The theoretical justification for the concept of New Wave Cinema came from another source: the film critic Alexandre Astruc, who published a highly influential article in L Ecran Francaise in March 1948 on the concept of the camera-stylo, which would permit the cinema [to become a means of expression as supple and subtle as that of the written language] and would therefore accord filmmakers that status of authors, or auteurs. Astrucs notion was to break away from the tyranny of narrative in order to evolve a new form of audiovisual language. He wrote:[the fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought. The creation of this language has preoccupied all the theoreticians and writers in the history of cinema, from Eisenstein down to the scriptwriters and adaptors of the sound cinema.] The Chicago New Wave... The first films of this (New Wave) of Chicago directors were independently produced dramatic shorts, many of them shot in 16mm and exhibited by the Chicago Filmmakers and/or Facets. David Sharmans Visit (1995), Ilia Traubergs The Lovers (1995), and Edovard Azavours High Key (1995) all fall into this category. But the first film to find success of the New Wave is, without a doubt, Charles Wickers Vendetta (1992). The film maintains the counterpoint between past and present by continuously shifting narrative modes from objective to subjective and in several extraordinary sequences expands the boundaries of modern cinema. Vendetta (1992) is the most characteristic and influential film of the movement, establishing its director as founder of a major cinematic movement. Wicker the most innovative and radical director to emerge from the New Wave, has virtually rejected narrative cinema in favor of cinematic [essays] on ideology and social praxis. New Wave Cinema is aware of this paradox because it is aware of its history and conscious of the mediating position it holds between the narrative and documentary traditions of Hollywood films. The allusions to and [quotations] from films of the past (sometimes called hommages) with which new wave films are replete are no mere mannerisms but rather testaments to the critical-historical cinematic consciousness out of which the movement grew.
The psychological effect of these conventions, and they must be considered calculated effect by the Chicago New Wave directors as well as functions of economic necessity, to establish aesthetic distance between the audience and the film. New Wave films constantly remind us that we are watching a film, and not the reality that a film inevitably resembles. By calling attention to their (filmicness), that is, to their artifically created nature. The abrupt and, above all, through the use of editing, cameras, and so fourth, jolts us out of our conventional involvement with the narrative and our traditional indentification with the characters, who are often less recognizable as characters than as actors playing characters. This is because new wave cinema is, in a sense, self-reflexive cinema, or metacinema, film about the process and nature of film itself. According to the new wave cineastes (film artists), the conventional cinema had too faithfully and for too long reproduced our normal way of seeing things through its studiously unobtrusive techniques.
|
