Left Bank
Alain Resnais
ALAIN RESNAIS–not w. CAHIERS group, attended film school, making docs in 50s, becoming famous with Night and Fog (1954) which deals w. the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps and their significance today. Unlike most New Wave filmmakers, Resnais has always preferred tightly written scripts and his films are meticulously planned in advance.
WATCH: Alain Resnais- Projection of Memories
- All his films deal w. time and memory
- Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) ) first feature explores how the memory of a WW II experience affects the consciousness of people living in the present.
The story deals w. an affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect, some years after the bombing of Hiroshima. Their relationship is doomed, in part because she is unable to escape the memory of her traumatic love affair w. a German soldier during the Nazi occupation of her country.
His images are polished and elegant.
Uses lingering dissolves to overlap events from the past w. those of the present.
Italy and Michelangelo Antonioni
Began as neorealist; went to Centro Sperimentale and wrote criticism for Cinema. First films bleak neorealist doc shorts, BUT first features broke from neorealist conventions to examine the middle-class milieu he was most familiar with (as the son of wealthy businessman)–deal w. social displacement and alienation. Became the screen poet of the modern individual’s estrangement from his environ and of his tragic inability to communicate w. others and himself.
1959: L’avventura masterpiece of mise enscene; began trilogy (w. The Night and The Eclipse) around a central them of the hopelessness of love in the modern age…of the fragility and impermanence of personal relationships.
Concerns a yachting party of rich Italians who land on a deserted volcanic island in the Mediterranean. A young woman, Anna, quarrels w. her lover, Sandro, the leader of the party, and then mysteriously disappears. Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), and Sandro, both of whom have been marginal figs in the film up to this point, search the island for her and can find no trace. At Claudia’s instigation, they return to mainland Sicily and continue their search, but they ultimately forget the missing woman and become lovers.
WATCH: l’avventura
The lack of final resolution and the seeming aimlessness of the narrative caused jeers at the 1960 Cannes fest. BUT won JURY prize–and the impact of its revolutionary style soon felt around the world.
Characteristics
- Abandoned traditional plotting for a series of seemingly random events. More concerned w. behavior than story–and situations grow out of the personalities and surroundings of his characters, vs. the imposing of sits thru plot.(recall Zavatinni’s credo!)
- Antonioni: “I have rid myself of much unnecessary technical baggage, eliminating all the logical narrative transitions, all those connective links between sequences where one sequence served as a springboard for the one that followed…cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than logic…the rhythm of life is not made up of one steady beat; it is, instead, a rhythm that is sometimes fast, sometimes slow…There are times when it appears almost static…I think that through these pauses, through this attempt to adhere to a definite reality–spiritual, internal, and even moral–there springs forth what today is more and more coming to be known as modern cinema, that is, a cinema which is not so much concerned w. externals as it is w. those forces that move us to act in a certain way and not in another.”
- Sequence shot to equate film time w. REAL TIME to transfer the psych experience of the characters to the audience since both groups are required to perceive time and space in precisely the same terms, unmediated by expressive montage. So we are, like the protagonists, interested, then desperate, and finally bored and disgusted which leads us to forget the object of the search altogether and concentrate on the relationship of the searchers, just as they themselves do. Antonioni never permits us to know any more about the mystery of Anna’s disappearance than do Sandro and Claudia and we come to realize that the psych adventure of the characters has been our own.
- Wide screen, deep focus to link characters w. their oppressive surroundings to emphasize the overwhelming importance of the material environment on the interior lives of characters.
Whereas that neorealism used the external social environment to define a human being, Antonioni used the emotions of a human being to define the external physical environment–a subtle Expressionism in the service of psychological, sociological, and philosophical insight. For Antonioni, the world takes its color from the character rather than the character taking color from the world…he concentrates as much on the scenic environment as one the people in the environment. The environment reflects the people in it. The emotional resonances of the environment convey the internal states of the people within it. Among Antonioni’s favorite photographic subjects are the slick, hard-surfaced materials of modern architecture: glass, aluminum, terrazzo…favorite object for emotional definition is the white wall…the Antonioni character’s feeling of affinity with the hard white wall is emphasized by a piece of business that recurs through nearly all of the films–the character stands against the wall and then circles around the room, back and palms pressing against the plaster.” (Mast 333)
- Minimal dialogue and music: Characters communicate, but w. very little dialogue, and are most often seen looking away into the bleak Sicilian landscape, implying the virtual irrelevance of human communication. There is even less emphasis on music, but brilliant use of naturalistic sound and silence to emphasize his characters’ isolation in a seemingly random, if not hostile universe.“ The real subject of the Antonioni film is education. (The films are circular seeming to end where they began) Although the characters walk around in a physical circle they do not walk around in an emotional one. During their journeys, they learn the pervasiveness of emptiness and the possible if temporary ways of combating it. For such a theme, Antonioni’s visual images are the only means of rendering each emotional stage of the journey clearly, convincingly, and sensitively…He rejects words as not effective for communicating internal states of feeling (vague, imprecise feelings of loneliness, uneasiness, and angst do not lend themselves to the terse summary required of movie dialogue. The more lucidly and lengthily a person talks about his or her own internal feelings (either in life or in art), the more we distrust the sincerity of the feelings and the depth of the self-awareness.Antonioni does not trust words as genuine means of human communication. “Our drama,” he once said, “is non-communication.” If his characters succeed in discovering anything meaningful at all, they do so by physical contact, by moments of laughter or calm, by a union of temporarily harmonizing vibrations rather than by discussion and conversation. (Mast, 334)But, in L’ Aventurra, if Sandro’s education is to discover the human weakness that makes betrayal so inevitable, Claudia’s education is to discover that betrayal is a fact of human life and to ignore that fact is to cut herself off completely from the human. “Human” and “betrayal” are unfortunately synonymous; any meaningful human relationship must start from that definition.
1966: Blow Up–swinging London photog (David Hemmings) inadvertently photographs a murder in background of some random shots he has taken of an anonymous woman in a park. As he “blows up” the telltale prints to greater and greater scale, objective reality becomes pure abstraction, and the film ends by suggesting that modern experience–when rendered visible on film–is not subject to interpretation and is therefore meaningless.NOTE: Commercially, the biggest successes were Italy’s exportation of Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti’ westerns, such as A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) — the slowest paced, most naturalistically detailed, and most visually dazzling collection of western clichés ever assembled–but with a difference. The West is demystified, shown in all its grossness, while Leone weaves a new myth. A film of sudden, intense close-ups and boldly composed long shots enthusiastically filling the wide screen.*******Too, MAST notes: “In its early years the postwar Italian cinema showed the American industry how to combine ideas, social comment, realistic human observation, and poetic visual techniques with the motion picture form; in its later years it seemed to pander more and more to the very movie conventions and practices it had previously tried to subvert.” (342).