Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
NOTES ON SOME IMPORTANT TERMS FOR FILM STUDIES
Gopa B. Caesar:
Sirk, Douglas: Another transplant from the Ufa studios, German director Douglas Sirk came to prominence in the 1950s with a series of lush melodramas such as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959). His films were rediscovered in the 1970s and acknowledged for their semiotic complexity, which enables them to function as both sentimental, visually resplendent genre pictures and radical critiques of the artificiality and hypocrisy of middle-class suburban culture.
Ray, Nicholas: Along with Sirk, Ray was the most incisive observer and critic of 1950s American culture, creating taut psychological dramas like In a Lonely Place (1950) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Embracing the new widescreen technology, Ray imbued his mise-en-scène with symbolism that points to the hollowness and restrictiveness of middle-class suburban domesticity. Talented actors such as Humphrey Bogart and James Dean ably expressed the psychological torment and moral ambiguities of Ray’s protagonists, whose rebellion against social structures and mores never quite manages to coalesce into active politics.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Kazan, Elia: One of the most successful directors of the postwar period, Kazan is known best for his collaboration with Marlon Brando, the method actor considered the greatest of his generation. However, Kazan’s legacy was forever compromised by his decision in 1952 to cooperate with HUAC and reveal the names of colleagues who were suspected communist sympathizers. Many of Kazan’s films are attempts to justify his actions at HUAC: Viva Zapata! (1952) portrays revolutionary leadership as inherently corrupt and doomed to failure, Man on a Tightrope (1953) feeds anti-communist paranoia, and On the Waterfront (1954) attempts to justify the act of informing.
Bresson, Robert: The French director Bresson emerged as a singular talent with an idiosyncratic style and strong moral vision upon the release of films such as Pickpocket (1959), Au Hasard Balthasar (1966), and Lancelot du Lac (1976). A devout Catholic, Bresson made films that represent the fragility of innocence, purity, and selflessness in a world corrupted by greed and cruelty. With an austere, minimalist visual style, Bresson expresses the moral dilemmas of his protagonists through complex sound design, novelistic narration, and restrained dialogue and acting.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Bergman, Ingmar: Throughout a prolific career in film and theater, Bergman, the son of a pastor, was interested in the impact of an alienating, modern world on human psychology and faith. In Persona (1966), Bergman uses an experimental, self-reflexive style to explore the ways in which film and other media contribute to our difficulties in recognizing material reality from illusion, self from other, eros from death. Bergman’s somber and portentous films express the agony of human existence through stillness and silence, often punctuated by moments of intense passion or despair visualized through searing, unforgettable images, such as the clock without hands in Wild Strawberries (1957) or the scene of self-mutilation in Cries and Whispers (1972).
Ray, Satyajit: Educated amid the vibrant Bengali intellectual community and influenced by Italian neorealism and the films of Jean Renoir, the Indian director Ray burst onto the international scene with the Apu trilogy (1955–1958), which chronicles a Bengali boy’s growth into adulthood. Abandoning the mythological tales and song-and-dance productions of Indian commercial cinema, Ray focused on the subtle power dynamics and intimacies of domestic life. Accused by some of failing to address India’s pressing social and political problems, Ray instead used location shooting, naturalistic acting, and long takes to convey sensitively and carefully his characters’ reactions to the events shaping their lives.
Other major directors: Robert Aldrich, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, Michael Powell, Otto Preminger, Jacques Tati.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Film History: Transitional Period (1960–1979)
By the 1960s, Hollywood was in decline, unable to keep up with the radical political and cultural developments transforming American society. European films, however, fueled by government funding of film production, achieved unprecedented levels of critical acclaim and box-office success. The sophistication and creativity of these films led to the recognition of cinema as an artistic medium, not simply a form of mass entertainment.
By comparison, Hollywood output in the early 1960s seemed old-fashioned, uninteresting, and irrelevant. Fewer and fewer studio films were profitable. Hollywood reacted by cutting costs, entering into partnerships with independent and foreign producers, and allowing greater levels of experimentation. In 1968, the decades-old Production Code was scrapped, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) began to issue movie ratings, which enabled the industry to make more daring and challenging films. These changes, along with a middle-class migration to the suburbs that left urban movie theaters in disarray, led to new genres such as blaxploitation, sexploitation, and hardcore pornography.
The political consciousness and formal innovation of the period was nowhere more dynamically represented than in the burgeoning film industries of Latin America and Africa.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Major Movements
French New Wave: The French New Wave was the most influential postwar movement. Its practitioners were loosely divided into two camps: those who had formerly been critics for the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol) and the more political “Left Bank†filmmakers (Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker). The Cahiers filmmakers combined whimsical tales of youthful rebellion and capriciousness with political and philosophical investigations of cinematic language. The Left Bank filmmakers engaged in rigorous formal experimentation to explore the relationships among cinema, memory, history, and politics. Key films include Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Weekend (1967), Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961), Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), and Marker’s La Jetée (1964).
New Italian cinema: In the 1960s, Italian directors began to deviate from the tenets of neorealism, creating autobiographical, fantastical, and mythical films that unabashedly celebrated the artistic imagination. These filmmakers turned their attention away from the urban and rural poor and toward the alienation of the cosmopolitan middle and upper classes. What was lost in political content was gained in stylistic innovation: films of the period featured groundbreaking uses of symbolic mise-en-scène, allegorical narratives, elliptical editing, and expressive cinematography. Key films include Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1959), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970).
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