Waves on Different Shores: France, Japan

In the early 1960s, a number of new film movements in national cinemas around the world. Inevitably called “new waves” or “new cinemas,” these movements, usually made up of young filmmakers, would challenge both the cinematic industrial structures in each of their respective nations, as well propose often radically different approaches to filmmaking and to cinematic storytelling. This course will explore three important examples of this development—the French New Wave, the Japanese New Wave and the Brazilian Cinema Novo—and detail both the commonalities among these movements (aesthetic, social, political) as well those factors which made each unique. A special concern will be the relationship of the “new waves” to simultaneous radical experiments in visual arts, theater, literature and music. The course will begin with a consideration of Roberto Rossellini’s VOYAGE TO ITALY, a watershed work between Neorealism and subsequent cinematic modernism, and will conclude with Andrei Tarkovsky’s MIRROR, described by Andras Balint Kóvacs as “the last modernist film.”