Synopses & Reviews
Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood.
From Roberto Rossellini’s Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art. Championing the cause was the new “cinephile” generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty.
The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
Review
"Neupert offers brilliant analyses, whether of familiar or neglected films . . . [giving] a masterful sense of the movement, its sources, character, and its continuing influence. Essential."—Choice
Review
"Refreshingly jargon-free and full of interesting details and anecdotes, this book is a pleasure to read."—Library Journal
Review
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“A major contribution to film historical scholarship. Balio charts the fascinating careers of foreign films in the American market, complete with comprehensive details of their marketing, box-office success or failure, and reception by critics.”—Sarah Street, author of Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA '
Synopsis
The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques. A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. Jean-Pierre Melville, Alexandre Astruc, and the young Agnes Varda all offered valuable narrative lessons and cheap production models. They were followed by Roger Vadim and Louis Malle, whose sexy story lines and lively new narrative strategies helped define a marketable, youthful cinema. But Neupert demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinema--especially Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard--who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave.
A History of the French New Wave Cinema captures the dramatic impact these films made upon their release, closely examining such famous movies as The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959) and Breathless (Godard, 1960), as well as many less-studied films, including La Pointe Courte (Varda, 1955), Paris Belongs to Us (Rivette, 1960), and Le Bel Age (Kast, 1964).
Synopsis
The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques. A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—especially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard—who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave.
In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.
About the Author
Tino Balio is professor emeritus of film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and former director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. He is author of United Artists, Volume 1, 1919–1950 and Volume 2, 1951–1978 as well as Grand Design: Hollywood as Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939. He is editor of The American Film Industry and Hollywood in the Age of Television.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One: Emergence
1 Antecedents
2 Italian Neorealism
3 British Film Renaissance
Part Two: Import Trends
4 Market Dynamics
5 French Films of the 1950s
6 Japanese Films of the 1950s
7 Ingmar Bergman: The Brand
8 French New WAve
9 Angry Young Men: British New Cinema
10 Second Italian Renaissance
11 Auteurs From Outside the Epicenter
Part Three: Changing Dynamics
12 Enter Hollywood
The Aura of the New York Film Festival
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