2115 Midterm

The Witch Hunt and the Blacklist

Our Cold War with the Soviet Union began officially in July 1947, when Stalin refused to accept the Marshall Plan for the Soviet Union or any of its satellites, but of course, Soviet-American tensions, although briefly relaxed during the alliance to defeat Hitler, had been mounting ever since the Bolshevik Revolution. Among other things, this meant that in the public mind, the menace of Nazi agents and fifth columnists was replaced by the menace of Communist spies and “fellow travelers,” doubly sinister because they looked just like everyone else and didn’t speak with an accent. Furthermore, what David Caute has called “the myth of the Vital Secret”—the inflated notion that members of the American Communist Party were feverishly conducting atomic espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union— was widespread during this era and would result in the conviction of Alger Hiss (1948), the rise and fall of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1950–1954), and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1953). Politically, the country was in the throes of an anti–New Deal backlash that had been building since the tumultuous 1930s, and Hollywood, as a signal beneficiary of FDR’s economic and social policies, became the target for a squalid inquisition that brought shame and/or ruin to hundreds of key industry personnel.

In the spring of 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly, and pejoratively, known as HUAC), which had been inactive since the hot war ended, decided to undertake a full-scale investigation of what its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas (R–N.J.), called “communism in motion pictures.” As John Howard Lawson, one of the victims of this investigation, later wrote, the charge that American films contained “communist propaganda” in the late 1940s or at any other time was wholly laughable, because the American film industry was one of the most conservative elements in the country. There were, however, recent films of predominantly liberal sentiment, such as the problem pictures and the semi-documentary melodramas, and there were the apolitical film noirs, which did not take a very sanguine view of life under any system of government.

There were also all of those pro-Russian films made at the OWI’s behest during the war, when the Soviet Union had been America’s ally (a HUAC subcommittee report would later claim that “some of the most flagrant Communist propaganda films were produced as a result of White House pressure” during the war and that Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Board had infiltrated Communists into the industry). Yet most damaging of all, because there was at least factual substance to the charge, a number of famous Hollywood directors, screenwriters, and actors had joined the Communist Party or contributed funds to its activities during the Depression, when it had seemed to offer a viable alternative to starving under capitalism. Some had merely supported causes, such as relief for refugees from Franco’s Spain, that were also supported by Communists. It was among these people, most of whom had dropped their Communist Party affiliation years earlier, that HUAC was able to do the most damage.

In September 1947, the tragicomedy began as the committee subpoenaed forty-one witnesses, nineteen of whom declared their intention to be “unfriendly”— that is, to refuse to answer questions about their political beliefs. When the hearings began on October 20, the so-called friendly witnesses (among them the producers Jack L. Warner and Louis B. Mayer; the writers Ayn Rand and Morrie Ryskind; the actors Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, and Gary Cooper; the directors Leo McCarey and Sam Wood; and producer-director Walt Disney) were called first. They proved their patriotism by naming people whom they identified as leftists and generally telling the congressmen what they wanted to hear. (“Hollywood,” claimed the right-winger Menjou, “is one of the main centers of Communist activity in America”; Disney testified that the Screen Cartoonists Guild was Communist-dominated and had tried to take over his studio.)

Of the nineteen unfriendly witnesses, eleven were summoned to the witness stand the following week for questioning about their alleged Communist Party membership: the German émigré playwright Bertolt Brecht; the screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo; and the directors Herbert Biberman and Edward Dmytryk. Hollywood liberals, including John Huston, William Wyler, Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall, responded by forming the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) to fight for the constitutional rights of the “accused witnesses”—a contradiction in the terms of jurisprudence, if there ever was one—but opposition faltered when the now- famous Hollywood Ten listed above (less Brecht, who temporized before the committee, then fled the country several days later) defied HUAC by refusing to testify and were subsequently given prison sentences of six months to a year for contempt of Congress. The committee’s action was scandalous, but its meaning was crystal clear: HUAC wished to purge Hollywood and, if possible, the entire country of any and all liberal tendencies by creating and then exploiting anticommunist hysteria. The threat of state censorship loomed, and panic broke out in the nation’s most image-conscious industry, which was already plagued by antitrust actions, unemployment, and rapidly declining profits.

On November 24, 1947, the same day that the House of Representatives by a nearly unanimous vote approved HUAC’s contempt citations for the Ten, Hollywood closed ranks against some of the most talented artists it had ever known. The fifty members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA; MPPDA before 1945) and the Association of Motion Picture Producers (the business and public-relations component of the MPAA, representing the industry’s most powerful executives, including Eric Johnston, Nicholas M. Schenck, Harry Cohn, Joseph M. Schenck, Walter Wanger, Samuel Goldwyn, Henry Ginsberg, Albert Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary, Spyros Skouras, and William Goetz) produced the Waldorf Statement, censuring the behavior of the Ten, firing them, and refusing to re-employ any of them “until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.”

The statement continued by spelling out future industry policy: “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by illegal or unconstitutional methods.” This was the beginning of the infamous practice of blacklisting, which brought to an end one of the most creative periods in the history of American film and made Hollywood a wasteland of vapidity, complacency, and cowardice for well over a decade. From 1948 to 1951, there was a lull of sorts, as the production community drew a cautionary lesson from the fate of the Ten and allowed the Committee for the First Amendment to disintegrate, with Bogart and Bacall, for example, publicly calling their participation a “mistake.”

The once-liberal Screen Actors Guild (SAG), under the new leadership of Ronald Reagan, required that its members take a loyalty oath and in the following year openly condoned the blacklist. Yet in March 1951, HUAC, now chaired by John S. Wood (D–Ga.), began a new onslaught by subpoenaing forty-five unfriendly witnesses, who were called on very specifically to name names and inform on former colleagues. By the end of the second round of hearings—which were televised, adding to their frisson—110 men and women had testified, 58 of them confessing past party membership and collectively providing the committee with the names of 212 alleged fellow travelers. Those who refused to inform were put under tremendous pressure to “come clean”—a process of self-abasement that involved denouncing one’s friends (especially if they had already been denounced by previous witnesses), confessing one’s own guilt by association, and groveling not only before HUAC, but before a host of self-appointed Grand Inquisitors and “clearance” agencies in the private sector, such as the American

Legion and American Business Consultants, editors of the scurrilous public blacklists Counterattack and Red Channels.

Some refused to cringe, and at the end of the process in 1951 (which was resumed when Senator Pat McCarran’s Internal Security Subcommittee reopened the hearings in 1952, subpoenaing Judy Holliday, Burl Ives, and others), 324 people had been fired by the studios and were no longer permitted to work in the American film industry. Among them were some of the most talented directors, writers, and actors of the postwar cinema. Some of the writers were able to make a living by selling their scripts on the black market under the names of real people, or “fronts.” The 1956 Academy Award for the Best Original Screenplay, for example, went to a mysterious “Mr. Robert Rich” for Irving Rapper’s The Brave One.

The Oscar could not be picked up at the time because Rich was actually Dalton Trumbo; four years later, tensions had relaxed to the point that Trumbo could receive screen credit in his own name—for Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). Yet the highly visible actors and directors were doomed to unemployment (Muni) or exile (Losey and Dassin went to Europe). Some lost their lives: Philip Loeb, one of the stars of the popular television series The Goldbergs, committed suicide; and the screen actors John Garfield, Canada Lee, J. Edward Bromberg, and Mady Christians died as a result of the stress they were subjected to. Hundreds of other film people were maligned by HUAC but managed to survive under the cloud of either marginal blacklisting (e.g., Lewis Milestone, Fredric March, José Ferrer, and Edward G. Robinson) or their own collaboration with the investigating body (e.g., Elia Kazan, Richard Collins, Harold Hecht, Clifford Odets, Isobel Lennart, Bernard Schoenfeld, Lee J. Cobb, Lucille Ball, Sterling Hayden, Lloyd Bridges, Frank Tuttle, Budd Schulberg, and, ultimately, Edward Dmytryk and Robert Rossen).

Several commentators have suggested that for members of the latter group, the moral catastrophe of informing proved as destructive as the practical effects of being blacklisted, but materially, at least, quite the reverse was true. While the victims of the blacklist lost their jobs, their families, and even their lives, most of the informers prospered. Ball, Cobb, Schulberg, and Kazan, for example, were all rewarded with stunning career success in the 1950s, Kazan winning an Academy Award for directing a paean to informing in On the Waterfront (1954)—which, not coincidentally, was written by Schulberg, starred Cobb, and was also named Best Film of the Year by the Academy, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Board of Review. At the same time, Lester Cole was working in a warehouse, Sidney Buchman operated a parking garage, and Alvah Bessie was a stagehand at a nightclub; others struggled to support their families as maître d’s, appliance repairmen, and outside salesmen.

The practice of blacklisting in the American film industry continued well into the 1950s, and its impact was felt during the entire 1960s. Abraham Polonsky, for example, was not able to direct again in Hollywood until 1969, when his Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here appeared—twenty-one years after Force of Evil. Yet as damaging to American cinema as the loss of individual talent was the pervasive mood of fear, distrust, and self-loathing that settled over Hollywood in the wake of the hearings. Everyone was scared of the government

and of everyone else, and the industry tacitly imposed a form of self-censorship more repressive and sterile than anything HUAC could have devised.

As early as 1948, William Wyler speculated that a modestly progressive film such as his own The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) could not be made in America again, adding, “In a few months we won’t be able to have a heavy who is an American.” Wyler was right. No one in Hollywood was willing to take the slightest chance on anybody or anything; the industry had had its fill of trouble and wanted no more of it. Safety, caution, and respectability were the watchwords of the studio chiefs, and controversial or even serious subject matter was avoided at all costs. Thus vitiated, frightened, and drained of creative vitality, Hollywood experienced in miniature what the whole of American society was to experience during the McCarthy-era witch hunts— intellectual stagnation and moral paralysis.

The Arrival of Television

Finally, as if the devastating impact of the hearings was not enough to sink Hollywood’s already foundering ship, a new entertainment medium suddenly emerged that threatened to do the job all by itself. This, of course, was television—a system for transmitting moving images based on the process of electronic image analysis and synthesis patented by the independent inventor Philo T. Farnsworth in 1930. RCA, which had been moving toward the development of just such a system for several years through the work of the Russian scientist Vladimir K. Zworykin, attempted first to buy and then to pre-empt Farnsworth’s patents through litigation. In 1939, however, the courts gave legal priority to Farnsworth, and in September, RCA licensed his patents for a period of ten years for $1 million—the first and only time in its history that the corporation was forced to pay royalties, rather than collect them.

Formally introduced to the public at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, television was a smashing success, and RCA began marketing receivers in the same year for regularly scheduled daily broadcasts (about fifteen hours per week) via its NBC subsidiary. CBS began telecasting in the following year, and in July 1941, the FCC set format standards for black-and-white transmission and authorized the full operation of commercial television. Wartime restrictions soon put a halt to the manufacture of television transmission equipment and receivers, and the networks were forced to curtail their telecasts sharply. When the war ended, however, they resumed regular daily telecasting, and the production of transmitters and receivers burgeoned.

By 1949, there were 1 million TV sets in use in the United States, and the television broadcasting industry had begun in earnest. Only two years later, there were ten times as many sets in use, and by 1959, the number had risen to 50 million. In 1946, when two-thirds of the total population of the country went to the movies weekly, attendance had been guaranteed by the nearly complete lack of alternate sources of audiovisual entertainment. Now that lack was met with a vengeance.

At first, Hollywood attempted to enter the television business by applying for station licenses in major markets and by innovating large-screen television in its theater circuits (HBO -like subscription programming for in-house viewing was also tested). The studios were outmaneuvered politically, however, by the dominant radio networks, and NBC, CBS, and ABC moved directly into television broadcasting, with the blessing of an FCC that looked askance at the movie monopolists’ recent conviction in the Paramount case; in this context, moreover, theater/subscription television simply could not compete with the “free” programming provided by the networks.

When it became clear that film and television were in direct competition for the same audience, the members of the MPAA adopted a bunker mentality and, until 1956, refused to sell or lease their product for broadcast—a strategy that in the long run may have hurt the industry financially more than either direct competition from television itself or the Paramount decrees. Furthermore, many studios contractually restrained their stars from appearing on television, which simply stimulated the new medium to develop star personalities on its own, and by 1949, the American film industry was seriously threatened by television. In that year, attendance dropped to 70 million, from 90 million in 1948, and it continued to decline in direct proportion to the number of television sets in use. In the first quarter of 1949, only twenty-two features, or half the normal number, were in production in Hollywood, and by the end of the year the major studios were ordering large layoffs and salary reductions, star contracts were being permitted to lapse, and all over the country, the great movie palaces had begun to close their doors.

Yet those who predicted the demise of Hollywood overlooked the American film industry’s quintessential feature: its nearly protean capacity for adaptation. Though Hollywood was never to recover its immediate postwar status or to recapture its once vast audiences from television, in the decade of the 1950s it adapted, counterattacked, and—as always (to date, at least)— survived.

Hollywood, 1952–1965

Much that characterized Hollywood between 1952 and 1965 can be understood as a response to anticommunist hysteria and the blacklist on the one hand, and to the advent of television and economic divestiture on the other. In the name of combating communism, films directly critical of American institutions, such as the “problem pictures” and the semi-documentary melodramas so popular in the immediate postwar years, could no longer be made. Instead, Westerns, musical comedies, lengthy costume epics, and other traditional genre fare—sanitized and shorn of explicit political and social referents—became the order of the day. Such films dominated the domestic market of the era, both because their subject matter was uncontroversial and because their spectacular nature was suited to the new screen formats, which the studios had embraced to do battle with television and, simultaneously, to make their product more attractive to their former subsidiaries, the newly independent first- run exhibitors.

The Conversion to Color

Television threatened Hollywood with a new technology, and Hollywood fought back in kind by isolating and exploiting the technological advantages that film possessed over television. The cinema had two such advantages in the early 1950s, both of them associated with spectacle—the vast size of its images and the capacity to produce them in color. (Soon, the capacity for stereophonic sound would be added to the list.) It was the competition with television that prompted Hollywood’s rapid conversion from black-and-white to color production between 1952 and 1955. In 1947, only 12 percent of American feature films were made in color; by 1954, the figure had risen to more than 50 percent.

The changeover was made possible by the breakup of Technicolor’s de facto monopoly over color technology and aesthetics. The Justice Department had filed an antitrust suit against Technicolor and its supplier, Eastman Kodak, in 1947 for monopolization of color cinematography. Even though yearly Technicolor production did not increase dramatically—from fewer than twenty films in the early 1940s to more than fifty in 1948—and rival processes such as Cinecolor and Trucolor were in general use, the company was judged to exercise a monopoly by virtue of its authoritarian control of the three-color process. In 1950, a federal consent decree ordered the corporation to set aside a certain number of its three-strip cameras for use by independent producers and minor studios on a first-come, first-served basis. Yet it was another event of that year, commercial introduction of a viable single-strip color process in Eastmancolor, that finally brought Technicolor’s effective monopoly to an end.

First used experimentally in 1949, Eastmancolor was based on the German Agfacolor process invented for 16mm use by the Agfa Corporation in 1936. Similar to Technicolor Monopack, Agfacolor used a multilayered film stock, but the layers were composed of photographic emulsions sensitive to red, green, and blue bonded together in a single roll. This “integral tripack” negative formed three color images simultaneously and, after development through a process known as dye-coupling, was printed onto a multilayered positive film for release.

First used commercially in 1940, the process briefly became a jewel in the crown of Nazi cinema when it was used in such spectacular productions as Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City; Veit Harlan, 1942), Immensee (Immense; Veit Harlan, 1943), Münchhausen (Josef von Báky, 1943), and Kolberg (Veit Harlan, 1945; re-released 1966). Eisenstein used Agfacolor stock captured from the studios of liberated Prague to film the color sequences of Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946), and it became the technical basis for the Sovcolor system officially adopted by the Soviet industry during the 1950s (Sergei Yutkevich’s Othello [1956] was the first major Sovcolor feature).

After the war and the release of Agfa’s patents, Agfacolor principles were also used in a number of Western systems, most notably Anscocolor, which had wide currency in Hollywood from 1953 to 1955 and appeared in such popular productions as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954) and Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954).

But it was Kodak’s subtle refinement of integral tripack that permitted Eastmancolor to replace Technicolor as the dominant color system of the West. Unlike Agfacolor, Sovcolor, or Anscocolor, Eastmancolor incorporated “automatic color masking,” a principle already used successfully in Kodacolor still photography to enhance the clarity and brilliance of the final print. Eastmancolor was thus able to offer the industry a low-cost negative tripack stock capable of excellent color contrast, which could be shot through a conventional single-lens camera and processed in a conventional laboratory, just like black and white.

When it was discovered simultaneously that imbibition printing did not yield enough resolution for the new anamorphic widescreen processes, Technicolor’s fate was sealed. In 1952, Kodak received an Academy Award for Eastmancolor (Scientific or Technical Award, Class I), and within two years, the Technicolor threestrip camera and the company’s special processing service were rendered obsolete. (Technicolor cameras were used for the last time in the production of Foxfire [Joseph Pevney, 1955], but Technicolor continued its imbibition printing activities—subsequently improved for use with widescreen—until 1975, using Eastmancolor negatives to produce its matrices.)

Though the system came to be known by the trade names of the studios who paid to use it (Warnercolor, Metrocolor, Pathécolor) or the labs that did the processing (Movielab, Technicolor, Deluxe), it was Kodak Eastmancolor that inaugurated and sustained the full color age with integral tripack and dye-coupler printing, and by 1975 even the Technicolor Corporation had converted to a printing process similar to Eastman’s. After the 1950s, color became an infinitely more subtle medium than black and white. By 1975, 96 percent of all American feature films were being made in color (see Figure 12.1).

Widescreen and 3-D

Multiple-Camera/Projector Widescreen: Cinerama

In a simultaneous attempt to exploit the size of the screen image, Hollywood began to experiment with new optical systems that lent greater width and depth to the image. The earliest of the new formats was a multiple-camera/projector widescreen process called Cinerama, introduced in September 1952, that was similar to the Polyvision process Abel Gance had used in Napoléon (1927) some twenty-five years earlier and was originally devised as a battle simulator for gunnery training during World War II by the inventor Fred Waller (1886–1954).

In Cinerama, three synchronized 35mm cameras linked together in an arc would simultaneously record a wide-field image, which three similarly linked projectors would later cast on a vast wraparound screen (actually, a three-screen triptych). The projected image was thus three times as wide as the standard 35mm image; it was also nearly twice as tall because of two extra sprocket holes (six instead of four) per frame on the film strip. The seams between the three images were concealed by a slight overlapping of the camera lens and by floating metal combs in the projectors, a technique that never proved wholly satisfactory.

Nevertheless, the Cinerama image was six times the standard size, and its curvilinear shape added the phenomenon of peripheral vision to the screen. Cinerama also surrounded its audience with seven-track stereophonic sound, recorded magnetically rather than optically, on a separate strip of 35mm film, which permitted a directional use of sound appropriate to its sprawling image. All of these factors combined to create an illusion of depth and spectator involvement that was thrilling to audiences accustomed to the flat, rectilinear screen of decades past, and for a time Cinerama became immensely popular.

Yet the process was cumbersome and very expensive for both filmmaker and exhibitor, and therefore for the paying public. Only theaters in large cities could afford to install the complicated projection equipment and the huge three-panel screens (the installation cost $75,000), so it was as a costly urban novelty that Cinerama enjoyed its initial success. Accordingly, it offered its audiences circuses, rather than narrative. Films such as This Is Cinerama (1952) and Windjammer (1958) featured a succession of wild rides, extravagant spectacles, and exotic travelogues, but no stories. The first story films made in Cinerama, How the West Was Won (1962) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), proved that the multiple-camera process was simply too clumsy and costly for the production of conventional narratives. How the West Was Won, for example, required the services of three directors (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall) and four cinematographers and cost the then staggering sum of $14 million to shoot.

In 1963, driven by economic necessity, Cinerama appropriated a single-lens wide-film widescreen system (Ultra Panavision 70) for its next film, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and finally adopted its own wide-film system, Super Cinerama, which, combined with a special elliptical projection lens, allowed it to keep and fill its deeply curved screen. Given its great expense and peculiar technology, multiple-camera Cinerama never really had a chance of becoming a widely used process. At the height of its popularity, only a hundred cities all over the world were equipped to show Cinerama films.

Finally, for a variety of reasons, widescreen encouraged the use of longer-than-average takes, and it seems clear today that the widescreen processes created the functional grounds for a new film aesthetic based on composition in width and depth, or mise-en-scène, rather than on montage.

In this new aesthetic, which might be called the long-take or mise-en-scène aesthetic, the major em- phasis would shift from editing to shooting, because a long take composed in width and depth is capable of containing a long shot, a medium shot, and a close-up, action and reaction, within a single frame without re- sorting to fragmentation of the image. At least one veteran Hollywood director recognized this as early as 1955. In an interview with the British film journal Sight and Sound, Henry King said, “This lens [the anamorphic] enables the director . . . for the first time to show on the screen cause and effect in the same shot, whereas before we used to have to cut from cause to effect in a story.” [italics added]

Obviously, film narratives would continue to be assembled through the editing process, but the primary unit of narration would no longer be the dialectical shot (or the “montage cell,” in Eisenstein’s phrase) but the long take or sequence shot composed in width and depth and/or constantly moving to reframe significant dramatic action. Theorists of the long-take aesthetic, such as André Bazin and his follower Charles Barr, would later maintain (in Cahiers du cinéma and the British journal Movie, respectively) that the long take preserves the integrity of time and space by linking foreground, middle ground, and background within the same shot, whereas montage destroys it.

The close-up is a case in point (ironically, because early critics thought widescreen incapable of close-ups). In montage, the figure in close-up is divorced from its background by virtue of both focal limitations and the rapidity with which images flash on the screen. In the long-take close-up, the figure in close-up is temporally and spatially linked with its environment by virtue of the shot’s mise-en-scène, and for Bazin and Barr, at least, this constitutes a more authentic mode of representation than the dissociated close-up of montage.

According to the long-take theorists, montage evolved over time because it was the first technologically feasible way to structure film, or to give it “speech.” However, in the 1950s and the 1960s, they argued, the technology of cutting was usurped by the technology of shooting, so that the radical fragmentation of montage could be replaced by the organization of complex images within the frame. This is certainly true to the extent that the widescreen image, composed in depth, is capable of containing much more visual information than the old Academy frame, and its greater visual density makes it the perfect medium for rendering detail, texture, and atmosphere in relation to character.

Finally, both Bazin and Barr insisted that the width- and-depth perspective created by the widescreen long take offers the viewer a “democratic” and “creative” alternative to the manipulative process of montage. Though shot composition can guide his or her seeing to some extent, they reasoned, the viewer of a long take can choose which details or actions to concentrate on within a given shot, rather than have them pointed out by close-ups or be drawn to some inexorable conclu- sion through a montage sequence, such as Eisenstein’s massacre on the Odessa steps.

Although montage was the traditional aesthetic of the cinema, extending from Griffith through Eisenstein to the classical Hollywood paradigm of the studio years, Bazin and his followers were able to construct a historical countertradition for the long-take aesthetic stretching back to Feuillade and including the “integral style” of von Stroheim and Murnau, the deep-focus “realism” of Renoir and Welles, and the postwar neorealism of Rossellini and De Sica. According to this version of film history, Welles began the revolution in favor of the long take with Citizen Kane in 1941, and the arrival of widescreen technology in the early 1950s assured its permanent success. As a corrective to the influence of Soviet-style montage and three decades of classical Hollywood continuity editing, the Bazinian view was healthy, if impressionistic (overlooking, for example, the integration of montage and mise-en-scène in both Griffith and Welles). In any case, though, it took the widescreen aesthetic yet another decade to evolve, and the years 1953–1960, similar to the years 1928–1935, witnessed much experimental blundering before the major artists of the new form of cinema could emerge.

The Widescreen “Blockbuster”

In Hollywood, the emergence of a widescreen aes- thetic was delayed by the sudden proliferation of a venerable film type known as the “blockbuster,” newly renovated to exploit the physical novelty of the big screen. These inflated multimillion-dollar pro- ductions were the widescreen counterparts of the “100 percent all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing ” films of the early sound period—lavish and excessively lengthy super-spectacles in the DeMille tradition, every element of which was made to subserve sheer visual magnitude.

The blockbuster craze started in 1956, when King Vidor’s War and Peace (VistaVision; 3 hours, 28 minutes), Michael Anderson’s Around the World in 80 Days (Todd-AO; 2 hours, 58 minutes), and Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of his own The Ten Commandments (Vista- Vision; 3 hours, 39 minutes) were all released simultaneously in wide-film widescreen processes and full stereophonic sound. Because the production costs for blockbusters were abnormally high, the films had to have a correspondingly high box-office gross simply to break even, and this factor, combined with their artistic unwieldiness, would ultimately destroy them. Yet for a while, they reigned supreme. Around the World in 80 Days, for example, which cost $6 million to produce, grossed more than $22 million in the year of its release, and The Ten Commandments, which cost $13.5 million, grossed nearly $43 million.

By the early 1960s, production budgets for block- busters had grown so large through inflation that most were produced abroad in Italy (by Dino De Laurentiis at Rome’s Cinecittà studios), Spain (at Samuel Bronston’s vast studio complex on the outskirts of Madrid), and Yugoslavia (at the Zagreb studios) to cut costs. Even so, many went down to ruin at the box of- fice, alerting producers to the fact that the blockbuster trend had exhausted itself with the public. Yet the film that demonstrated this most graphically was Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s disastrous Cleopatra (1963—Todd-AO; 4 hours, 3 minutes), which took four years and $40 mil- lion to produce, nearly wrecking 20th Century–Fox. This film had returned only half of its negative costs by 1964 and did not break even until its sale to network television in 1966. Other blockbusters were made in the mid-1960s, including the fantastically successful The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), but few were able to recover their production costs before sale to television, and producers turned away from the blockbuster policy until it was revived, with substantial modifications, in the mid-seventies.

The Scrapping of the Production Code

A final important development of the 1950s in America was the breaking of the Production Code and the achievement of an unprecedented freedom of expression for the cinema. Ever since a U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1915 (Mutual v. Ohio), the movies had not been considered a part of the press, whose freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. For this reason, six states and hundreds of local communities had film censorship boards, and of course, through the Production Code, Hollywood had imposed an extreme form of censorship on itself. Yet this situation changed in 1952, after the State of New York attempted to prevent the exhibition of the Italian film Il miracolo (The Miracle [Roberto Rossellini, 1948]; written by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, and Rossellini himself), on the grounds that it committed “sacrilege.” Producer-distributor Joseph Burstyn took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in May 1952 that movies were “a significant medium for communication of ideas” and were therefore protected against the charge of sacrilege by both the First and the Fourteenth Amendments. Subsequent court rulings between 1952 and 1958 clarified the Miracle decision, and by the early 1960s, films were guaranteed full freedom of expression.

While these legal battles were in progress, the Production Code was being challenged from within by the influx of “unapproved” foreign films and, especially, by the rise of independent production. Because the studios no longer owned America’s theaters, they could no longer force the exhibitors to accept their product exclusively. Shrewdly realizing this, director Otto Preminger openly challenged the code by producing two films for United Artists with sensational (for that era) content—The Moon Is Blue (1953), which used the forbidden word virgin, and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), in which Frank Sinatra portrayed a heroin addict. As Preminger had anticipated, both films were denied the Production Code’s Seal of Approval, and both were released independently to great commercial success.

It didn’t take long for the studios to find out which way the wind was blowing: Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll, released by Warner Bros. in 1956 to a storm of protest, was the first motion picture of a major American studio ever to be publicly condemned by the Legion of Decency, the Catholic organization responsible for instituting the Production Code in the first place. The financial success of these three films sounded the death knell for the legion’s influence in Hollywood, and the Production Code was scrapped altogether in the 1960s, in favor of a ratings system administered by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which does not proscribe the content of films, but rather classifies them as appropriate for certain segments of the public, according to age.

Instituted in 1968 and revised in 1972 and 1984, the MPAA ratings system uses the following five classifications for films: G (general audience); PG (parental guidance suggested for children under seventeen); PG-13 (parental guidance suggested for children under thirteen); R (restricted to persons seventeen or older, unless accompanied by an adult); and NC-17 (no children under seventeen admitted; formerly X). Many people believe that the ratings system has contributed significantly to the decline of high-quality films in the G and PG range and to the sharp increase in exploitative sex and violence in the R and NC-17 classifications.

In about 1955, human sexuality began to be overtly depicted on the American screen for the first time since the code’s imposition some twenty years earlier, and more generally, a fascination with veiled (and increasingly unveiled) eroticism came to pervade American films in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. This, more than any other single factor, accounts for the vast popularity of the Pillow Talk cycle, seven adaptations from the exotic plays of Tennessee Williams, and such sexy imports as And God Created Woman (Et Dieu créa la femme; Roger Vadim, 1956) and La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) during this period.

Other taboos were broken, too, as a new realism of content entered American cinema after years of political reaction. Social problems such as juvenile delinquency (Rebel without a Cause [1955], Blackboard Jungle [1955]), alcoholism, drug addiction, and even race were suddenly fair game for filmmakers working both inside and outside the studios. Crime began to be treated less moralistically and melodramatically, so that it became possible by the end of the decade to sympathize with criminals as human beings, although they did not become wholly admirable ones until Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

The next cultural taboo that American cinema had to overcome (simultaneously with Italy and preceded slightly by Japan) was the convention against the graphic, excessive, and/or poetic depiction of brutality and violence. This, however, could not occur until the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy (which was documented on film by Abraham Zapruder), the gunning down on live television of Lee Harvey Oswald, and for much of the decade that followed, the nightly TV news updates that brought the war in Vietnam into American living rooms.

Influence of the Fifties Documentary Movement and Independent Production

By 1955, French commercial cinema was approaching stagnation because many filmmakers who had emerged during the Occupation were firmly ensconced within the studio system or working on big-budget spectacles and international co-productions. The cinematic individualism of Bresson and Tati, and also of Cocteau, offered the succeeding generation of French directors examples of how film could be used as a medium of personal expression, and Ophüls had forecast the possibility of a purely audiovisual language for the screen. Yet the most important stylistic influences on this next generation of filmmakers came from the French documentary movement of the 1950s, which was their train- ing ground, and from the films of independent directors working outside the studio system of production.

The documentary movement can be said to have begun in 1946 with Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique, a lyrical feature-length documentary about peasant life on a farm spanning the four seasons. Jean Grémillon and Roger Leenhardt both made countless short documentaries during the 1950s on art and on the lives of great men. Yet the master of French documentary cinema during this period was Georges Franju (1912– 1987), a totally original filmmaker who was deeply influenced by German Expressionism and has often been called a surrealist.

Franju had been working in cinema since 1937, when he made a 16mm amateur film with Henri Langlois. However, his first major film was Le sang des bêtes (The Blood of the Beasts, 1949), a brutally graphic documentary short about the daily activity of a slaughterhouse in a quiet Parisian suburb, whose butchery was made deliberately resonant of the horrors of the Nazi death camps. In Hôtel des invalides, possibly his finest film,

Franju turned an ostensibly objective account of the French War Museum into a devastating antiwar statement by exposing the human suffering that underlies the myths of heroism and glory enshrined by that institution. In 1958, Franju directed his first feature, La tête contre les murs (English title: The Keepers), a half-documentary, half-surrealistic account of a sane man who is committed to a French lunatic asylum; the film is often cited as a forerunner of the New Wave. Similarly influential is Les yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face, 1959; released in the United States cut and dubbed as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus), about a mad doctor who kidnaps young girls in a futile effort to graft their faces onto his daughter’s disfigured one; it is regarded today as a landmark in modern horror.

Alain Resnais (b. 1922), whose first feature, Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), became the clarion call of the New Wave, was another important figure in the French documentary movement. He made documentary shorts for the first eleven years of his career, beginning with a series of films about art—Van Gogh (1948), Gauguin (1950), Guernica (1950)—and progressing to Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), a profoundly disturbing meditation on the horrors of the Nazi death camps and on the way time and memory affect our perception of them, written by Jean Cayrol with an original score by Hanns Eisler.

Toute la mémoire du monde (The Memory of the World, 1956), a study of the books “imprisoned” in the French National Library, has a similar temporal theme, as do most of Resnais’s features. Other figures associated with the documentary short were Chris Marker, who would later organize the radical cooperative La Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON) for the production of Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967), and the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, who invented the term cinéma vérité by translating Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda into French for his Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961; co-produced with Edgar Morin).

The example of independent production outside of the traditional studio system was another important influence on the emergent New Wave generation. Jean-Pierre Melville (b. Jean-Pierre Grumbach, 1917–1973) was a vastly significant figure in this regard. A lover of cinema from an early age, Melville founded his own production company in 1945. His first feature, Le silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea, 1947), earned him the admiration of Cocteau, who commissioned him to direct Les enfants terribles in 1949. The commercial success of Quand tu liras cette lettre (When You Read This Letter, 1953) allowed Melville to purchase his own studio and move into totally independent production. The result was the much-admired gangster film Bob le flambeur (1955), a highly personalized work whose production methods—location shooting, small crew, use of unknown actors (all borrowed, of course, from neorealism)—became the model for New Wave filmmakers. Melville’s work itself became increasingly commercial after he directed Léon Morin, prêtre (Léon Morin, Priest, 1961), a star vehicle for Jean-Paul Belmondo, but his fascination with the iconography of the American gangster film and the underworld of urban crime caused him to produce a trilogy of popular gangster films in the 1960s that are among the most admired in the genre—Le doulos (The Finger Man, 1962), Le deuxième souffle (Second Breath, 1966), and Le samouraï (The Samurai, 1967).

Another independent production that foretold the New Wave—and that some critics have called its first manifestation—is Agnès Varda’s La Pointe-Courte (1955). This film, about the dissolution and recon- struction of a marriage, is set against the backdrop of a small fishing village and was produced by a collective of crew and actors. It was edited by Alain Resnais and is considered to be a direct antecedent of his own Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). The drama of the hus- band and the wife is highly stylized and “literary,” but the day-to-day life of the village is presented in semi-documentary form.

It was the early films of Roger Vadim (1928–2000), however, that contributed most to the economic development of the New Wave. The spectacular commercial success of his independently produced first feature, Et Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman, 1956), demonstrated to the stagnant French film industry that young directors and new themes could attract large audiences. A visually sumptuous production in widescreen and color, Et Dieu créa la femme was a sensitive examination of the vagaries of amoral youth set against the luxurious background of St. Tropez. It starred Vadim’s wife, Brigitte Bardot, and featured a number of explicit love scenes, which made it an international hit. In subsequent films, such as Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1959), Vadim’s commercialism and exploitativeness increased, but he remained an impeccable craftsman and an elegant stylist of the widescreen color film. Moreover, it was Vadim, more than any other single figure in French cinema, who opened the doors of the industry to his generation of filmmakers and provided the economic justification for the New Wave.

Theory: Astruc, Bazin, Auteurism, and Cahiers du cinéma

The theoretical justification for the New Wave cinema came from another source: the film critic Alexandre Astruc (b. 1923), who published a highly influential article in L’écran française in March 1948 on the concept of the caméra-stylo, which would permit the cinema “to become a means of expression as supple and subtle as that of written language” and would therefore accord filmmakers the status of authors, or auteurs. Astruc’s 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 script- writers and adaptors of the sound cinema.”

Like Bazin, Astruc questioned the values of classical montage and was an apostle of the long take, as exemplified in the work of Murnau. Astruc was succeeded as a theorist by the vastly influential journal Cahiers du cinéma (literally, “cinema notebooks”), founded in 1951 by André Bazin (1918–1958) and Jacques Doniol- Valcroze (1920–1989), which gathered about it a group of young critics—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer—who were to become the leading directors of the New Wave. These young men were cinéphiles, or “film lovers.” They had grown up in the postwar years watching great American films of the past and present decades (many available for the first time only when the German Occupation ended), as well as classical French films at the amazing Cinémathèque Française in Paris, the magnificent film archive and public theater founded in 1936 by Georges Franju and Henri Langlois to promote cinema study and cinema culture in France and throughout the world. During the Occupation, Langlois kept the enterprise in operation secretly at great personal risk, and afterward, through André Malraux, minister of culture, he obtained a large government subsidy for it.

Today, the Cinémathèque is the largest public film archive in the world, housing more than 50,000 films, three theaters, and a museum in the Palais de Chaillot devoted entirely to film history. It was Langlois who preserved the works of Griffith, Keaton, Gance, Vigo, and Renoir for the postwar generation of cinéphiles, and introduced them to the then unrecognized genius of directors such as Ingmar Bergman and the great Japanese masters Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Under Langlois’s tutelage, these young men came to love film and desperately wanted to become filmmakers themselves, but found French commercial cinema inaccessible to them because of the powerful influence exerted by the trade unions. Because they knew more about film than any other generation in history, based on the experience of actual viewing, they became critics and theorists instead.

The Cahiers critics had two basic principles. The first, deriving from Bazin, was a rejection of montage aesthetics in favor of mise-en-scène, the long take, and composition in depth. Mise-en-scène, the “placing-in- the-scene,” is probably best defined as the creation of mood and ambience, though it more literally means structuring the film through camera placement and movement, blocking the action, directing the actors, and so on—in other words, everything that takes place on the set prior to the editing process. Integral to the concept of mise-en-scène is the notion that film should be not merely an intellectual or rational experience, but an emotional and psychological one as well.

The second tenet of the Cahiers critics, derived from Astruc, was the idea of personal authorship that François Truffaut expressed in a 1954 essay titled “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” (“A Certain Tendency in French Cinema”) as la politique des auteurs. This “policy of authors,” christened “the auteur theory” by the American critic Andrew Sarris, states that film should ideally be a medium of personal artistic expression and that the best films are therefore those that most clearly bear their maker’s “signature”—the stamp of his or her individual personality, controlling obsessions, and cardinal themes. The implicit assumption was that with each successive film, an auteur grows increasingly proficient and mature in vision, an assumption that is not always borne out by fact.

Truffaut’s essay, which appeared in Cahiers du cinéma (no. 31) for January 1954, began by attacking the postwar “tradition of quality”—that is, the commercial scenar- ist tradition of Aurenche and Bost, Spaak, and directors such as Clair, Clément, Clouzot, Autant-Lara, Cayatte, and Yves Allégret, with its heavy emphasis on plot and dialogue. The key figure in this literary/theatrical cinema was the scriptwriter, the director being merely “the gentleman who added the pictures.” To these littérateurs and their cinéma de papa, Truffaut counterposed un cinéma d’auteurs, in the work of such French writer-directors as Gance, Vigo, Renoir, Cocteau, Becker, Bresson, and Ophüls, and of numerous American directors—both major and minor—who had somehow managed to make personal statements, despite the restrictions imposed on them by the studio system. Some of the American choices, such as Welles, Hitchcock, Hawks, Lang, Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Anthony Mann—all masters of mise- en-scène—made perfect sense. Others, such as Jerry Lewis, Otto Preminger, and Roger Corman, were based less on the quality of their films than on evidence of their personal directorial control. And the unquestioning allegiance that the Cahiers group gave to the figures in its pantheon made many skeptics wonder whether one form of ironclad dogmatism had not simply been exchanged for another.

Yet for all of its deficiencies (and a proneness to fanaticism and cultism seems to be a major one), the auteur theory does offer a valuable schematic model for interpreting the filmmaking process and goes some way toward solving a very basic methodological problem of film criticism: that is, to whom or what does one attribute cinematic creation? Furthermore, the Cahiers critics were able to partly vindicate the auteur theory by becoming filmmakers themselves and practicing it.

The New Wave’s challenge to the “tradition of quality” was economic, as well as aesthetic. Under the system that prevailed from 1953 to 1959, government aid was awarded to productions by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC, founded in 1946) on the basis of reputation, so potential directors needed an established record of success, and very few new people could hope to enter the industry. In 1959, however, the laws relating to aid for film productions were changed to allow first films to be funded by the state on the basis of a submitted script alone, enabling hundreds of new filmmakers to become their own producers and creating the economic context for the New Wave. Moreover, the international commercial success of films such as Les quatre cents coups, which was produced for $75,000 and brought in $500,000 for its American distribution rights alone, dramatically increased the number of private producers willing to finance new work. Thus, for a while at least, until the failures mounted, Truffaut’s concept of un cinéma d’auteurs was realized in France by placing the control of the conception of a film in the same hands that controlled the actual production.

The New Wave (Nouvelle Vague): First Films

The first films of this “new wave” of French directors were independently produced dramatic shorts, many of them shot in 16mm and subsequently blown up for 35mm exhibition. Yet the first feature-length success of the New Wave is generally acknowledged to have been Claude Chabrol’s first film, Le beau serge (The Handsome Serge/Bitter Reunion, 1958), although Varda’s La Pointe-Courte preceded it by three years. While still a Cahiers critic, Chabrol (1930–2010) shot Le beau serge, about the rehabilitation of a village drunkard, on location with funds provided by a small inheritance. The success of Le beau serge enabled Chabrol to follow it with Les cousins (The Cousins, 1959), an ironic study of sexual intrigue and murder set against the backdrop of Parisian student life.

The year 1959 was the annus mirabilis for the New Wave, because three of the main figures of the move- ment released their first features. François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), made for $75,000 with a loan from his father-in-law when the director was twenty-seven years old, is a lyrical but wholly unsentimental account of an adolescent delinquent, shot on location in Paris. Dedicated to the memory of André Bazin (who died on the second day of shooting) and photographed in Dyaliscope (a French version of CinemaScope) by the talented New Wave cinematographer Henri Decaë (1915–1987), the film is consciously evocative of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933). It won the prize for Best Direction at Cannes in the year of its release, as well as the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film in 1959. It was also the first film in Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, a kind of continuing cinematic autobiography starring Jean-Pierre Léaud (b. 1944), an actor who physically resembled Truffaut.

More remarkable in structure and theme was Alain Resnais’s first feature, Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), which, like Nuit et brouillard, examines the relation- ship between time and memory in the context of a terrible atrocity. With a brilliant script by the novelist Marguerite Duras (who was to become an important director herself in the 1970s) and cinematography by Sacha Vierny (1919–2001), the film concerns a love affair between a French actress working in Hiroshima and a Japanese architect, in the course of which both recall their memories of the past war in Asia and Europe. Resnais maintains the counterpoint between present and past by continuously shifting narrative modes from objective to subjective and, in several extraordinary sequences, by combining dramatic footage of the couple making love with documentary footage of the aftermath of the Hiroshima blast. Hiroshima, mon amour, like Les quatre cents coups, was a great commercial success and conferred further prestige on the New Wave by winning the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film in 1960.

The third important New Wave film of 1959, Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless), was in many ways the most characteristic and influential film of the movement. Breathless, which was written by Godard after a story by Truffaut and shot by cinematographer Raoul Coutard (b. 1924) in four weeks for less than $90,000, is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, one of the larger American B-film studios of the 1930s and the 1940s, which were famous for their ability to turn out tightly paced films on short shooting schedules and poverty-line budgets. This was precisely the ideal of the New Wave (or, at least, of its dominant Cahiers branch), but instead of making cheap films in order to make a quick profit, the New Wave directors made cheap films in order to be able to make films at all, because their productions were necessarily independent of the industry. (Happily, many of the first New Wave films, including Breathless, made a great deal of money, which temporarily ensured the future of the movement.)

Modeled on the American gangster film in a simultaneous spirit of parody and homage, Breathless is about an amoral young thug on the run who is finally betrayed to the police by his American girlfriend (deliberate shades of Pépé le moko [1937] and Quai des brumes [1938]), and it contains virtually every major technical characteristic of the New Wave film. These include the use of shaky, handheld 35mm camera shots; location shooting; natural lighting; improvised plot and dialogue; and direct sound recording on location with portable tape machines that were electronically synchronized with the camera.

Yet the most important technical characteristic of the New Wave film was its jagged, elliptical style of editing, which employed a high percentage of jump cuts within and mismatches between scenes in order to destroy the spatial and temporal continuity of the viewing experience. As Breathless begins, for example,

we witness the following sequence of events: Michel, the young hood, steals a car in Paris with the help of his French mistress and speeds out into the countryside alone; at high speed, he passes several other vehicles on his side of the road; he briefly contemplates picking up two female hitchhikers; and, to occupy the time, he talks to himself and to the audience about a variety of subjects. Next, he passes a large truck at a road construction site and suddenly finds himself pursued by two motorcycle cops; he pulls off the road into a small wooded area and pretends to be having car trouble. One cop passes him by, the second spots him and pulls into the wood. At this point, Michel reaches into the car, grabs a revolver, and guns down the cop. He then flees across an open field and hitchhikes back to Paris. In a conventional commercial film of the day— French, American, British, or Italian—this sequence would have been rendered in many separate shots fully depicting each of the actions. In Breathless, the whole sequence is conveyed in only several brief shots: alternating close-ups of Michel and his mistress on a Paris street; a quick take of the car theft at eye level; medium-close shots, taken from the passenger’s seat, of Michel driving the car; medium-long shots, which pass away rapidly through the windshield, of the road and later the hitchhikers; a shot of the motorcycle cops appearing in the rearview mirror, followed by one of Michel pulling off the road and opening the hood of his car as the cop discovers him; an extreme close-up of the revolver, followed by a medium-long shot of the murder; a long shot of Michel running across a field; and a medium shot of him arriving in Paris as a passenger in the backseat of an unidentified car. Later in the film, Godard begins many scenes with a huge disorienting close-up and only later cuts, or pulls his camera back, to reveal the context of the action—which completely reversed conventional practice of the day.

Most radical of all, however, was Godard’s use of the jump cut, in which a section of a single continuous shot is eliminated and then what remains is spliced together, creating a completely nonnaturalistic ellipsis in the action and calling attention to the director’s power to manipulate all aspects of his medium. This radical elimination of transitional scenes (of what Hollywood calls establishing shots—medium or long shots of exteriors that indicate changes in dramatic space), and even of continuity within the shot itself, was thought extremely confusing when Godard and his peers first practiced it on a large scale. Yet it is no more than a logical extension of the discoveries of Méliès, Porter, and Griffith, that cinematic narrative is by its nature discontinuous or, as Eisenstein discovered, that spatial and temporal continuity in the cinema resides not on the screen but in the viewer’s mind as it makes the connections that the images on the screen, by their arrangement, suggest.

The New Wave: Origins of Style

These conventions, like all film conventions, sprang from two sources—theoretical conviction and material circumstances (not necessarily in that order). The material circumstances were these: the young directors of the New Wave were the first film-educated generation of filmmakers in history. They approached the cinema from the experience of having viewed almost the whole of its history at Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française and from having written about it theoretically and critically in Cahiers du cinéma for nearly a decade. When they finally came to practice cinema, they knew more about the medium as an art form and less about the practical aspects of production than anyone who had ever made films before them. Consequently, they made many mistakes that their low budgets and tight shooting schedules would not permit them to correct. Like the Soviet filmmakers during the film-stock shortage that followed the 1917 Revolution, the New Wave directors could not afford to retake shots, so they relied on elliptical editing to conceal technical defects on the screen. Jump cuts, for example, were a means not only of creating perceptual dislocation in the audience, but also of restoring botched scenes by excising some actor’s or cameraman’s blunder from the middle of a take.

Yet there were sound theoretical reasons for the stylistic conventions of the New Wave, as well as budgetary ones. If location shooting with handheld cameras was inexpensive, it was also totally at odds with the fluid, studio-bound cinematography of the contemporary commercial film. If jagged editing and jump-cutting were useful in concealing defective footage, they also eliminated the smooth transitions that permit an audience to forget that it is watching a film—that is, a consciously crafted product of human imagination, rather than some “found” reality.

The psychological effect of these conventions—and they must be considered calculated effects by the directors, as well as functions of economic necessity—is 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 artificially created nature. The abrupt and, above all, obvious manipulation of our perception in these films, through the use of the jump cut, handheld cameras, and so forth, jolts us out of our conventional involvement with the narrative and our traditional identification 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 cinéastes (loosely, “film artists”), the conventional cinema had too faithfully and for too long reproduced our normal way of seeing things through its studiously unobtrusive techniques. The invisible editing and imperturbably smooth cam- era styles of commercial cinema of the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, and much of the 1960s were designed to draw the spectator’s attention away from the fact that he or she was watching a consciously crafted artifact. Yet the disruptive editing and camera styles of the New Wave say to us constantly, “Look, there’s a film being made right before your eyes,” that whenever we watch a film, the process immediately beyond the borders of the frame is being controlled by a handful of artists.

The theoretical position of the New Wave filmmak- ers is therefore that film must constantly call attention to the process of its own making and to the medium’s own unique language—thus, the unparalleled cinematic éclat, or explosiveness, of the New Wave, its em- phasis on “magical” cinematic tricks such as the jump cut; the iris-in and iris-out, decelerated and accelerated motion; and optically violent camera movement—all devices of which film and no other medium is capable. In this sense, the New Wave represents a return to Méliès and his conspicuously cinematic brand of conjuring. On one hand, it envisions film as a special kind of magic that requires of its viewers a uniquely cinematic way of seeing to comprehend. On the other hand, the New Wave reaches back equally to Lumière, because its most characteristic techniques are essentially documentary in practice. In fact, cinéma vérité, the chief documentary mode of the 1960s and the 1970s, constitutes an application of New Wave shooting and recording practices to real events, rather than staged ones.

Furthermore, Jean-Luc Godard, 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 Western film. 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.

European Renaissance: West

The Second Italian Film Renaissance

Like the American, French, and British cinemas, Italian cinema experienced a creative decline during the 1950s, as the neorealist impulse died out and the studios returned to the business of producing mass entertainment. Visconti, Rossellini, and De Sica continued to make serious films, but as elsewhere, the industry’s emphasis was on spectacle and mildly titillating sex. The 1950s were largely a period of “rosy realism” in the Italian film—a mode that might best be understood as a merging of telefono bianco and neorealism—and the decade witnessed the appearance of such international sex symbols as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and Marcello Mastroianni. Yet two figures were working within the domestic cinema at this time who would create the second postwar Italian film renaissance—Federico Fellini (1920–1993) and Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007).

Federico Fellini

Formerly a newspaper cartoonist, Fellini began his film career as a scriptwriter for Rossellini. His early films as a director were very much in the orthodox neorealist tradition, but I vitelloni (The Loafers/The Young and the Passionate, 1953) was the first to reveal remarkable feeling for character and atmosphere. This episodic study of aimless young loafers in the seaside resort town of Rimini, where Fellini grew up, contains semiautobiographical elements and is one of his finest achievements.

With La strada (The Road, 1954), Fellini made a break with neorealism to tell the story of a simple- minded peasant girl who is sold to a circus strongman for a plate of pasta. Realistic in form but essentially allegorical in content, La strada was attacked by leftist critics for betraying the social commitment of neorealism. Nevertheless, it attracted worldwide attention and won a Silver Lion, the second-highest honor, at the prestigious Venice Film Festival in 1954. By the time he made La strada, Fellini had assembled about him the group of collaborators with whom he was to work for most of his career: his co-scenarists, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli; his director of photography, Otello Martelli; his composer, Nino Rota; and his leading lady, Giulietta Masina, who was also his wife.

Fellini’s next film was Il bidone (The Swindle, 1955); like La strada, it was realistic in style but symbolic in content. This tale of two-bit swindlers who victimize the poor has an aura of tragedy about it and contains a number of surreal touches that adumbrate Fellini’s later concern with psychology and myth. Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1956), which Fellini wrote with the Marxist poet and future director Pier Paolo Pasolini, again has Giulietta Masina as the central figure. Here she plays a plucky, indomitable Roman prostitute who is betrayed and robbed by the young man she loves but who nevertheless has the spirit to begin life anew.

After a hiatus of nearly four years, Fellini produced La dolce vita (1960), his first film in widescreen and a turning point in his work. This film concerns the life of a Roman journalist and press agent (Marcello Mastroianni) as he seeks sensational stories and hobnobs with the international jet set. Its superficially realistic milieu is corruption and decadence, and its visual extravagance borders on the fantastic. The film begins with a long traveling shot of a statue of Christ being flown by helicopter over the city and ends at the seashore with the capture of a monstrous dead fish. La dolce vita brought Fellini international recognition as a major artist and a new master of widescreen composition.

With Otto e mezzo (81⁄2, 1963)—so named because it was his eighth-and-a-half film, the “half” having been his contributions to the anthology films Amore in città (1953) and Boccaccio ’70 (1962)—Fellini moved directly into the world of self-reflexive fantasy. In 81⁄2, Guido (Mastroianni), a film director who seems to represent Fellini himself, has undertaken a large-scale production but runs out of creative energy in the process. This blockage plunges him (and us) into a subconscious dream world of nightmares, fantasies, and flashbacks that interpenetrates his perceptions of the present and jumbles narrative logic. This surrealistic parable of the agony of artistic creation won many international awards. Although it has been called a twentieth-century version of Dante’s Inferno, it is ultimately about the process of its own making.

In Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), his first feature in color, Fellini focused on a woman (played by Masina) who, like Guido in 81⁄2, collapses into a world of fantasy under the pressure of an unpleasant external reality—her husband’s infidelity and the dominance of her glamorous mother and sisters. In Fellini Satyricon (1969), a flamboyant, personalized version of a classical epic paean to hedonism, he created a nightmarish portrait of the decadence of ancient Rome. In Fellini Roma (1972), stunningly photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno, the director continued to explore his preoccupation with subjective history in an impressionistic study of Rome that combined stylized documentary with Fellini’s own memories of the city as a youth.

His next major work, Amarcord (1974; the title is regional dialect for “I remember”), is about a young man growing up in the seaside town of Rimini some forty years earlier. More directly autobiographical than I vitelloni, it provided Fellini with breathing space before he undertook a spectacular English-language version of Casanova’s memoirs (Casanova, 1976)—a film more controversial with the critics for its glacially sumptuous tableaux than even Fellini Satyricon. During the 1980s, Fellini made approximately one feature every two years, the most important of which were E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983) and Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986), both satires about the decline of cinema, the rise of contemporary television, and its cult of instant celebrity. The last film Fellini completed before his death in 1993 was La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990), which returns to the popular culture of his provincial youth to make a comic, if pessimistic, plea for a quieter, less technocentric world.

Deeply influenced by neorealism in the formlessness and circularity of his narratives, Fellini structured his work through the sheer force of his own personality and obsessions. To use one of his favorite images, Fellini was first and foremost a great ringmaster whose circus was the human comedy, as it existed both inside and outside himself. His theme was the mystery of identity (often his own or that of the characters played by Giulietta Masina), and he learned to tap a large portion of the cinema’s vast but generally unrealized potential to objectify subjective states, and vice versa. Fellini’s rich frescoes and intoxicating images create a stylized world of mental fantasy in which reality is reinterpreted and made significant by the imagination of the artist.

Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni, similar to Fellini, began his career in film as a neorealist. The son of a wealthy businessman, he attended the Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia in Rome and wrote criticism for Cinema. In 1942, he collaborated on the script of Rossellini’s Un pilota ritorna and served as an assistant to Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir. His first films as a director were bleak and uncompromising neorealist documentary shorts, but his first features broke away from neorealist conventions to examine the middle-class milieu with which he was most familiar. They all dealt with social displacement and alienation, key themes in Antonioni’s later work.

In his first major feature, Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), a pessimistic study of the alienated bourgeois women of Turin, Antonioni announced a new style, one that abandoned traditional plotting for a series of seemingly random events and that connected his characters intimately with their environment through the long take, or sequence shot, as opposed to montage. Use of the long take in Le amiche, which won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1955, enabled Antonioni to render the duration of real time on the screen and emphasize the overwhelming importance of the material environment on the interior lives of his characters—the two main components of his mature style. In Il grido (The Cry, 1957),

Antonioni turned briefly from the bourgeois milieu to portray the doomed journey of a factory worker and his daughter across the desolate wasteland of the Po Valley. Here, as in Le amiche, Antonioni used the physical environment of his film to express the psychology of the characters. Yet it was with L’avventura (The Adventure, 1960) that Antonioni achieved his first great masterpiece of mise-en-scène.

The first film in his brilliant trilogy about displacement and alienation in the modern world, and his first film in widescreen, L’avventura concerns a yachting party of rich Italians who land on a deserted volcanic island in the Mediterranean. A young woman, Anna, quarrels with her lover, Sandro, the leader of the party, and then mysteriously disappears. Anna’s best friend, Claudia (played by Monica Vitti, who starred in Antonioni’s next three films), and Sandro, both of whom have been marginal figures 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. The lack of final resolution and the seeming aimlessness of the narrative caused L’avventura to be jeered at the 1960 Cannes Festival, but it received the Jury Prize, and the impact of its revolutionary style was soon felt around the world.

For one thing, Antonioni used the sequence shot in L’avventura to equate film time with real time—every scene in the film, whether edited or not, takes the same amount of time to occur on the screen as it would in empirical reality. He also employed widescreen deep focus to link his characters inexorably with their oppressive surroundings. Both techniques have the effect of transferring the psychological experience of the characters to the audience, because both groups are required to perceive time and space in precisely the same terms, unmediated by expressive montage. Thus, we experience the long and tedious search for Anna, first on the island and later on Sicily, very much as do Sandro and Claudia—at first with interest and anticipation, then with desperation, and finally with disgust and boredom, which leads us to forget the object of the search altogether and concentrate on the relationship of the searchers, just as do the searchers themselves. From one moment to the next, Antonioni never permits us to know any more about the mystery of Anna’s disappearance (or about the mystery of their own relationship) than do Sandro and Claudia, and when the film ends with these mysteries unresolved, we realize that the psychological “adventure” of the characters has been made our own.

Antonioni continued his trilogy on what he calls “the great emotional sickness of our era” with La notte (The Night, 1960), a film about the growing estrangement of a successful novelist and his wife, and the alienation of both from the vacuous environment of modern industrial Milan. L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), a brilliant conclusion to the trilogy, offered Antonioni’s most sustained vision of the disorder and incoherence of modern existence. In Rome, two lovers conclude an affair, having “nothing left to say to each other,” and the woman drifts into another affair with her mother’s handsome young stockbroker. This affair, too, leads toward estrangement, and the film concludes with a seven-minute montage sequence of fifty-eight shots showing places in the city from late afternoon to nightfall where the lovers have met regularly during the course of the film but in which neither of them now appears. Their unexplained disappearance (and our mute acceptance of it) is a chilling reminder of the fragility and impermanence of personal relationships and provides the perfect coda for a trilogy whose theme is the hopelessness of love in the modern age.

In Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), his first color film and winner of the Golden Lion at Venice in 1964, Antonioni portrayed the neurotic wife of a wealthy engineer searching for meaning in the industrial wasteland of Ravenna. Her sense of personal dislocation and the chaotic impingement of industry on nature are both heightened by Antonioni’s impressionist/expressionist use of color, the first of its kind in the history of film. Great poisonous clouds of yellow smoke billow from the factories, ships pass continuously in the background through the gray mists of the harbor, and chemical dyes give a nightmarish cast to the industrial wastes and slag heaps that intrude on the natural landscape of the town. Antonioni created a foreshortened perspective for this nightmare world by using telephoto lenses in excess of 100mm to eliminate depth of field and heighten the film’s abstraction.

Antonioni also used color symbolically in Blow-Up (1966), an abstract and mystifying film about a fashion photographer in “swinging” London who seems to have inadvertently photographed a murder in the 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, even (or, perhaps, especially) when rendered visible on film, is not subject to interpretation and is, therefore, meaningless. Blow-Up was Antonioni’s first film to reach a large popular audience, and its commercial success led to his filming of Zabriskie Point for MGM in America in 1970. Shot partly on location in Death Valley, this beautiful color film was an attempt to suggest the decadence of American society through the fantasies of the revolutionary young.

After Zabriskie Point, the film’s producer, Carlo Ponti, asked Antonioni to shoot a suspense thriller about a man who changes his identity. The result was not a thriller at all but a despairing existential meditation on the uselessness of human individuality, titled Professione: Reporter (English title: The Passenger, 1975). Set in exotic international locations, The Passenger concerns a television news reporter at midlife who finds a corpse in a Moroccan hotel and assumes the identity of the dead man. This desperate bid for self-liberation ends in disaster when the dead man turns out to have been a political operative dangerously involved in a guerrilla war. Filmed as a series of long takes and concluding with an elaborate seven-minute zoom-and-tracking shot in which the death of the reporter is obliquely implied, rather than observed, The Passenger was Antonioni’s last major work before his death.

Although a cerebral hemorrhage suffered in 1985 prevented him from working for a decade, in the course of his career he had tenaciously maintained his integrity and independence to become a poet of the modern individual’s estrangement from his environment and of his tragic inability to communicate with others and with himself. His films contain little dialogue and less music, implying the virtual irrelevance of human communication, but they make brilliant use of naturalistic sound and silence to emphasize his characters’ isolation in a seemingly random, if not hostile, universe. Antonioni was, by his own account, more concerned with behavior than with story, and he lets the situations of his films grow out of the personalities and surroundings of his characters, rather than imposing situations through plot. His oblique and languorous narrative style, with its simultaneous capacity for distancing and involvement, has decisively influenced the development of modern widescreen cinema.

Popular Cinema in Italy

Although they brought international prestige to the Italian cinema, art-film directors such as Fellini and Antonioni did not sustain the industry financially during the 1960s and the 1970s. No account of Italian cinema after neorealism would be complete without a discussion of three exploitation genres that became financial mainstays for both studios and independent producers during this period—the “peplum” epics, the “spaghetti” Westerns, and the Italian horror film, especially the subtype known as the giallo and its clones. These genres were not only important in an industrial and economic sense, but—similar to Hollywood B-films of the 1930s and the 1940s and the youth-cult exploitation films produced by AIP during the 1950s and the 1960s—they provided the training ground for many directors who later became prominent figures in the mainstream cinema.

With roots in the Italian pre–World War I super-spectacle, the peplum films (named for the short skirts worn by the protagonists, both male and female) were sword-and-sandal epics with plots inspired by classical mythology and heroes drawn from the ancient world— for example, Hercules, Ulysses, and Spartacus—who were often played by American bodybuilders such as Steve Reeves; 170 such films were produced by the Italian industry between 1957 and 1964, representing 10 percent of national production. The first was Le fatiche di Ercole (The Labors of Hercules; Pietro Francisci, 1957), imported into the United States by Joseph E. Levine as Hercules in 1959, which grossed an astonishing $18 million. This success led to the creation of multiple peplum franchises—the original Hercules series (1958–1965), the Maciste series (1959–1965), and the Ursus series (1960–1962); the latter two were based on characters from the paradigmatic superspectacle Cabiria (1914).

As the peplum cycle was winding down, Cinecittà began to make Westerns to fill the void left by Hollywood when it abandoned the genre to television. Cinecittà made approximately twenty-five of them, using some of the same creative personnel as were used in the peplum epics, before Sergio Leone (1929–1989) set the standard for the genre in his Dollars trilogy, starring Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name. Leone is usually credited with establishing an international market for the Italo-Western, some 400 of which were produced between 1963 and 1973, dominating Italian film exports for a decade. Leone’s trilogy—Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966)—contain all of the hallmarks of the classical spaghetti Western: baroque framings, an emphasis on duration through both the long take and montage, an electronically synthesized score (in this case, by the innovative and distinguished Ennio Morricone), a Latinate cast and a Mexican setting (here represented by Spanish locations), and an emphasis on sudden and shocking violence.

Leone’s ironic stylization of American myths continued though two more Westerns—C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) and Giù la testa (A Fistful of Dynamite/Duck, You Sucker!, 1971)—and a gangster epic, C’era una volta in America (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984); and he is today regarded as a major figure in postwar Italian cinema. In addition to the enormous influence of Leone’s successful formula on filmmakers in Italy (there were more than four hundred imitations, in dozens of successful series), the Italian Western had an enormous influence on American filmmakers as diverse as Sam Peckinpah, Ralph Nelson, and Robert Altman, and it raised the bar on the graphic depiction of violence in cinema generally.

Two conventions of Kabuki are especially unusual, relative to Western films. First, all female roles until well into the 1920s were played by male, professional female impersonators known as onnagata or oyama, which worked against even the simplest sort of photographic realism. Second, and much more formative in the development of Japanese cinema, was the convention of the benshi—an actor who stands at the side of the stage (or the screen, in the case of films) and narrates the action for the audience. In the earliest Japanese films, the benshi provided both voices for the characters and commentary on the action.

After 1912, the benshi concentrated exclusively on dialogue in response to an influx of foreign films using intertitles, a practice quickly imitated by domestic producers. By 1920, however, the benshi had returned to the practice of mixing description/commentary with spoken dialogue—sometimes read from intertitles, sometimes interpolated from the action itself. As scholar Donald Kirihara has pointed out, the effect on film form was immense: “[T]he presence of the benshi was a fact that filmmakers could assume during production, allowing them to make films with ambiguous spatial and temporal transitions or under-motivated plots with the knowledge that the benshi would be present to provide whatever narrative coherence was lacking.” In short, the presence of a human, verbal narrator permitted Japanese cinematic narrative to remain relatively diffuse.

In September 1923, an earthquake leveled large portions of Tokyo and neighboring Yokohama, including many film studios and theaters. After the quake, the industry, like much of urban Japan, had to be rebuilt from scratch, and one result, as film historian Donald Richie points out, was a new division of production: historical films (jidai-geki) were henceforth made in Kyoto, where studios and ancient buildings were still standing, and contemporary films (gendai-geki) were made in Tokyo, where modern Western-style buildings had either survived the quake or were subsequently built to replace those that hadn’t.

There was, in addition, a turning away from the past and an increased receptivity to modern ideas, especially those from the West. The oyama rapidly disappeared, and Japanese films adopted nonnative styles, such as the newly discovered Western modes of naturalism and Expressionism. The benshi, however, many of whom had become stars in their own right, would remain a potent force in Japanese cinema until well after the introduction of sound. In 1927, there were 6,818 benshi, including only 180 women, who were licensed to practice throughout the Japanese Empire. Though their stranglehold on the industry was eventually broken by reorganization, there were still 1,295 of them (mostly unemployed) in 1940. Nevertheless, the coming of sound ensured that directors could finally become the primary creative force in Japanese film, as they already were in most countries of the West.

By 1925, the Kabuki-oriented cinema had been replaced by a new director’s cinema, consciously divided into two large genres, or types, that persist to this day: the jidai-geki, or period films set before 1868 (the year marking the beginning of the Meiji Restoration and the abolition of feudal Japan), and the gendai-geki, or films of contemporary life. Both genres are obviously very broad, and each has come to contain a large number of subtypes. Currently, for example, the jidai-geki encompasses the chanbara, or sword-fight film, which focuses on the figure of the masterless samurai (“warrior”), or ronin; the historical romance; and the ghost film. The gendai-geki includes such disparate types as the lower-middle-class comedy-drama (shomin-geki); the “children’s film,” in which the inanities and corruptions of the adult world are satirized by presenting them from a child’s point of view; and the yakuza-eiga, or modern gangster film.

The years 1926 to 1932 saw the appearance of the first major works of Japanese cinema in the beautiful period films of Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896–1982) and Kenji Mizoguchi, and in the shomin-geki of Yasujiro Shimazu (1897–1945), Heinosuke Gosho (1902–1981), Mikio Naruse (1905–1969), and—above all—Yasujiro Ozu. In careers that extended well into the postwar period, both Mizoguchi and Ozu became masters of classical Japanese film (which followed the primitive period, from roughly 1926 until the 1950s). The third master was Akira Kurosawa, whose career did not begin until the middle years of World War II, or the “Pacific War,” as it is known to the Japanese.

Rashomon, Kurosawa, and the Postwar Renaissance

Rashomon, based on two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), is a film about the relativity of truth, in which four conflicting versions of the same event are offered by four equally credible (or equally incredible) narrators. Thus, all four versions of the truth are shown to be relative to the perspectives and self-serving intentions of the individual participants. Kurosawa implies that reality, or truth, does not exist independent of human consciousness, identity, and perception.

Cinematically, Rashomon is a masterpiece, and its release marked the emergence of Kurosawa as a major international figure. Each of the four tales has a unique style appropriate to the character of its teller, but the film as a whole is characterized by the many complicated tracking shots executed by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (1908–1999), superbly paced editing, and thematically significant composition of the frame in depth. The camera seems to be almost constantly in motion, much of it violent, and Kurosawa uses many subjective shots to represent “reality” from the perspective of the individual narrators. Ironically, the Japanese had been somewhat reluctant to enter Rashomon in the Venice Festival, thinking that foreigners would misunderstand it. They were as amazed as they were pleased when the film won the Golden Lion, but their industry was quick to capitalize on its success.

From 1951 through the present, the Japanese have consistently submitted entries to international film festivals, and they have achieved recognition and respect for their cinema all over the world. Between 1951 and 1965, as vast new export markets opened in the West and as Japanese films won prizes in festival after festival, Japanese cinema experienced a renaissance unprecedented in the history of any national cinema. Established figures, such as Mizoguchi and Ozu, produced their greatest work during this period, and relatively new figures, such as Kurosawa, Shindo, Ichikawa, and Kobayashi, all made films that stand among the classics of the international cinema.

Kurosawa became the most famous Japanese director in the West, perhaps because his films are more Western in construction than those of his peers. He followed Rashomon with the brilliant shomin- geki—Ikiru (Living/To Live, 1952)—a fatalistic yet ultimately affirmative account of the last months of a minor bureaucrat dying of cancer. Ikiru was made for

Toho, which would produce and/or distribute all of Kurosawa’s films but one from 1952 to 1991. In 1954, Kurosawa produced the epic jidai-geki—Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai)—which many critics regard as his greatest work. More than eighteen months in production, this spectacular and deeply humanistic film tells the story of a small village that hires seven unemployed samurai to defend it against bandit raids in sixteenth-century Japan, an era in which the samurai as a class were rapidly dying out (in fact, the bandits are themselves unemployed samurai).

As an epic, Seven Samurai clearly ranks with the greatest films of Griffith and Eisenstein, and cinematically it is a stunning achievement. The entire film is a tapestry of motion. Complicated tracking shots compete with equally elaborate and fast-paced editing to create a prevailing tempo that is like that of war punctuated by ever shorter intervals of peace. For the battle between bandits and samurai that concludes the film, Kurosawa created a montage sequence that rivals the massacre on the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin in its combination of rapid tracking shots and telephoto close-ups of the action at various decelerated camera speeds. Seven Samurai was honored on a global scale: it received the Kinema Jumpo Award in Japan, the Silver Lion at Venice, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in the United States. (It was remade by John Sturges in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven, with its setting transposed to the American West.)

Kurosawa’s other masterpiece of the 1950s was a brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a jidai-geki set in medieval Japan. Similar to Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood concludes with an elaborate montage sequence in which the Macbeth figure, Lord Washizu (Toshiro Mifune), is immolated by a hail of arrows. In Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood, Kurosawa succeeded in elevating the jidai-geki from a simple action genre to an art form. After another literary ad- aptation, of Maxim Gorki’s play The Lower Depths (Donzoko, 1957), he made three superb chanbara—The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san-akunin, 1958), Yojimbo (The Bodyguard, 1961), and Sanjuro (Tsubaki sanjuro, 1962). Though these films lack the thematic depth of his earlier jidai-geki, they are masterworks of widescreen composition and rival their predecessors in visual richness.

In 1960, Kurosawa was put in charge of his own production unit at Toho and given complete control of it. Kurosawa Production’s first effort was The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru, 1960), a film about corporate versus social responsibility in the form of a murder mystery. It was followed by Yojimbo; Sanjuro; High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, 1963), a strikingly formalized film of kidnapping and detection, which contains some of the most thematically complex wide-screen framings of Kurosawa’s career; and Red Beard (Akahige, 1965), the story of a young doctor’s education in late-Tokugawa Japan. Kurosawa was then invited by Fox to co-produce and direct the Japanese sequences of the Pearl Harbor battle epic Tora! Tora! Tora! (Richard Fleischer, 1970; see Chapter 20), an experience that ended bitterly for both parties in January 1969, when the director’s footage was rejected and Fox terminated his contract. From this point, Kurosawa Production was not active again until Dreams in 1990.

After returning to Japan, Kurosawa gave the cinema another masterpiece—Dersu Uzala, a Soviet-Japanese co-production shot in 70mm with six-track sound. Set in the forests of eastern Siberia at the turn of the century, it is a portrait of the friendship between an aging hunter of the Goldi tribe and a young Russian surveyor. By 1977, the film, which was distributed by Mosfilm, had won the Grand Prize at the Moscow Festival and an Academy Award in America. In 1980, Kurosawa completed Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior), a tragic jidai-geki set during the sixteenth-century civil wars; this film was co-winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in the year of its release, but as great as it was, Kagemusha was in many ways simply a test run for Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Ran (literally, Chaos), in 1985. This $10 million Japanese-French co-production, the most expensive film made in Japan to date, was the culmination of a life’s work: a stylized, epic version of King Lear set in the context of the same clan wars as those portrayed in Kagemusha. Ran was internationally recognized as the director’s most brilliant, profound, and magisterial film. In 1987, Kurosawa announced his intention to retire from directing, as if after Ran there was little left to say, although he went on to make Dreams in 1990 and Rhapsody in August in 1991.

Kurosawa was unquestionably a giant of international cinema. Like Bergman and Antonioni, he was the true auteur of his films—he set up his own shots, did his own editing, and wrote his own scripts. He was probably more conscious of Western styles of filmmaking than any of his Japanese peers and always claimed a great stylistic debt to John Ford. Kurosawa was a professional student of Western painting before he entered the cinema, but it would be a mistake to assume that the Western “look” of his films betokens Western values.

Although he was sometimes mistakenly identified by Western critics as a humanist, Kurosawa was, in fact, a fatalist, or at least an existentialist, in subtle but thoroughly Japanese terms. His vision of human experience was firmly rooted in the value system of feudal Japan. Zen Buddhism, the samurai code of bushido (“the way of the warrior”—loyalty and self-sacrifice), and the master-pupil relationship are all important ethical components of his films. Because of his great universality of spirit, we can recognize ourselves in Kurosawa, but we would do well to remember that Kurosawa also shared many sympathies with Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), the famous anti-intellectual novelist and right-wing militant who staged a raid on the Tokyo headquarters of the nation’s “peacekeeping” forces on November 25, 1970, and committed a spectacular act of seppuku, or hara-kiri, there to protest the decadence of contemporary Japan and the declining role of feudalism in its culture.

Kenji Mizoguchi

The directorial career of Kenji Mizoguchi (1898– 1956) spanned thirty-four years and encompassed ninety feature films. As did Kurosawa, Mizoguchi studied Western painting as a student, but his themes and visual style were purely Japanese. He began his career as an actor for the Nikkatsu studio and became a director there in 1922. Appearing from a variety of studios, Mizoguchi’s first films were mainly thrillers and melodramas adapted from popular literature, but in 1925, he began to make films dealing with the impact of urbanization on Japanese life. Few of his silent films have survived, but those that do reveal an almost painterly evocation of atmosphere and mood. After a politically committed film about the urban working class, Mizoguchi turned increasingly to period films to avoid government censorship.

Yet his two greatest films of the 1930s, Osaka Elegy (Naniwa ereji, 1936; banned in 1940) and Sisters of the Gion (Gion no shimai, 1936), have contemporary settings and announce Mizoguchi’s main thematic concern: the position of women within the social order and the redemptive power of their love. The films also contain Mizoguchi’s first consistent use of the technique that would become the hallmark of his later films—the extended long take composed in depth for a static camera. Critics have compared Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion with Jean Renoir’s pre- war films, in terms of both their humanism and their mise-en-scène. Like Renoir, Mizoguchi constant- ly sought ways to portray internal states through external means, and he felt that in the long take he had discovered what he called “the most precise and specific expression for intense psychological moments.” Diagonal composition leading the eye outward toward the world beyond the frame, fluid and thematically significant moving camera shots, luminous photography (often by Kazuo Miyagawa), and minimal cutting are other characteristics of Mizoguchi’s mature style, which link him with the mise-en-scène tradition of the West.

During the war, Mizoguchi was forced to make a certain number of government-policy films, although he was able to confine them to jidai-geki. After the surrender, he continued to examine the condition of Japanese women. Yet in the last six years of his life, with the Occupation ended, Mizoguchi produced his greatest masterpieces, nearly all of them for Daiei. In rapid succession, he shot five films that many critics regard as among the most beautiful and haunting ever made. The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952), winner of the International Award at the 1952 Venice Film Festival, is a humane critique of feudalism centered around the degraded life of a prostitute in seventeenth-century Kyoto.

Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953), which won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953, is set during the feudal wars of the sixteenth century. Two ambitious young men leave their wives to seek wealth and glory. In the course of a long and picaresque pilgrimage, they both come to realize that nothing they have gained on their journey is worth the love of the women they have cast away. Simultaneously realistic, allegorical, and supernatural, Ugetsu is the most stylistically perfect of all of Mizoguchi’s works. With Sansho the Bailiff (Sansho dayu, 1954), set in the eleventh century, and The Crucified Lovers/A Story from Chikamatsu (Chikamatsu monogatari, 1954), set in the seventeenth century, Mizoguchi continued his concentrated scrutiny of the feudal social system and its impact on women, although neither film was the equal of The Life of Oharu or Ugetsu. The last film Mizoguchi completed before his death in 1956 was Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956), a fictionalized account of the lives of Tokyo prostitutes.

Mizoguchi is popularly perceived in the West, which has seen only about a tenth of his total opus, as a maker of period films. Yet when Mizoguchi looked at the past, it was always as a mirror for the present. His lifelong critique of feudalism, his sympathetic concern for the social and psychological condition of women, and his simple humanism in the face of a callous world are the thematic bridges uniting his period and his contemporary films. Furthermore, his absolute mastery of decor, the long take, and the moving camera make Mizoguchi one of the great mise-en-scène directors of international cinema, a rival of Murnau, Ophüls, and Welles, to name only his contemporaries. Nevertheless, his nearly transcendental visual style finally makes Mizoguchi unique in the history of film.

Yasujiro Ozu

The Japanese director whose work most expresses traditional Japanese values is undeniably Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963); for that reason, he was the last of the three great masters of Japanese cinema to be discovered by the West. As a boy in Tokyo, Ozu spent much of his time in movie houses, entranced by Italian spectacles such as Quo vadis? (1913) and by American comedy, melodrama, and romance (he particularly admired Lubitsch and Griffith). After briefly attending Waseda University, he became a scriptwriter at the Shochiku studio, where he was to work for the rest of his life. Here he soon became an assistant director under the tutelage of Tadamoto Okubo, a specialist in light comedies known as nansensu-mono, or “nonsense films.”

For a time, Ozu specialized in nansensu-mono in the manner of Okubo, but he soon turned his attention to the more serious genre of shomin-geki, social comedies that concentrate on the daily lives and the interpersonal relationships of the members of lower-middle-class families. Ozu seems to have chosen this genre because he found in the routine lives of these people—in their necessary ability to cope with hardship—a “sympathetic sadness” at the harshness of the natural order that ultimately enables one to transcend it. In Western culture, the lower middle class has not often been a traditional subject for art but rather, at best, for soap opera and low comedy. In Japan, however, the simple lifestyle necessarily practiced by people of this class is highly regarded as the most authentic, valid, and human way to live, unencumbered as it is by false values, pretensions, and distortions.

Of Ozu’s fifty-four films, nearly all deal with the life cycles and life crises of lower-middle-class family members, but beyond this, they are about the impact of modernization and modernity on traditional Japanese culture. Often using the same actors, Ozu’s films are, in a sense, all parts of one film that the director was driven to remake throughout his career. Even the titles seem barely distinguishable from one another. To these films of people living restrained and minimal lives, Ozu brought a restrained and minimal cinematic style.

Most of the films he made from 1936 onward take place within the confines of a typical Japanese home. His camera is often motionless, and it frequently assumes the low-angle position of a person seated on a tatami mat, whose eye level is about 3 feet above the floor, as if it were a guest or a visitor in the household. Its attitude is one of calmness, quiescence, and repose. The composition of the frame is inevitably horizontal, and the editing style is spare, with no fades or dissolves but straight cuts only, and with little concern for traditionally fluid continuity. In fact, the characteristic Ozu film is composed of a series of static long takes, in which the dialogue, always written by Ozu in close collaboration with Kogo Noda (1893–1968), sustains the drama. Sometimes, however, moments of stillness and stasis in which there are no human beings at all, occur in Ozu’s films. These are Ozu’s famed “empty scenes” or “still lifes,” and they are extremely important, both to his aesthetic and to international cinema at large.

It often happens in an Ozu film that the characters leave a room to eat or go to the bathroom or to bed, while the camera remains behind in its stationary position to record for a while the empty space that the actors have created by their departure. This preoccupation corresponds to a concept in Zen aesthetics known as mu, which, technically, designates the empty space between the flowers in the Japanese art of flower arrangement, but which more generally refers to the Zen doctrine that the spaces between the materials used to create a work of art are an integral part of the work. So Ozu’s “still lifes,” which appear in each of his major films, are an integral part of his transcendental vision of reality. Yet they are also of great importance to the formal evolution of narrative film. Through his use of the empty scene, Ozu became one of the first directors in the history of film to create offscreen space.

India

Because television did not exist as a mass medium in India until the twenty-first century, cinema is still the most popular form of entertainment. In the mid-1990s, the estimated weekly audience was 130 million for a population of nearly 1.2 billion people, and since 1971, India has been the largest film-producing nation in the world, accounting for fully one-fourth of the total global output each year. Its film industry—the country’s tenth largest—is centered in Bombay, or “Bollywood” (for Hindi-language films, which account for about 25 percent of the total), with substantial production facilities in Calcutta (for Bengali-language films) and Madras (for Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu films).

India produces between 800 and 900 features annually in more than 16 different languages. Yet 90 percent of these films are rigidly conventionalized musicals and mythological romances made for consumption by a largely uneducated and impoverished domestic audience. (Significant export markets for Indian films also exist in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom, with smaller ones in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa; these markets are sustained largely by an expatriate Indian population that numbered 25 million in 2012.)

The formula has been described as “a star, six songs, and three dances”—usually about three hours long and in garish color. The Indian film industry is dominated today by a star system similar to that of Hollywood’s early years, and the cinematic quality of the star vehicles matters less to Indian audiences than their value as spectacle—and those audiences are huge, accounting for more than 6 billion theater admissions per year. Despite these conditions, India has managed to produce some filmmakers of extraordinary talent in the last few decades and, in Satyajit Ray, at least one contemporary director of major international stature.

The current structure of the mainstream Indian commercial film industry—the only major industry in the world to develop under colonial rule—was engendered by the coming of sound. The audience for Indian silent cinema had consisted of hundreds of thousands of Indians, Burmese, and Ceylonese, who spoke many different tongues. Yet with sound, production was initially forced to fragment into regional language groups, of which, within India alone, there were no fewer than twenty-six, fifteen of them official ones. Even the majority Hindi-speaking market of 140 million people had at least three separate dialects.

Under these conditions, the first talking feature, the Hindi music drama Alam Ara (Beauty of the World; Ardeshir Irani, 1931), might well have plunged the industry into chaos. Yet instead the film was a huge success—as indeed were all early Indian sound films— heralding an unprecedented boom. The reason was grounded deep in Indian culture: sound permitted a revival of the vastly popular folk-music drama of the nineteenth century (itself based on centuries-old religious myths), which had been, literally, “all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing.”

Between 1931 and 1932, the resurgence of this form on the screen played an enormous role in winning widespread acceptance for the Indian sound film, despite language barriers. Although most Indian sound films were produced for domestic consumption and seemed to exist mainly as an excuse for musical performance and representation, the Indian film industry nevertheless became a powerful entity during the transition to sound: from producing 28 films in 1931 (23 of which were in Hindi, 3 in Bengali, and 1 each in Tamil and Telugu), it was producing 233 in 1935 in 10 different languages.

As in the United States, the rapid diffusion of sound in India helped consolidate a studio system that was already in place. Yet World War II saw the steady rise of independent production, initially as a means of laundering black-market money. By the war’s end, most of the major studios were bankrupt, and the vast majority of production was carried out on an ad hoc basis until the distributor-financiers reconsolidated in the mid-1960s.

After national independence was granted in 1947 and Pakistan was partitioned off in 1948, however, the film industry came under increasing government supervision through the promulgation of official censorship codes, and independent production became the order of the day. With the arrival of color in the industry, there was an enormous boom in costume films and “mythologicals,” both perfectly suited to the new technology in the “Hindustani” cinema (i.e., Bollywood films made in filmi Hindustani, a colloquial blend of Hindi and Urdu that is spoken all over northern and western India).

Because so many films of this era were financed as one-shot deals backed by a major star, directors experienced a considerable degree of artistic freedom. One such star was Raj Kapoor (1924–1988), who became a producer-director himself during this period, and while the bulk of his work was romantic and popular, he also made films of social comment (or “socials”) in the 1950s, including The Vagabond (Awaara, 1951). So, too, did his contemporary Bimal Roy (1909–1966) with Two Acres of Land (Do bigha zameen, 1953). Other interesting filmmakers of the 1950s were Guru Dutt (1925–1964), whose Paper Flowers (Kaagaz ke phool, 1959) was India’s first widescreen film; and Mehboob Khan (1907–1964), whose epic Mother India (Bharat Mata, 1957) is widely regarded as the Indian Gone with the Wind.

The Golden Age of “Hindustani” film was roughly from 1940 to 1960, but Bollywood became an international phenomenon during the next few decades, producing multigeneric hits such as Sholay (Flames; Ramesh Sippy, 1975), a two-hundred-and-four-min- ute Hollywood-influenced “curry Western” that played nonstop domestically for nearly five years and became India’s most profitable film to date. Like most Bollywood films, Sholay, though ostensibly an action film, was full of carnivalesque song-and-dance routines.

Another immensely popular “curry Western” was God Is My Witness (Khuda gawah; Mukul S. Anand, 1992). The film mixes several action genres with epic spectacle and lavish musical production numbers, including a pitched battle between hundreds of singing, saber-wielding Afghan horsemen. When Hollywood films began to erode India’s domestic market in the 1990s, Bollywood’s musicals became increasingly Westernized—for example, The Heart Is Crazy/Somewhere, Someone Waits for You (Dil to pagal hai; Yash Chopra, 1997), whose college scenes were patterned after the popular American television series Beverly Hills 90210; and Something Happens (Kuch kuch hota hai; Karan Johar, 1998), which was modeled on Nora Ephron’s hit romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Yet the formulaic structure of these films, as well as their spirit, remained unmistakably Indian.

By the end of the century, the Bollywood musical form was being widely imitated in the West, providing a major source of inspiration for everything from music videos to postmodern musical features such as Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001). Yet during the 1950s and the 1960s, while Bollywood was still a local enterprise, a filmmaker of singular talent and vision was claiming international attention for Indian cinema: Satyajit Ray (1921–1992).

Satyajit Ray

As a young man, Ray studied painting with the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and then worked for a while for the Calcutta branch of a British advertising agency as an illustrator. Ray’s job took him to London for six months in 1950; there he saw Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and was tremendously impressed by the film and the style of Italian neorealism. On his return to Calcutta, he met Jean Renoir and was able to observe him filming The River (1951). After many practical difficulties, Ray made his first film, The Song of the Road (Pather panchali, 1955), which, to the astonishment of nearly everyone, won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1956, in addition to becoming a box-office hit in Bengal.

Ray followed with two more films, The Unvanquished (Aparajito, 1957) and The World of Apu (Apur sansar, 1959), which together completed the Apu trilogy—a sensitive, humanistic story of the growth of a young Bengali boy from childhood to maturity. Ray’s style was neorealistic in its simplicity and directness, and he made brilliant use of classical Indian music with a sound track composed and played by Ravi Shankar. Ray acquired a large international following in the 1960s based on his films. Because his focus fell so frequently on personal relationships and the small intimacies of everyday life, Ray was sometimes accused of ignoring India’s pressingly serious problems of poverty, official corruption, and religious intolerance.

In the 1970s, however, he produced more politically conscious films, such as The Adversary (Pratidwandi, 1971), which deals with unemployment among middle-class youths; Distant Thunder (Ashanti sanket, 1973), a depiction of the effects of famine on Bengal during World War II; The Chess Players (Shatranj ke khilari, 1978; Ray’s first film in Urdu, rather than Bengali), set during the British annexation of India’s last independent princely state in 1856; and The Middleman (Jana aranya, 1979), a bitter satire about the Calcutta business world.

During the 1980s, Ray wrote, directed, and scored the full-length theatrical feature The Home and the World (Ghare baire, 1984), based on a novel by Tagore set in 1905, when the British viceroy Lord Curzon deliberately provoked antagonism between the Hindus and the Muslims of Bengal to consolidate his rule; and an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s socially conscious melodrama An Enemy of the People (Ganashatru, 1989).

Before his death in 1992, Ray received an American Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. At the time, he was working on The Broken Journey (Jargoran), a film about a young physician’s futile attempts to bring modern medical practice to a backward Bengali village, which was completed by his son Sandip Ray in 1993. Whatever his status as a social critic, Ray was a genuine artist who made Indian cinema worthy of serious attention for the first time in its history. Furthermore, as the last representative of the Bengali cultural renaissance founded by Tagore, he was held in remarkably high regard by his fellow Hindus: the day of Ray’s funeral was declared a state holiday, and his last rites in Calcutta were attended by more than a million people.

Parallel Cinema

Ray’s Apu trilogy also created the split in Indian cinema between commercial entertainment and art that persists to this day, and it generated great enthusiasm among other Bengali filmmakers, notably Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) and Mrinal Sen (b. 1923). A radical Marxist intellectual, Ghatak made only eight films, the best known of which is Pathetic Fallacy (Ajantrik, 1958), a popular fable about a rural cabbie’s love for his aging taxi.

Yet Ghatak’s true genius lay in the creation of an authentic alternative cinema. In his semiautobiographical trilogy on East Pakistani refugees, brutal directness belies the rich mythic subtext. His masterpiece, Reason, Debate and a Tale (Jukti takko aar gappo, 1974), is an autobiographical account of an alcoholic intellectual who must come to terms with the decay of his own revolutionary idealism.

Sen was much more prolific, making films throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, but his breakthrough film was Bhuvan Shome (Mr. Shome, 1969), which is generally considered the beginning of New Indian Cinema, or “parallel cinema”—that is, parallel to the mainstream commercial industry. Inspired by the French nouvelle vague, specifically Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961), Bhuvan Shome tells the story of a petty-minded railway official on holiday who is humbled and then liberated by an uninhibited village girl, and it was financed by a small unsecured loan from the Indian Film Finance Corporation. This agency had been founded by the government in 1960 as part of a constellation of institutions designed to enhance the quality of domestic films (the others were the Film Institute of India in Poona, established in 1961 to train aspiring directors, and the National Film Archive, founded in 1964), but until Bhuvan Shome, it had only supported the work of established figures, such as Ray. The critical and commercial success of Sen’s film opened the FFC’s doors to unknown directors of small-to medium-budget features.

During the next decade, about fifty-five such films were produced under its auspices. Sen followed his success with the formally experimental Interview (1971) and Calcutta ’71 (1972); clearly influenced by Godard, these works mix third-person narrative with direct address to the audience. Next, Sen produced a series of films that deals with the exploitation

of the urban and the rural poor by multinational corporations, the British raj, Indian businessmen, and bourgeois leftist filmmakers. With the Indian-French- Belgian-Swiss co-production Genesis (1986), a richly beautiful parable of the cyclical rise, decline, and fall of the human race, Sen achieved an international reputation that has been sustained through his most recent work.

Regional Cinemas

In the late 1960s, the nonstar parallel-cinema movement was basically in Hindi (or “Hindustani”) and centered in Bombay. But during the 1970s, regional industries in the southwest—especially, Karnatka and Kerala—began to subsidize independent production, resulting in a “southern new wave.” In Karnatka, a state of more than 61 million inhabitants whose Kannada-language industry is centered in Bangalor, the revivial began with Girish Karnad’s (b. 1938) The Forest (Kaadu, 1973), a brilliant film about two feuding villages, as seen through a child’s eyes.

In neighboring Kerala, India’s most densely populated and literate state, where Malayalam is the principal language, the first major work was Adoor Go-palakrishnan’s (b. 1941) One’s Own Choice (Swayam-vharam, 1972), a film about the grim consequences of a young couple’s flaunting social convention. In the 1990s, Gopalakrishnan contributed to India’s quality cinema The Servile (Vidheyan, 1993), a psychological drama about the domination of a weak Keralese by his Karnatakan landlord, and his Man of the Story (Kath-apurushan, 1996) was voted “Best Film” in India’s National Film Awards, providing an elliptical political history lesson in its autobiographical account of the failure of Marxian socialist movements in postwar Kerala.

The most commercially successful director of the parallel cinema, however, is indisputably Shyam Benegal (b. 1934), whose feature debut The Seedling (Ankur, 1974) provided a model for much of the new cinema that followed. This stylistically polished film depicts the exploitation that underlies the landlord-serf relationship in a narrative that is at once realistic and dramatically satisfying. Benegal followed with Night’s End (Nishant, 1975), The Churning (Manthan, 1976), and The Boon (Anugraham, 1977), which underscore the link between entrenched feudal power and the sexual exploitation of women.

He then delivered a sweeping and highly successful historical epic of the 1857 Sepoy rebellion in The Obsession (Junoon, 1978), and he moved even closer to the tastes of the popular audience with such spectacles as Past, Present, and Future (Trikal, 1986). Yet Benegal’s social commitment is still apparent in such theatrical features as The Essence (Susman, 1987), about corruption in the hand-loom industry in his native Telugu- speaking state of Andhra Pradesh.

In the 1990s, Benegal continued to produce important work. He returned to the realm of social comment with The Making of the Mahatma (1996), a hundred-and-fifty-minute biopic of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s political awakening during his years in South Africa and his growing commitment to the policy of passive resistance. More recently, Benegal’s Conflict (Samar, 2000) was selected as “Best Film” in the Forty-Sixth National Film Awards competition; it offers an analysis of India’s caste system in the story of a dispute over the installation of a village water pump, which self-reflexively becomes the subject of a documentary on the caste system by some Bombay filmmakers, who inadvertently plunge the village into violence. With Zuabeidaa (2001), based on the life of an ill-fated film actress; Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005), a biography of the founder of the Indian National Congress; and the comedies Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba (2010), Benegal maintained his prominence as a mainstay of so-called middle cinema.

During the 1980s, several young Marxist directors became prominent in Bengali parallel cinema, especially Goutam Ghose (b. 1950), Aparna Sen (b. 1945), and Buddhadev Dasgupta (b. 1944). Yet many observers felt at the time that India might in fact be moving toward a “middle cinema,” patterned more or less on the work of Benegal—that is, films whose political and social concerns are not at odds with audience accessibility and even entertainment. This tendency can be seen in the political thrillers of Benegal’s former cameraman Govind Nihalani (b. 1940), the dramatic work of Ramesh Sharma and Jahnu Barua (b. 1952), the fast-paced comedies of Kundan Shah (b. 1947), and the feminist films of Aruna Raje (b. 1946), one of India’s few women directors. In fact, though, India has remained, by and large, the home of the blockbuster “Bollywood” musical.

HUAC (296-299)

Blacklist (296-299)

Hollywood Ten (296-299)

Causes of B/W to Color Conversion & Widescreen Tech Development (300-306, 316-317)

Ratings System (335-337)

Night & Fog (347-349)

Andre Bazin, Cahiers du Cinema and the tenets (principles) of the French New Wave (350-356)

Background of French New Wave Directors (350-356)

“Tradition of Quality” (351)

Fellini’s Style (425-428)

Antonioni’s Psychological Realism (428-432) Features of the Spaghetti Western (441) Categories of Japanese Cinema (566-567) Kurowsawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu (570-577) Bollywood (594-597)

Satyajit Ray – Background (597-598)

Parallel Cinema (598-601)

“Japanese Cinema: Ozu’s Tatami Shot”

In particular the film's cinematography is unique and establishes Ozu as the pioneer of what we now call the tatami shot. For a tatami shot, the camera is positioned at a rather low height, imitating the viewpoint of a spectator sitting on a tatami. In Tokyo Story, we can appreciate many of these shots, for example, when Shukishi and Tomi get ready for their journey to Tokyo (4:38). The camera, placed about 90cm above the ground, remains fixed and allows us to witness an everyday scene as if we were there beside them. Tatami shots invite viewers to simply observe by recreating the position in which a person participates in a tea ceremony. In fact, since the field of vision is extremely limited, this way of filming creates a passive and contemplative mood.

With the tatami shot, Ozu denies viewers the possibility of identifying with the protagonists directly.

He transforms us into the witnesses of his characters' actions, as we see everything from a close point of view which still retains a certain distance. This feeling is increased by combining the tatami shot with the frontal shot, in which he shows us the actor's face directly, for example, when Noriko welcomes the parents-in-law after arriving in Tokyo (15:15). The protagonists direct their gaze and their words directly at us. With this, Ozu turns us into the recipient of the character's words and facial expressions. Behind such shots, there is the will to capture everything in the behavior of its protagonists without the need to take a position. The result is a lack of empathy towards the characters, something peculiar to Ozu's style. Then, in our eyes, the story becomes more natural and real by letting us enjoy the whole narrative as if we were part of it.

The magic of tatami shots is finding yourself sitting in Japan, experiencing a talk, or welcoming a relative. You feel closer to them as well as to the story itself.

A Summer at Grandpa’s Handout

Why does he do this? There are two ways to explain this. One common trope among critics and filmmakers in Taiwan is that the style of Taiwanese films is the result of the concrete conditions of filmmaking in Taiwan. Many have noted that limited equipment and budgets forced these filmmakers to use such “innovations” as natural lighting, fewer camera set-ups and, yes, even a static camera. Zhang Yi had this to say about his own films "I am most dissatisfied with how l have handled my own images. I would love for my shots to move freely about just like Bernardo Bertolucci’s and bring the audience into the deeper layers of reality. But given the present conditions of production, is this even possible?” Hou, on other hand, apparently had no desire to be a Bertolucci; he did not restrict his camera movements out of necessity, but out of conscious choice. Once again, the grandfather’s clinic played a key role, since the octogenarian doctor still lived there and was still practicing medicine when this film was in production. As a result of these logistical hassles, Hou and his crew had to work around the doctor's schedule which always included a long siesta around noon during which time the film crew had to be absolutely quiet. Those imposed siestas, with

their resonating stillness and tranquility, profoundly affected Hou. He says he fell in love with that certain atmospheric quality. Thus, for the first time he purposefully kept the camera still in an attempt to capture that feeling on film. As a result, another piece of the aesthetic puzzle fell in place, and a crucial one at that. Duration seemed to have crept up on Hou, distancing he seemed more aware of. But the static camera was almost a happy accident, except it was the accident of a director becoming ever more aware of what he was doing. Now he could apply this awareness even closer to home.

Jules et Jim

Francois Truffaut's French new-wave classic Jules and Jim, centers on a love triangle between two best friends and the woman they both love.

Each of them Jules Jim and Catherine are carefree youthful spirits full of playfulness, with Jules and Jim offering mutual respect and love, but this joyfulness gradually develops into tragedy as they are pushed to maturity through war, family, life, and relationship troubles.

Roger Ebert in his review of Francois Truffaut’s film, states that “their tragedies that they shared a magical youth and that adulthood will not and cannot accommodate it. No practical arrangement of their lives can duplicate the freedom of their early days in Paris.The men can try to come to terms with this, but Catherine cannot. And Jules and Jim is really Catherine's film.”

Roger Ebert's review is discussing how the film details the beauty of carefree youth and how as the characters grow.

Their carefree lifestyle is forced to change when responsibilities grow. The

film is influential and significant in its depiction of the complexities of a

love triangle. The foundation of the triangle being between two best friends.

Jules, an Austrian, and Jim, a Frenchman, are playful personalities who do everything together: going to the gym, having massages, visiting the local bars, activities not dissimilar to the present-day best friends.

Upon meeting Catherine alongside two other women, Jules encourages they dispose of formal titles such as sir and miss and greet by the touching of toes and feet. A playful greeting that emphasizes youthful spontaneity.

Jules and Jim clearly both feel a connection to Catherine, and upon meeting her at her apartment, Jules says to Jim in a friendly tone, something of a suggestion: to not include Catherine in his growing number of sexual endeavors. Jules, caring for Catherine and knowing that Jim has a reputation for being intimate with numerous women, but also keeping in mind his respect for his best friend, offers a friendly warning. A warning that indicates that Jules believes Catherine is someone special.

Catherine is almost the epitome of spontaneity. Mustache on her face, she walks with Jules and Jim around town, even convincing a passerby asking for a light to a cigarette, that Catherine could be a man. They plan to race across a nearby bridge only for Catherine to cheat and win. Catherine is quite unpredictable, but seemingly offers a similar playful nature to light of Jules and Jim. It's easy to see why these two young men with their cheeky personalities would feel connected to Catherine. a woman who seems to reflect them both. As a trio run to home by the coast line playing a game

that searches for traces of civilization on their walk towards a beach, making a

fun way to find litter. Jules asks if Jim would be okay if Jules were to ask her

Catherine's hand in marriage. Jules understands that they both share the same feelings for Catherine, but Jules also respects his best friend's insight and perspective. Although

Catherine doesn't initially agree to the marriage proposal, Jules suggests he will propose to her every year on her birthday, romanticizing this gesture. Exaggerating Catherine’s spontaneity is a scene where as the trio walk back from a play. Jules and Jim debating over it, Catherine out of frustration asks why Jim doesn't protest more often towards Jules, before jumping in the river.

She has attempted to divide the two with an extreme gesture. as war breaks out

this is a major turning point for Jules and Jim as they are both enlisted in opposing armies. As Jill suggests it's Jim over the telephone that he and Catherine plan to marry in his home country of Austria, he has clearly been made to enlist over there. During the war, Jules writes a letter to Catherine about how he misses her but how he also wishes not to fight Jim in battle. he openly writes about his love for Catherine but within the subtext of the scene, we understand he must love his friend Jim just as much, wishing no harm upon him. On the other side of the war, Jim shares the sentiment of not wishing to fight Jules in battle. Their friendship transcends war but unfortunately, their personalities are not quite the same as they used to be pre-war. After the war, Jules and Jim write to each other. Jim coming to visit Jules at his new home in the countryside. Jules is married to Catherine and they have a daughter called Sabine. Jules congratulates Jim on winning the war but Jim retort so he would much rather have the family life like Jules has. Jim is envious as his feelings for Catherine haven't diminished, but this idyllic family life is only idyllic on the surface.

Jules admits to Jim that Catherine has had numerous affairs, possibly in an attempt to keep the carefree nature of her youth, but instead of showing frustration, Jules has come to terms with it. Accepting he is likely not the man for Catherine. Jim still having his affections for Catherine, is later granted permission by Jules that if he wishes to marry her, he can. This marital tension is illustrated during a conversation between Jim and Jules, which is interrupted by Catherine, frustrated and argumentative about different types of French wines. Despite their young carefree loves of yesteryear, it is clear that Catherine and Jules' relationship is in a difficult place. And with Jules’ sense of respect for Jim, if his wife is to settle down with anyone else, he would clearly rather it be a best friend of his. The affair between Catherine and Jim only works for a short while.They spent an intimate night together and the next days full of laughter and games, but Jim grows jealous when Jules and Catherine play together in the bedroom above heads. Returning to Paris, Jim reconnects with an earlier girlfriend of his. She is

supportive and gives the impression of maturity of a spontaneity. Establishing this reconnection gives Jim the opportunity to reconsider his relationship with Catherine. Should he be with a woman so spontaneous or should he keep his connection with a more mature woman?

As Jim returns back to Jules’ home, Catherine and Jim attempt to try for a baby. An attempt to develop a family life he was so envious of earlier in the film. Their attempts are not successful, which places tension on their relationship. Jim returns back to Paris

and writes to Catherine that he is in disbelief about her pregnancy. The unfortunate happens, Catherine has a miscarriage. Jim back in Paris is meant by Jules and they greet each other enthusiastically. Old friends with nothing to hide. Their playful banter is still apparent when Jim teases Jules on his choice of hat, suggesting he can't

be seen in Paris with a hat like that, offering Jules one of Jim's own hats. Jules had made such after the miscarriage, Catherine had not been quite the same suffering from depression. A shadow that looms over the trio's relationship. when Jim tells Jules he wishes to marry Gilberte, Jules admires. him he even suggests Jim to be a smarter man than himself for realizing when things are over with Katherine. Katherine doesn't accept the news so easily, pulling a gun on Jim and threatening him. Months later, the trio reconnect Jules seeing Jim a few rows ahead at the cinema. Jim, reluctant to talk to Katherine, is lured into a car where she drives both of them off of a bridge killing them both. Jules is left alone attending their cremation. The narrator compares Jules and Jim’s bond to that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. From cervantes brilliant novel Don Quixote, the chaotic goal is to balance their friendship alongside a stable relationship with Katherine. This suggested comparison to Don Quixote implies the narrator's understanding that this girl, while admirable, is not always unobtainable, transforming this initially carefree playful beautiful friendship and blooming romance into a devastating tragedy.

In conclusion, Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim has a masterful work that demonstrates youthful wonder between a trio of friends, which develops into a complex love triangle. And while at first, a carefree and bohemian demeanors live on, eventually as adult life pressures the characters to accept responsibilities and to grow, preserving these same carefree attitudes becomes increasingly difficult. Catherine Jules and Jim are not bad people, but their friendships transformed into something tragic. As time expects them to move on and mature rather than preserve their youthful endeavors.

Ugetsu

So i never really considered Ugetsu a horror movie, but then again it does have supernatural elements in it, involving a ghost story, so that and the fact that it's one of the greatest films ever made, i thought it'd be appropriate to include in my halloween series. Ugetsu is a film I always wanted to talk about, and it's one that I always watch alongside Sancho the bailiff. Both are actually pretty different stories but they both have to deal with similar dramas about wartime, and its effect on the average person during feudal japan.

Both of these films were also created by the excellent director kenji mitsuguchi. So if you haven't seen ugetsu or sancho the bailiff, I don't care who you are you need to watch both of these excellent films right now. So ugetsu released in 1953.

It's technically a samurai movie just because it takes place during the 1600s in japan. Also it features samurai in it. But this one instead focuses on the peasants and just the negative effects that war and samurai have on them. Ao right in the beginning during the title screen, it tells us the setting. It takes place in early spring during the 16th century japan. This was a time period of persistent civil war it drew the country into a bit of chaos.

So right in the beginning, we see the dangers of life during the civil war period in japan. We are showing it visually instead of just being told about it. We see villages getting raided by soldiers food and people were scavenged and treated as value. Actually a scene that stood out to me was when the peasant families are trying to go to town to make trade. They come across the remnants of a boat that was raided by pirates. Fog and clouds surround them, and the fear of what could be in those waters is real. The fear is just as present as any horror film. I'll say even more so because it shows the horrors of what real people could be turned into. All it takes is a little desperation. Mitsuguchi actually changed the setting of the original story that this is based on, and he made it this time period for the film. Keep in mind that he was making this movie only six or seven years after the end of the Pacific war. At that time, Japan was economically depressed. I think this film is in some ways a way to reflect back on the very recent experiences of many ordinary japanese people at the time. I think he was pointing out some values that he feared had been lost. The point of showing a vivid picture of the japanese past is in many ways to underline just how different it is compared to what japan has become in the present.

The full title is really Ugetsu Monogatari: it means rain moon stories u is rain getsu is moon, and manigatari is an informal word for story. Mitsuguchi tries something different from the stylistic practices that made him famous in his early films in the 1930s and 40s. Here he tries a very straightforward type of storytelling, and it's mainly done in mid shot with fades to black and fades from black, signaling passing time.

While this is very simple, it owes something to hollywood cinema at the time, but it's not at all storytelling that was ripped off from hollywood. He in fact rejects many of the conventions of hollywood storytelling. You'll find that there's a few scenes that almost feel like the director wants us to pay attention to them. And that's because some of these scenes will get foreshadowed later on in the film. This is something mitsuguchi does with his other films as well.

It's incredibly paced, especially considering it's an old movie. I'll even say it's better paced than most films that are out now. You'll find yourself easily getting drawn into this world, and soon you'll just forget it's a movie. I really only felt the drag a little bit in the middle, and surprisingly, it was the scene with the ghost. I just felt that there was a little bit too much dialogue at this part, but in the end though, it's context that was needed, so i'll forgive it.

So the story follows two couples that are drawn into the life of civil war, and it basically shows how it affects them. It shows the differences in how the characters react to war. Mainly the differences between the way the woman reacts and the way the men react. The film actually doesn't have one central main character, it crosscuts between the situations of two different protagonists. We have genjiro and his wife miyagi and their child genichi, and then there's genjiro's younger brother tobey and his wife. Tobey is kind of the goofy comic relief character. He's a peasant but has his strong desire to become a samurai, which is something that was almost impossible at the time, especially for someone that was such a low class to be rising to the high class of a samurai. I like how every time he sees a samurai he'll just freak out like a little kid, and then he gets scolded by his wife and told to stick to your trade or you'll regret it.

Genjiro on the other hand has a skill in pottery, and he plans on profiting from the war by making and selling pots. It's interesting watching the strange contraptions that they had back then, and i'm sure they're 100 accurate. Especially considering how like anal mitsuguchi was about being a perfectionist and depicting the time period as authentically as possible. He'd end up doing things like making the entire cast wait an entire day just because a prop wasn't ready, and that's probably why some people who worked with him just absolutely hated him. But in the end at least he gave us some awesome films. Eventually both men achieved their dreams, but by doing so, they also lose everything. With Tobey he wanders from his wife and brother, a lot of time passes, he clumsily kills a samurai and steals the head of a foe that the samurai had killed. Turns out it was a general, and presenting this trophy to the samurai lord, he is praised and given a horse, a house, and man to follow him. it's kind of like winning the lottery at the time. Filled with pride, he brings his men for the night to a brothel, only to find that his wife was raped by soldiers after he abandoned her. And now she's become a prostitute.

The horror aspect comes into play when genjiro comes into contact with lady rakasa. First, genjuru visits a fabric shop, imagining his wife's joy when he brings her more beautiful dresses. But then lady wakasa appears, suggesting that she really likes his pottery, and that he should go to her castle. He's mesmorized by her strange beauty. At the castle, she drifts from behind screens and curtains, and regarding his pots, asks him how such beauty is created. It's implied then that he's spending a lot of time with lady wakasa. We hear him say that he never dreamed such pleasures even existed. But Genjiro should have then taken warning, especially when he heard the voice of the lady's dead father.

Lady bokassa also advises him not to bury his talents in a small village, and instead marry her. And while Genjiro's fooling around with this ghost, his wife miyagi is killed by a soldier. I felt that ultimately its central theme has to do with men chasing after their dreams, but instead of succeeding being a good thing, here, it teaches us that what we want is already in front of us. And pursuing a wild dream is just gonna lead us to losing what we have. It's definitely different from stories that just tell us to chase our dream and that's how we'll find happiness. Here, it shows us the more realistic results and basically what happens when you pursue something that maybe you aren't meant to have. And just to appreciate what you already have.

In the end, both men damage their lives and the people around them. And in some cases the damage is permanent. So Kenji mitsuguchi's ugetsu is an unforgettable and beautiful supernatural drama about the tragedy of men's ambitions.