French New Wave – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism[1] and classical Hollywood cinema.[1] Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm and is an example of European art cinema.[2] Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.
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| Will Hays |
by Richard Maltby
Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Head of the School of Humanities at Flinders University. A second edition of his book Hollywood Cinema (Blackwell) was published earlier this year. Co-editor with Melvyn Stokes of a series of books on Hollywood’s audiences for the BFI, he is currently completing Reforming the Movies: A Political History of the American Cinema, 1908-1940 with Ruth Vasey.
This essay is also an introduction to a season of films entitled “Hazing the Hays Code: Hollywood’s pre-Code’ Era” programmed by the Melbourne Cinémathèque and screening in December. The author will be presenting a lecture on pre-Code Hollywood at ACMI on December 10, 6pm prior to the screening of The Public Enemy. For further articles on this season, please refer to this issue’s CTEQ: Annotations on Film.
Most people know two things about the Hays Code. One is that the bedrooms of all married couples could contain only twin beds, which had to be at least 27 inches apart. The other is that although the Code was written in 1930, it was not enforced until 1934, and that as a result, the “pre-Code cinema” of the early 1930s violated its rules with impunity in a series of “wildly unconventional films” that were “more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre” than in any other period of Hollywood’s history (1).
Neither of these things is true.
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/29/pre_code_cinema.html
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