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who in the late 1940s and early '50s launched
a series of wildly publicised hearings into
alleged Communist infiltration and subversion
of the motion picture industry. The committee’s
goal was to eradicate what they perceived
as emerging left wing liberalism and
radical propaganda contained within American
movies. A group known as the Hollywood Ten
(which included screenwriters Dalton Trumbo
and Alvah Bessie), when called before the
committee, based their defence on the First
Amendment-freedom of speech. Furthermore,
they refused to reveal the names of those in the
industry with ties to the Communist party and
as a consequence, all ten were blacklisted and
sent to prison. HUAC’s effect on Hollywood was
profound; literally suffocating any social criticism
or comments being expressed onscreen, which
further removed American movie narrative and
subjects from real life social issues.
Although US movie theatre attendance was
falling year on year, the popularity of “urban
arthouses”– that screened European films –
increased substantially during the 1950s and
'60s. The immediate post-war Italian cinema
had introduced a film movement that their
filmmakers called neo-realism. Adopting quasi-
documentary techniques, using the natural light
of location shooting and casting non-actors
instead of stars as working class protagonists,
their films captured the hardships of everyday
life in a war shattered nation.
Films such as Roberto Rossellini’s
Rome,
Open City
(1945), Vittorio De Sica’s
The
Bicycle Thief
and Luchino Visconti’s
The Earth
Trembles
(both 1948) would permanently change
the European rules of filmmaking.
Many aspiring and soon-to-be
film directors were fascinated by
this refreshing post-war Italian
aesthetic, which brought together
an engaging narrative technique
and the real social issues of
poverty and unemployment.
None more so than a community
of French film critics writing
for the film journal
Cahiers du
cinema
(translated as Notebooks
on Cinema).
These cinephiles' (movie lovers) magazine
articles vilified the traditional French film
industry’s insistence on producing old fashioned
historical costume dramas and literary
adaptations, describing them as artificial,
meaningless and out of touch with modern
life. Following the lead of the Italian neo-realist
filmmakers, three of these
critics – Francois Truffaut,
Jean Luc Goddard and Claude
Chabrol – became amateur
film directors, inventing novel
ways to inexpensively fund and
shoot their movies. Their films
were primarily about French
youth set in Paris, and owed
more to documentary style and
television shooting methods
than mainstream commercial
cinema. Shot principally on
location with smaller production
crews, unknown actors (who were encouraged
to improvise their lines), and the use of portable
camera equipment set up in the trunk of a car
or hand-held on the back of a
motorcycle, these filmmakers
brought a refreshing and
revolutionary simplicity to
their movies. Films such as
Le
Beau Serge, Les Cousins, The
400 Blows, Breathless
and
the many others that followed
became known as
Nouvelle
Vague
(The French New Wave)
– one of the most significant
and influential film movements
in the history of cinema.
By the early 1960s the European renaissance
in film had gained international fame via
various esteemed film festivals and became
extremely popular with the youthful American
arthouse audiences. The French New Wave
films encountered some censorship difficulties
when imported to the US, particularly those
with an adult sexual theme. The Catholic Legion
had always equated onscreen sex with sin and
deemed that French films that contained realistic
love scenes were far too explicit for American
audiences. However, the Legion and the Motion
Picture Association of America censorship only
applied to mainstream US motion pictures,
and although they vehemently condemned these
European movies, neither organisation had the
power to ban them outright
when shown in privately owned
theatres.
Meanwhile, the pressure
remained on the American film
industry to show social and
cultural responsibility within their
movie productions. But as early
as the mid 1950s, a few of the
old guard Hollywood filmmakers
had begun to rebel against
the strict and outdated
censorship controls they
had to work under. There
were also a group of young American movie
fanatics studying film as an art form at USC and
UCLA, who were fast becoming keen advocates
of the innovative European cinema. Moreover,
following graduation, these talented soon-to-
be filmmakers would totally dismantle the old
studio system of making films by adopting the
style, themes and modes of production of the
French New Wave. And, as a consequence,
they would go on to write and direct some of
the most thematically challenging movies ever to
have come out of Hollywood.
To be continued...
FEATURE
EXTRAS
Quo Vadis
Luchino Visconti shooting
La Terra trema/The
Earth Trembles
Francois
Truffaut
filming on
the streets of
Paris with the
camera set
up in a motor
vehicle
A scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s
Breathless
(1960)
with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg
Our fear of what
censors will do
keeps us from
portraying life
as it really is