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It is hard to overstate how much Godard changed cinema, even in America. If you don’t believe me check for yourself. Open the best picture nominees between 55’-

It is hard to overstate how much Godard changed cinema, even in America. If you don’t believe me check for yourself. Open the best picture nominees between 55’-65’ and watch their trailers. Films like Marty/On the waterfront/12 angry men/To kill a mockingbird/The Caine Mutiny/Sweet smell of success is what movies were like in the late 50s. The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. Movie shots followed strict guidelines and the creative head of the movie was the producer while the director was akin to a contractor, someone hired to film the scenes. Starting in the mid 60s there was a radical shift, topping the nominations we have films like Five Easy Pieces, The French Connection, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Deer Hunter, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver etc. Actors would act and behave like normal everyday people facing everyday problems. The new Archetype is the Anti-Hero, someone with flaws/vices in their character, someone that viewers can relate to. We see the rise of the director as the auteur, the creative master of a film. Every known filmaking rule is being tested to it’s limits and broken by young experimenting directors. The catalyst for this change was the French New Wave, a group of young filmmakers tired of the old style of cinema wanting to do films about their own life and experiences. The poster boy for the New Wave was Jean-Luc Godard starting this revolution with his 1960 film Breathless.

wellthisisgreat 4y ago
Cahieurs du Cinema crew were famously obsessed with film noir and american directors who have been pushing doom and gloom ever since the depression.
- paganel 4y ago
  For what it’s worth they also loved Lubitsch, so it was not all doom and gloom for them.
kome 4y ago
Italian Neo-realism predates French New Wave.
- klik99 4y ago
  True, but I believe italian neorealism didn't have international reach until fellini - outside of influencing french new wave which went on to popularize (within the art community at least) those ideas. French New Wave also paired it with new editing and cinematography techniques that made it all work together. Edit: I had originally prefaced this with "I'm not a scholar" but forgot to readd it - the responses below invalidate most of what I said, but leaving the comment so their responses make sense - though I still stand by the lesser version of what I said - that Godard had a bigger impact on American cinema than pre-Fellini Italian Neorealism, and that parts of italian film influenced Godard.
  - l33tbro 4y ago
    The French New Wave were all too different to generalise like this. Godard and Rohmer (or Resnais) could't be more different really. It was actually the previous generation of French directors that they were all reacting against - who were making somewhat pretentious literary adaptation films. You can read about it in Truffaut's 1954 essay 'A certain tendency in the french cinema'. Neorealism was actually a fairly minor influence - as none of the new wave directors were social realists. But older, maverick French directors like Bresson and Melville were much more influential, as it was their freewheeling sensibility which united all the new wave directors and sent them hurtling off in different directions.
    - klik99 4y ago
      Yeah, it's hard to talk about French New Wave as a cohesive set, since it was so reactionary - I still see influences from earlier italian neorealism in Godard, in the street view slice of life shots and focus on regular people throughout Breathless
  - carlob 4y ago
    Not sure I agree De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine) won a Honorary Academy Award in 1947, which then became the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. In other words it was so influential that it ended up defining its own category at the Oscars.
pavlov 4y ago
IMO the success of "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay) marks the moment when the New Wave truly hit Hollywood. Although set in New York, it owes a lot more to Godard and other Europeans than American movies of the past.
- erichocean 4y ago
  > "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay) That was the first time people in Hollywood truly saw themselves represented on screen.
entropicgravity 4y ago
The Deer Hunter. A great movie I will never watch a second time. Too much reality.
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  The Deer Hunter is also a great example of how movies have changed. I enjoyed the movie but it's just sooooooooo.... daamn.... slooooooooow. Nothing happens for the first hour. That doesn't make it bad, but it goes to show - audiences in 1978 must have had very long attention spans. I can't imagine such a glacially slow movie being a hit if it came out today, when the average person can't pay attention to anything longer than a TikTok video (and even that needs to be played on double speed.) People's brains have changed.
  - smcin 4y ago
    Glacially slow, a lot of existential brooding and inner conflict. Curious if Godard was never considered to direct 'Dune', seems like his sort of thing, he might have done a good job.
    - graderjs 4y ago
      What, you can't spend an hour just watching someone else's creation? Your leisure free time's too important? You gotta quick-flick-swipe through endless new distractions on the web? C'mon. Just watch an old film. Once can't hurt. Don't apply the modern bullshit standards to the past. Alphaville. Worth a watch. Not everything has to be what you expect. Be confused. Be challenged. At least then you know someone's not making it trying to push your buttons and manipulate you. Maybe you just need to get in the moment. There's more entropy and information in something unexpected. And how is there not something unexpected to find, something new, in even the slowest oldest film? Just watch it with focused awareness. The quality of your attention determines the quality of your experience. :P ;) xx ;p
      - mikepurvis 4y ago
        There's a difference between someone's personal experience/capabilities and making observations about the broader cultural appeal of a thing. I can still put in the personal effort to read Charlotte Bronte or watch North By Northwest and take on the appropriate context required to understand that these are landmark works for their era, while simultaneously understanding that they have limited appeal to a general modern audience.
slibhb 4y ago
> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. Movie shots followed strict guidelines and the creative head of the movie was the producer while the director was akin to a contractor, someone hired to film the scenes. 12 Angry Men and especially Sweet Smell of Success are not good examples of this.
- mc32 4y ago
  And for me, I miss some of that straightforward cinema today. Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters. Everything is a blockbuster and a franchise.
  - nyokodo 4y ago
    > Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters. Or antiheroes, or love triangles, or…
    - mc32 4y ago
      You know, ketchup[1] in the right amount can do wonders but slather it everywhere and it’s the delight of a four year old, but it’s really not the way it should be experienced. [1] pick your condiment of choice.
    - Jimajesty 4y ago
      When a movie has a love story that doesn't involve a love-triangle or infidelity I breath a palpable sigh of relief. Realistic or not, does all romance have to involve competition or deception?
      - mc32 4y ago
        Cinema instead of being a reflection on society is more a mirror of itself. (look at Weinstein/Polanski and people like them in cinema and how they were treated until they could no more --look at their compasses).
jhbadger 4y ago
Film Noir (which inspired Godard a lot; his 1965 film Alphaville is basically an homage/parody of it) had many of these traits (realistic dialogue, protagonists who weren't 100% good or even antiheroes, endings where the the good guys don't win) -- look at 1940s/1950s movies with Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum.
- smcin 4y ago
  Specifically, the subgenre Future Noir. See 'How Alphaville (1965) Gave Us Blade Runner (1982) And The Matrix (1999)' [1] [1] https://nerdist.com/article/alphaville-gave-us-blade-runner-matrix/ https://nerdist.com/article/alphaville-gave-us-blade-runner-...
  - anthk 4y ago
    Future noir it's just cyberpunk since its conception. Blade Runner it's film noir in the future, and Neuromancer it's a hardboiled mistery book with computers. It has sense, a lot of pulp writers wrote both mystery and sci-fi booklets under diferent aliases, and a lot of plots were recycled by changing the setting.
- mzs 4y ago
  Yep, I immediately thought of "SUNSET BLVD." as a counter example. Even "The 400 Blows" predates Godard in French New-Wave.
1980phipsi 4y ago
Marty had pompous acting/writing? Seriously? How is Brando in "On the waterfront" all that different from Brando in "The Godfather"?
spywaregorilla 4y ago
> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. To be fair, they were literally lifting from theater talent that was trained to do this
photochemsyn 4y ago
1955-1965 could be described as Hollywood's McCarthyist era, characterized by Cold War hysteria, the blacklisting of anyone and anything even vaguely associated with Communism, the end of film noir, etc. French cinema didn't go that way, another important director of the period was Jean-Pierre Melville. https://www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-essentials-the-10-greatest-jean-pierre-melville-films-260554/ https://www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-essentials-the-10-grea...
WalterBright 4y ago
But wasn't this inevitable given the declining cost of movie cameras? After all, I grew up when taking a photograph cost a dollar (including printing). This meant one was very parsimonious that the picture would be worth it. I still have trouble shaking that off when taking pictures with my phone, though I use the phone for all kinds of things I never would have considered before. Such as taking a photo of the back of my head to check on a mole that I can't see in a mirror. Or when I mail a package to someone, I'll text a quick photo of the receipt with the tracking number on it. Or photograph something so I can enlarge it, i.e. use it as a magnifying glass. (Yes, I've watched Breathless. I thought it was rather dull.)
pnathan 4y ago
> . The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. I confess, I rather prefer that approach. Really don't like anti-heros and villains as protagonists.
cm2187 4y ago
It's hard to be more pompeous and recitative than a godard film. Reminds me of a joke from french comedian Desproges describing the parisian artistic crowd "who would rather die than to be more than 12 having understood the last Godard movie".
- aerovistae 4y ago
  "recitative" - great word, I would have never thought to use it.
Emma_Goldman 4y ago
This is just wildly exaggerated. Italian neo-realism, British kitchen sink dramas and the emergence (in France) of vérité cinema did just as much, if not more, to contribute to the refocusing of cinema on normal, working people.
bobbiechen 4y ago
>The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. I thought a big part of this was the Hays Code, which forced (voluntarily adopted by studios) certain standards of morality for filmmakers: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheHaysCode https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheHaysCo...

wellthisisgreat 4y ago

Cahieurs du Cinema crew were famously obsessed with film noir and american directors who have been pushing doom and gloom ever since the depression.

paganel 4y ago
For what it’s worth they also loved Lubitsch, so it was not all doom and gloom for them.

kome 4y ago

Italian Neo-realism predates French New Wave.

klik99 4y ago
True, but I believe italian neorealism didn't have international reach until fellini - outside of influencing french new wave which went on to popularize (within the art community at least) those ideas. French New Wave also paired it with new editing and cinematography techniques that made it all work together. Edit: I had originally prefaced this with "I'm not a scholar" but forgot to readd it - the responses below invalidate most of what I said, but leaving the comment so their responses make sense - though I still stand by the lesser version of what I said - that Godard had a bigger impact on American cinema than pre-Fellini Italian Neorealism, and that parts of italian film influenced Godard.
- l33tbro 4y ago
  The French New Wave were all too different to generalise like this. Godard and Rohmer (or Resnais) could't be more different really. It was actually the previous generation of French directors that they were all reacting against - who were making somewhat pretentious literary adaptation films. You can read about it in Truffaut's 1954 essay 'A certain tendency in the french cinema'. Neorealism was actually a fairly minor influence - as none of the new wave directors were social realists. But older, maverick French directors like Bresson and Melville were much more influential, as it was their freewheeling sensibility which united all the new wave directors and sent them hurtling off in different directions.
  - klik99 4y ago
    Yeah, it's hard to talk about French New Wave as a cohesive set, since it was so reactionary - I still see influences from earlier italian neorealism in Godard, in the street view slice of life shots and focus on regular people throughout Breathless
- carlob 4y ago
  Not sure I agree De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine) won a Honorary Academy Award in 1947, which then became the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. In other words it was so influential that it ended up defining its own category at the Oscars.

pavlov 4y ago

IMO the success of "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay) marks the moment when the New Wave truly hit Hollywood. Although set in New York, it owes a lot more to Godard and other Europeans than American movies of the past.

erichocean 4y ago
> "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay) That was the first time people in Hollywood truly saw themselves represented on screen.

entropicgravity 4y ago

The Deer Hunter. A great movie I will never watch a second time. Too much reality.

whoooooo123 4y ago
The Deer Hunter is also a great example of how movies have changed. I enjoyed the movie but it's just sooooooooo.... daamn.... slooooooooow. Nothing happens for the first hour. That doesn't make it bad, but it goes to show - audiences in 1978 must have had very long attention spans. I can't imagine such a glacially slow movie being a hit if it came out today, when the average person can't pay attention to anything longer than a TikTok video (and even that needs to be played on double speed.) People's brains have changed.
- smcin 4y ago
  Glacially slow, a lot of existential brooding and inner conflict. Curious if Godard was never considered to direct 'Dune', seems like his sort of thing, he might have done a good job.
  - graderjs 4y ago
    What, you can't spend an hour just watching someone else's creation? Your leisure free time's too important? You gotta quick-flick-swipe through endless new distractions on the web? C'mon. Just watch an old film. Once can't hurt. Don't apply the modern bullshit standards to the past. Alphaville. Worth a watch. Not everything has to be what you expect. Be confused. Be challenged. At least then you know someone's not making it trying to push your buttons and manipulate you. Maybe you just need to get in the moment. There's more entropy and information in something unexpected. And how is there not something unexpected to find, something new, in even the slowest oldest film? Just watch it with focused awareness. The quality of your attention determines the quality of your experience. :P ;) xx ;p
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      There's a difference between someone's personal experience/capabilities and making observations about the broader cultural appeal of a thing. I can still put in the personal effort to read Charlotte Bronte or watch North By Northwest and take on the appropriate context required to understand that these are landmark works for their era, while simultaneously understanding that they have limited appeal to a general modern audience.

slibhb 4y ago

> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. Movie shots followed strict guidelines and the creative head of the movie was the producer while the director was akin to a contractor, someone hired to film the scenes. 12 Angry Men and especially Sweet Smell of Success are not good examples of this.

mc32 4y ago
And for me, I miss some of that straightforward cinema today. Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters. Everything is a blockbuster and a franchise.
- nyokodo 4y ago
  > Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters. Or antiheroes, or love triangles, or…
  - mc32 4y ago
    You know, ketchup[1] in the right amount can do wonders but slather it everywhere and it’s the delight of a four year old, but it’s really not the way it should be experienced. [1] pick your condiment of choice.
  - Jimajesty 4y ago
    When a movie has a love story that doesn't involve a love-triangle or infidelity I breath a palpable sigh of relief. Realistic or not, does all romance have to involve competition or deception?
    - mc32 4y ago
      Cinema instead of being a reflection on society is more a mirror of itself. (look at Weinstein/Polanski and people like them in cinema and how they were treated until they could no more --look at their compasses).

jhbadger 4y ago

Film Noir (which inspired Godard a lot; his 1965 film Alphaville is basically an homage/parody of it) had many of these traits (realistic dialogue, protagonists who weren't 100% good or even antiheroes, endings where the the good guys don't win) -- look at 1940s/1950s movies with Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum.

smcin 4y ago
Specifically, the subgenre Future Noir. See 'How Alphaville (1965) Gave Us Blade Runner (1982) And The Matrix (1999)' [1] [1] https://nerdist.com/article/alphaville-gave-us-blade-runner-matrix/ https://nerdist.com/article/alphaville-gave-us-blade-runner-...
- anthk 4y ago
  Future noir it's just cyberpunk since its conception. Blade Runner it's film noir in the future, and Neuromancer it's a hardboiled mistery book with computers. It has sense, a lot of pulp writers wrote both mystery and sci-fi booklets under diferent aliases, and a lot of plots were recycled by changing the setting.
mzs 4y ago
Yep, I immediately thought of "SUNSET BLVD." as a counter example. Even "The 400 Blows" predates Godard in French New-Wave.

1980phipsi 4y ago

Marty had pompous acting/writing? Seriously? How is Brando in "On the waterfront" all that different from Brando in "The Godfather"?

spywaregorilla 4y ago

> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. To be fair, they were literally lifting from theater talent that was trained to do this

photochemsyn 4y ago

1955-1965 could be described as Hollywood's McCarthyist era, characterized by Cold War hysteria, the blacklisting of anyone and anything even vaguely associated with Communism, the end of film noir, etc. French cinema didn't go that way, another important director of the period was Jean-Pierre Melville. https://www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-essentials-the-10-greatest-jean-pierre-melville-films-260554/ https://www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-essentials-the-10-grea...

WalterBright 4y ago

But wasn't this inevitable given the declining cost of movie cameras? After all, I grew up when taking a photograph cost a dollar (including printing). This meant one was very parsimonious that the picture would be worth it. I still have trouble shaking that off when taking pictures with my phone, though I use the phone for all kinds of things I never would have considered before. Such as taking a photo of the back of my head to check on a mole that I can't see in a mirror. Or when I mail a package to someone, I'll text a quick photo of the receipt with the tracking number on it. Or photograph something so I can enlarge it, i.e. use it as a magnifying glass. (Yes, I've watched Breathless. I thought it was rather dull.)

pnathan 4y ago

> . The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. I confess, I rather prefer that approach. Really don't like anti-heros and villains as protagonists.

cm2187 4y ago

It's hard to be more pompeous and recitative than a godard film. Reminds me of a joke from french comedian Desproges describing the parisian artistic crowd "who would rather die than to be more than 12 having understood the last Godard movie".

aerovistae 4y ago
"recitative" - great word, I would have never thought to use it.

Emma_Goldman 4y ago

This is just wildly exaggerated. Italian neo-realism, British kitchen sink dramas and the emergence (in France) of vérité cinema did just as much, if not more, to contribute to the refocusing of cinema on normal, working people.

bobbiechen 4y ago

>The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. I thought a big part of this was the Hays Code, which forced (voluntarily adopted by studios) certain standards of morality for filmmakers: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheHaysCode https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheHaysCo...