sequence—made up of an establishing shot, long
shot, medium shot, and close-up, generally in that
order—to set the time and place of an action. The
restless rhythm of the editing is perfectly suited to
the restless mood of the story and the indecisive-
ness of the movie’s two major characters.
While the term New Wavebegan with the French,
its spirit soon spread internationally. These efforts
were significantly bolstered in many of the coun-
tries discussed below by the establishment of state-
supported filmmaking schools and film societies, as
well as the availability of lightweight filmmaking
equipment. In the United States, the New Wave
influence was noticeable early on in Arthur Penn’s
Bonnie and Clyde(1967) and recently in Wes Ander-
son’s The Royal Tenenbaums(2001) and Michel
Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(2004), to cite but three examples.
Many of the techniques pioneered by the French
New Wave filmmakers have become commonplace,
especially in today’s independent cinema, so that
Godard’s films from the early 1960s still look very
modern, and the unusually stylized treatment of
time and subjectivity in a film like Alain Resnais’s
Last Year at Marienbadremains cutting-edge to this
day, confusing and alienating many viewers used to
traditional cinematic conventions.
1947—Present: New Cinemas
in Great Britain, Europe,
and Asia
World War II, fought mainly in Europe and Asia
but involving virtually every country in the world,
was the most destructive war in history, killing
between 40 million to 50 million people, displacing
millions of others from their homes or countries,
destroying many historic cities, shattering
economies, and leaving the specter of the Holocaust
to redefine the concept of a civilized world. It was
impossible for many countries to return to normal,
even though the victory over fascism held the prom-
ise of establishing a new and more just society.
How did filmmakers react to the war? They all
knew that whatever they did with their movies, the
international landscape had changed utterly and
that they must acknowledge the horrors, postwar
challenges, and hopes for the future. For some
filmmakers, it was an opportunity to express their
nation’s identity through what we call a national
cinema. While this term is used generally to
describe the films identified by and associated with
a specific country—for example, through financing,
language, or culture—it remains a subject of
debate among film scholars and critics.
In the following pages, we differentiate between
two kinds of countries: (1) those that resumed film-
making pretty much as usual after the war, albeit
with a different perspective, audience, and set
of responsibilities (e.g., Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Russia and
the Soviet Union, Hungary, the former Czechoslova-
kia and former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and
many countries in Central and Latin America, Asia,
Africa, and the Middle East), and (2) those that
established the new wave movements we discuss
below: Great Britain, Denmark, Germany, Japan,
and China. Today, new cinemas are also emerging in
Albania, Bosnia, Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, Estonia,
Turkey, and the Czech Republic. (We emphasize the
new wave movements because they represent pock-
ets of resistance to dominant filmmaking traditions
that revitalized the cinemas of their respective
countries with a distinctive stylistic effect).
In making this simple distinction and in choos-
ing to discuss the new wave movements, we do not
overlook the profound achievements of such British
and European directors as Ingmar Bergman,
Andrzej Wajda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Satyajit
Ray, David Lean, or Federico Fellini, to name only a
few—artists whose work significantly altered the
psychological and imaginative landscape of postwar
filmmaking—or more recent directors—such as
Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Abbas Kiarostami,
or Ousmane Sembene—whose films, despite the
fact that they don’t fall within a definable move-
ment or trend, are widely recognized as modern
masterpieces.
Like the original new wave of directors in France,
each of the movements described below attempted to
(1) make a clean break with the cinematic past, (2)
inject new vitality into filmmaking, and (3) explore
cinema as a subject in itself.1947—PRESENT: NEW CINEMAS IN GREAT BRITAIN, EUROPE, AND ASIA 461