'400 Blows' to hit French new wave at Teater Utan Kayu

JAKARTA (JP): Franois Truffaut was only 27 years old when he directed 400 Blows, a lyrical but wholly unsentimental account of an adolescent delinquent, shot on location in Paris. And it won the Best Direction award at Cannes in the year of its release, as well as the New York Critics award for Best Foreign Language film.

400 Blows (1959) is to open the French New Wave Film Weekend at Teater Utan Kayu, East Jakarta, on Friday at 4:30 p.m. For three days, Teater Utan Kayu will be showing the works of Franois Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard.

Rayya Makarim, film curator of Teater Utan Kayu, said the theoretical justification for the French New Wave cinema came from the film critic Alexandre Astruc (b. 1923). Astruc's notion was to break away from the tyranny of narrative in order to evolve a new form of audiovisual language. This would permit the cinema "to become a means of expression as supple and subtle as that of written language" and would therefore accord filmmakers the status of authors, or auteurs.

Astruc was succeeded as a theorist by the vastly influential journal Cahiers du cinma (Cinema notebooks) founded in 1951 by Andri Bazin (1918-1958) and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (b. 1920), which gathered about it a group of young critics: Franois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer (who were to become the major directors of the New Wave).

These young men were film lovers. They had grown up in the postwar years watching great American films (many available for the first time since the German occupation ended) as well as classical French films at the film archive and public theater, the amazing Cinmathque Franaise in Paris. It was founded in 1936 by Georges Franju and Henri Langlois to promote cinema study and cinema culture in France and throughout the world.

Under Langlois' tutelage, these young men came to love film and desperately wanted to become filmmakers themselves. However, they found French commercial cinema inaccessible to them. So, since they knew more about film than any other generation in history, based on experience of actual viewing, they became critics and theorists instead. But soon enough the critics were able to partially vindicate the auteur theory by becoming filmmakers themselves and practicing it, according to Rayya.

"The first films of the nouvelle vague were independently produced dramatic shorts. However, 1959 was the annus mirabilis for the New Wave because in that year three of the major figures of the movement released their first features," she said.

Two other important films of 1959 were Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and Resnais' Hiroshima, mon amour.

Teater Utan Kayu is scheduled to present six New Wave films. Two films will be shown each day.

Following the screening of 400 Blows, Teater Utan Kayu will present Alan Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) at 7 p.m. It was hailed as one of the world's greatest documentaries. A film on Nazi concentration camps and a devastating record of man's inhumanity to man. Resnais weaves contemporary images of the abandoned Auschwitz Camp with newsreel footage of the atrocities that occurred there. Juxtaposing color and black-and-white film, Resnais' film brings the horror of the Holocaust to the present.

Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (Saturday, 4:30 p.m.) was written by Godard after a story by Truffaut, shot in four weeks for less than US$90,000. Modeled on the American gangster film, Breathless is about an amoral young thug on the run who is finally betrayed to the police by his American girlfriend. This film contains virtually every major technical characteristic of the New Wave film. These include use of shaky handheld 35mm camera shots, location shooting, natural lighting, improvised plot and dialog, and direct sound recording on location.

The Man Who Loved Women (Truffaut, 1977) will be shown on Saturday at 7 p.m. It is about Bertrand who worships the feminine spirit -- the idea of woman. His soul is tender and his women are enchanting, but for Bertrand, fidelity is impossible. In this wise look at Bertrand's conquests and his psyche, Truffaut neither condemns nor glorifies him, for what could be so worthy a subject of obsession as women?

Resnais' Hiroshima, mon amour (Sunday, 2 p.m.) examines the relationship between time and memory in the context of a terrible atrocity. With a brilliant script by the novelist Marguerite Duras, the film is about an intense relationship between a French actress and a Japanese architect, in the course of which both recall their memories of the past war in Asia and Europe. Resnais maintains the counterpoint between past and present by continuously shifting narrative modes from objective to subjective, in several extraordinary sequences, by combining dramatic footage of the couple making love with documentary footage of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.

It won the New York Critics award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1960.

The last film to be shown is Godard's My Life to Live (Sunday, 18 April, 4:30 p.m.). The 1962s movie is about a young mother who leaves her family behind to pursue an acting career but instead slips into a life of prostitution.

Following this will be a discussion on the three directors and the New Wave movement in general on Sunday at 7 p.m.