Scheduled film for 27 March 2009

JULES AND JIM
Friday 27 March 2009

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THIS FILM, MADE by French director Francois Truffaut one year after he made Shoot the Piano Player, put a stamp on the Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave" of French filmmakers determined to reject the literary style of films for a more cinematic presentation of the story focused on the image.
    Almost in defiance of the more traditional narrative cinema that Hollywood (and contemporary French filmmakers) had grown accustomed to, Truffaut recycles every cinematic device possible, so the film becomes (like Citizen Kane before, which the French idolized) a textbook of film style.
    The viewer must link style and content, because the two one in true art. As the American painter Ben Shahn said, "Form is the shape of content."
    In music this is clear. There is no other "meaning" to the 3 G's and the E-flat that famously begins Beethoven's Fifth Symphony except those 3 G's and E-flat in that particular rhythm with its unique assignment of instruments (orchestration). But because words refer to things outside themselves, readers tend to split form and content; as if the poetry of a Shakespeare text was somehow separate from its ideas.
    So the style of Jules and Jim is part of its content: the director's freedom in the cinematic devices used suggests the freedom Catherine, Jules, and Jim live in the film. In the same way, an action sequence is edited in shorter shots than a dialogue sequence, as in Before Sunrise.
    This film also gives the student the chance to study the auteur theory. This theory assumes that a director does not merely direct actors without his or her own personal vision. Rather, every good director (that is, an "auteur" or real "author" of the film) has a personal vision, which shows in the final film.
    We recognize this as true in other arts such as music, literature, and even pop music. Hemingway has a point of view about life which shows in all his novels (the stoic individual, for example). Dickens' outrage over social injustice is obvious in all his fiction. The French painter, Renoir, is in love with light no matter what he paints. Frank Sinatra put his personal stamp on songs that many others have also sung, but with different vocals and arrangements revealing their different personalities.
    Therefore one should find the same signature or personality in a good director's films, even if he directs projects given to him by the studio or even if he didn't write the screenplay. An Orson Welles film adaptation of Shakespeare is as much Welles as it is Shakespeare (perhaps more so!).
    So students might want to discuss relationships of style and content in the two Truffaut films assigned so far in this class.

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