영화, 미디어로서의 독립과 창작이론과의 만남, 프랑스 누벨바그(1958-1967)

Abstract

Generally looking through its history before the widely expanding of TV, it was cinema that functioned as not only a major entertainment, but also media, that is, making propaganda for the ideology of a society and its political authority. This kind of media function, the author of this essay argues, have prevented cinema from becoming an essential artistic vehicle of artists’ ideas before New Wave. This article, under this assumption, attempts to see the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) was formed by a change in the cinema’s entire function in its history, which started its weakness of media function and then led to the emergence of its natures. For this purpose, first of all, this essay will examine the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s in France just after Charles De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic came to power in 1958 and then look at steady inroad of TV as a remarkable achievement of the rapid growth. In doing so, this essay will show how TV’s growth influenced on the emergence of New Wave, in some sense, a kind of media-free cinema. In the light of this historical and economic aspect and other media of the time, secondly, this essay will look in more detail at New Wave’s major directors and their works such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Alain Renais. In doing do, it will see how New Wave directors tried to make their films different from the old one and attributed to the development of cinematic language, that is, the search of the nature of cinema. In this perspective, consequently, the article tries to show that during the 1950s and 1960s through this transition in French history, economy, and as a result, the newly emerged cinematic grounds, the major director of that time got historically inevitable chances to trial different kinds of cinematic language free from the function as media. Therefore, I would like to say New Wave and its directors escaped from the traditional functions, that is, as media and propaganda, of the cinema before the 1950s and then became to give a rise unexampled or unprecedented films. In this essay, lastly, it suggests to see New Wave as a revolutional cinema which expanded the essential realm of cinematic form and content, and turned over the previous paradigm of world cinema history.