In the first half of this course, we have explored the emergence of new waves of filmmaking in a number of nations and regions. Generally speaking, these new wave movements share the following five attributes:

  1. comprise young filmmakers
  2. reject established national traditions
  3. innovate film visual and narrative style
  4. circulate internationally
  5. inspire new cinema movements

Italian Neorealism and After

  1. What was Cinecitta? How did it support Italian filmmaking before and after World War II?
  2. How did “white telephone films” embody the prewar method and spirit of filmmaking in Italy?
  3. What were some stylistic features common to neorealist films of the postwar era?
  4. How did Rome: Open City embody the neorealist aesthetic of postwar Italy?
  5. How does Los Olividados appropriate the style and youthful energy of neorealist filmmaking to make a film critical of modern institutions?

French New Wave

  1. What were some international film festivals that promoted film after World War II?
  2. What were the Cinematheque Française and Cahiers du Cinema? How did each nurture postwar film culture in France?
  3. How did improvements in “flexible” filmmaking technology—smaller cameras, reflex viewfinders, faster film stock—aid young filmmakers in the postwar era?
  4. Compare the fragmented editing of Breathless and Cléo: from 5 to 7 with the collage form found in Persona. How does each method contribute to overall style of the film?
  5. How did prime de la qualité and avance sur reciepts help create a new generation of filmmakers in France?

Old Hollywood

  1. What led to decline of attendance in the US after World War II?
  2. What was a “roadshow picture” and how did the major Hollywood studios use it to woo audiences from television? Did it work?
  3. How did the increase of foreign films to US screens, such as And God Created Woman, and of unapproved films, such as The Man with the Golden Arm, pave the way for more mature filmmaking in Hollywood in the 1960s?
  4. What was the “Production Code” and why would it have hamstrung attendance in the 1950s and 1960s?
  5. Why was making Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? available only to “Mature Audiences,” instead of releasing for general audiences, an effective release strategy?

Eastern European New Wave

  1. What was Socialist Realism and how did it reflect the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s?
  2. How did the Yalta Conference divide Eastern and Western Europe after World War II?
  3. Why were most Eastern European films detached from political meanings, usually adapting well-known literary classics for the screen?
  4. How did the use of “double language” help Eastern European filmmakers circumvent state censorship?
  5. How did Eastern European films—namely, Daisies or WR: Mysteries of the Organism—take advantage of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”)?

Imperfect and Third Cinema in Latin America

  1. What did the phrase “Third World” refer to, soon after its coinage in the 1950s?
  2. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino famously coined the phrase “Third Cinema” in the late 1960s. What did first cinema, second cinema, and third cinema reference?
  3. How did the Cuban Revolution of 1959 help establish ICAIC and the film journal Cine cubano?
  4. How does Memories of Underdevelopment use modernist editing techniques, such as flashbacks and elliptical editing, to create distance between the film viewer and the protagonist?
  5. How does the collage form of La Hora de los Hornos craft a revolutionary message?

New German Cinema

  1. How did the demise of Ufa in the 1960s lead to a neue kino in West Germany?
  2. Why did young German filmmakers declare, “Papas Kino ist tot”?
  3. What was the “Oberhausen Manifesto”?
  4. How did the West German government establish opportunities for young filmmakers to make feature films?
  5. How does the story Ali:Fear Eats the Soul reopen the scars of Nazi Germany’s past?