New wave short film:

This video is my finished New wave short film, shot in Birmingham using a range of different new wave editing and shot techniques. For this finished piece, I decided to add in non-diegetic sound so that I didn't have to worry about the natural sound picked up by the camera and, in addition, the use of music enabled me to figure out more structure of where I was going to place my jump cuts and other new wave style edits. 

Although I am happy with how the overall appearance of the video came out and the way in which it presents/uses a variety of new wave editing techniques, I feel as though it turned out to be more of a music video than a new wave short film. This is because of how the jumps cuts and colour overlays match up almost perfectly with each of the beats or changes in music - I think that the lack of narrative also makes this video look a great deal more like a music video that an a contextual exploration of the new wave and the ways in which it challenged and changed film making through its rule breaking and lack of exposition for its audience. 

In addition, I feel as though rather than using the same editing techniques throughout the video, it would have made a stronger example/had a stronger link to the new wave cinema if there had have been a wider range of techniques (both editing and narrative/content wise) used. The ways in which I used jump cuts could also have been more effective if I had made the transitions between scenes/locations more sporadic and disjointed as it would have forced the audience to be aware that they are watching a video/short film - fitting the aim for new wave texts more. 

My choice of music for this new wave short film, I feel, works quite well as it does not detract from the content or footage being shown on the screen. The lyrics of the song do not fully match up/reflect the "narrative" of the film as well, meaning that there is a further reflection of the new wave style to break normal film text conventions and create an obscure final product. 

Dasies (1966):

The 1966 new wave film Dasies, directed by Vera Chytilova, is a very obscure and controversial text in its portrayal of women who seemingly have no purpose to their lives and export the manners and kindness/love and admiration so that they can eat or dine and continue to live their care free lives. This text is known to be a strong example of surrealist cinema and coming from a director who's won awards and respect for producing feminist works its a very strange and confusing text. 

The narrative of the text has been encoded with various creative and almost hypnotic or confusing types of editing, including overlaying black and white clips of film with reds, blues and occasionally even a rainbow assortment of colour over top. These outcomes were often due to the experimentation that the films editor did on the reels of footage, occasionally the colours and effects weren't intended but they decided to keep them in the finished text as they ended up looking creative and interesting when spliced together during production. 


Bibliography:
 HAMES, P (2005) ) The Czechoslovak New Wave. Second Edition. London: Wallflower Press

 https://screenproject1400.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/vera-chytilovas-daisies-czechoslovakia-1966/

New wave film - Rough cut:

This is my first draft/rough cut of my new wave short film, including no narrative or sound. I chose to make this so that I could work out the clips that I wanted to use in my film and the different types of editing techniques I will use (mainly the jump cuts).

New Wave Design Brief:

Having researched range of new waves and beginning to analyse three Czech new wave texts, I have chosen that when creating my own short new wave film I will try to draw upon a variety of techniques from a range of new wave films and follow the new wave idea/concept of breaking the formulaic Hollywood rules for film making- mainly the most common conventions such as: jump cuts, colour overlays, lack of narrative and obscure camera movements. I am going to keep the length of my short film around 3-5 minutes long as I think that will give me ample time to exercise a range of new wave techniques without dragging on too long. 

My plan is to compile a wide variety of shots from a large number of locations that I visit in the Birmingham city area. This should make it easy for me to edit in numerous  new wave techniques such as jump cuts and colour overlays. I aim to use mainly, if not completely, non-diegetic in my short film so that I don’t have to worry about the diegetic sound picked up by the camera when filming around Birmingham.  The use of putting the film to music means that I can add some structure to the jumps cuts that I put in as I can aline them with beats/changes in the song. 

For lighting and camera settings, I will be using natural (and unpredictable) lighting and keeping the footage hand held - fitting in with the new wave aim to break typical Hollywood film making conventions and rules.  I am going to try to keep the exposure correct, however, I feel as though changing the shutter speed could mean that the overall effect of the footage and video could be more creative and obscure. In terms of shot types, I’m going to try and use a wide variety of different types of camera shots and angels, meaning that the final cut of the film will have numerous different  shots and views rather than just one single camera shot/angle. 

Czech new wave - historical/social context:

Czechoslovakia in the 1940s was suffering the impact and aftermath of the second world war, meaning that there was a sudden influx in films being produced - although the control of the Soviet Union over the Czech government meant that all media content had to through public censorship checks before they could be fully released. During this time the Czech approach to society and creativity was forced to disappear and was replaced by the soviet cultural policies of the SU, however, in the following years Czechoslovak started to gain recognition and the Czech film industry was given its first Academy Award (for A Shop on Main Street (1965) directed by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos). (HAMES, 2005)

Surrealism was a great influence to how the Czech film makers encoded, directed and produced their texts. (OWENS, 2011)

References:
 Hames, P. (2005) The Czechoslovak New Wave. Second Edition. London: Wallflower Press

 Owens, J. (2011) Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovakian cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties. New York: Berghahn Books

 http://www.newwavefilm.com/international/czech-new-wave.shtml

Czech New Wave texts:



Into - For my contextual studies essay, I will be exploring Czechoslovakian new wave cinema and the obscure ways in which the texts are constructed while reflecting the society of the time. Through my research, I will also be looking at the impact that the society and political state had on the movement and Czechoslovakian cinema in general.

The three Czechoslovakian new wave texts that I have chosen to focus on particularly are: Dasies (1966), The Firemen's Ball (1967) and Valerie and her Week of Wonders (1970). I have chosen these texts because I think that they are some of the most interesting and obscure texts of the Czech new wave movement. 

Czech new wave:

As previously mentioned, the main influence for the Czech new wave was the political and creative freedom that they were given towards the end of 1960s, liberating film makers and other artist and allowing them to create works which contained controversial imagery and spoke about/mentioned taboo topics - before this liberation, all texts (from newspapers and radio to television and cultural event organisation) had to be sent through the public domain before publishing. 

Lasting from the 1960s till the early 1970s, a great deal of creative and obscure texts, including films, were produced and displayed for the public and creators enjoyment. Some of the major figures of the Czech new wave movement were: Milos Forman - who produced one of the first Czech new wave texts that helped launch the movement, Milan Kundera, Vera Chytilova and directing the director team of Jan Kadar and Elmar Clos - who ended up wining Czechoslovakia's first Oscar in 1965 for the film A Shop on the High Street. 

History of New Wave/The French New Wave:

The French new wave is the style of film making that broke Hollywoods rules and inspired a new way of film making that has carried through to the present day. As an artistic movement that changed the way Hollywood saw film making - choosing to use natural environments rather than studio sets - it gave the directors a great deal more freedom when it came to shooting their films and has been remembered as a great influence much like cubism and surrealism. This style of film making meant that the craft was opened up to many young, aspiring film makers and other amateurs - the French new wave was a cultural revolution. 

The new wave movement showed and reflected the change in lifestyle that was happening during the 1960s and how society was evolving. It took normal peoples lives and put them into cinema, being centred around young people, youth and a something new/a new life. 

Investigating different types of new wave:

Although each new wave style has the same goals and concept, there are slight differences between them - this was due to them all being strongly influenced by the society of the country in that time period. In Czechoslovakian New wave, the main influence was the political liberation that was introduced in the 1960s giving film makers and other artist the freedom to create work with a more controversial twist and about taboo topics. This new freedom lead to the Czech new wave film makers being a great deal more creative and making very obscure, and often indecipherable texts. The Czech new wave movement lasted from 1962 through to the early 1970s meaning that a large amount of film texts were created and produced during this time. 


The Hong Kong new wave movement happened a little later than the new waves from places like France and America, taking place in the late 1970s to well into the 80s. The greatest influence for this new wave style was the western influence that the Chinese directors had and the western-style education given to them through their lives. This lead to Hong Kong new wave film makers creating texts that chose to be stylistically incoherent - meaning that there was a clear distinction between the new filmmakers of the era and the older ones.


French new wave was the spark that egnited an explosion of new, creative styles of film making. Taking place from the late 1950s through to the early 70s, the french new wave movement produced a very large number of films which were influenced by the directors and their personal lives/experiences. Due to the french new wave being the first of its kind and sparking such a massive and memorable change, films like Breathless (1960) and The 400 Blows (1959) have been remembered for all their new, creative and interesting was of film making.

New Wave Cinema:

The new wave style of film making was created in the 1960s as an answer to the repetitive and formulaic structure to Hollywood films. New wave cinema, pioneered by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, was designed and created to break the rules and create something completely different and a new experience, which audiences loved. New wave film making is recognised as freeing the way that films were made - it is profound for the use of natural footage out on the streets as opposed to using studios or fixed sets and is enduring, much like cubism and surrealism. 

There are various different types of new wave cinema, due to it being a wide spread film making style across various countries. Some of these include: French New Wave, American New Wave, Hong Kong New Wave and Czech New Wave. Some of the notable conventions for new wave cinema are the following:
 - They included mistakes in the final film
 - Handheld camera
 - Hidden cameras in natural environments (e.g. streets and buildings - meaning that the reactions of people are genuine)
 - Breaking the forth wall and director having cameos in their own films
 - Syncopated editing
 - Jump cuts (often moving from one scene to another with no explanation)
 - Long takes with static/mobile or lateral tracking
 - Interior monologues and random comments
 - Sound doesn't always match the video, due to the sound being added post filming

Easy Rider (1969): 

Easy Rider (1969) is a film where “Two counterculture bikers travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of America” or, in other words, about two men who travel through the Southwest of America after selling a large about of cocaine. As a text, it was seen as a great turning point in the way New Hollywood created and shot films – exploring controversial issues and topics of the 1960s society it was made during (discussing things such as the hippie movement, drug use and ‘communal’ way of life).

The meaning behind this clip - reflecting the way that the people in the clip feel during their acid trip - has been constructed via varying camera shot types, angles, lighting techniques and sound. One of these creative devises included in the clip is the use of camera panning up the building, and continuing until the camera faces into the sun creating a giant lens flare, from 0:56 - 1:27. This constructs the representation of the characters slowly losing their senses as the hallucinogenic drug takes effect. This has been encoded so that audience members can gain the preferred reading that the characters have taken LSD (or at the least some drug to that effect). The combining of this panning shot with a low angle shot means that the audience is able to gain this preferred reading through the camera (as it presents them with the point of view of the people within the scene) conveys this view to be their point of view, more specifically the point of view of the two persons on the floor. This panning shot has various other shots cut into it, these cut-away shots show the main four characters in this scene and a woman reciting a biblical passage of some description. The use of encoding these cut-away shots into the narrative of the scene allows the viewer to decode the text with the reading that the LSD the people have taken is slowly taking affect and the thoughts of each member are becoming distorted and broken up.

The use of sound in this clip is used to show the delusional/drug induced mind-set of the characters. Combining and overlaying multiple different soundtracks in post-production means that the audience is unclear as to what sound is actually taking place in the scene and what is fake, allowing them to gain the preferred reading that the characters have taken LSD. At the start of the clip, along with small amount of dialogue there is a clunking/almost train track or factory machine sound. This creates the idea that they are near some kind of railway or possibly industrial area. The noise continues and, when the characters within the scene have taken the drug, snippets of a woman reading a bible verse/prayer are cut in and mixed/interchanged with the factory machine clanking. This gives the audience a reading that there is possibly a funeral going on in the cemetery whilst they are there – giving sense to the man in a business suit who is shown very briefly at 1:37. The preferred reading of the text, being that they have taken LSD a hallucinogenic drug, would mean that the audience decodes some aspects of the scene (the man in the suit, the non-diegetic sound of machinery that is present throughout the scene) are things that have been created by the characters drug induced minds and are in fact not real. The fact that Dennis Hopper’s character says “shut up” when the accompaniment of church preaching and factory machine sound merge together indicated to the viewer that he is struggling to block out the sounds and possibly an inner turmoil – possibly the fact that he sold drugs, linking to the overall narrative of the text. 

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