Godard has said that cinema is reality at 24 frames per second. So, what exactly is reality? How is it spawned? And how is it constructed? In the middle of the last century, the rise of the French New Wave cinema has attracted more and more attention and consideration. Let’s go to “Exhaustion” .
French director Jean-Luc Godard directed this film, released in 1960, about Michel, a penniless street gangster who steals a small car from Marseille and drives to Paris, but is caught by the police for speeding. After coming to Paris, he hides in his girlfriend Patricia who is a journalist. In addition to avoiding the police, he also tries to get back a sum of money earned from the sale of the car. The sheriff goes to the newspaper office to find Patricia and as soon as she has news of Michel, she calls to tell him. Patricia has mixed feelings about Michel, on the one hand deeply fascinated by his indifference to everything and pregnant with her child, but on the other hand, she dislikes him for being too dodgy and not doing his job, in the end, Patricia still chose to call the police, Michel did not escape this time, was shot on the main road, but he accepted death in a playful way.
This is an old film in black and white texture, together with Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”, which is regarded as the founding film of the French New Wave cinema. The black-and-white color palette of the film eliminates the clutter of color in the picture, allowing the audience to focus more intently on the plot, and the overwhelming sense of reality makes the audience feel like they are there.
The subject matter of the film
The main character, Michel, is a street hustler who floats around the country without knowing where he comes from, who his parents are, or where his home is, and his unruly nature seems to be inherent. The mob is the most marginalized group that was previously not noticed and recognized by society, and it becomes the main character of the film to make a movie about this group, which is itself a reflection of the negation of traditional moral concepts.
Furthermore, existentialism is present throughout the film, whether the character Michel is intensely individualistic and uninhibited, as if satirizing the world is his daily routine. Existentialism arose after the First World War, the beginning of the end of bourgeois civilization in Europe, and with the advent of the modern period, man entered a non-religious phase in history. At this time, although people had unprecedented rights, technology, and civilization, they also found themselves homeless at the same time. With the disintegration and shattering of the all-encompassing framework of religion, people found themselves without spiritual pillars and became not only destitute, but also a fragmented being, without a sense of belonging, considering themselves as “outsiders” in this human society, unable to integrate into any species, and questioning their values People’s values are questioned and reconstructed. When people desperately needed a theory to resolve their feelings of alienation, existentialism was born.
He is not bound by any values or norms, just as Jean-Paul Sartre believed that existence precedes essence, and that human existence is our only contact with the essence, which is always the central and determining factor, and that everything else is inseparable from human existence.
The setting of image language
In terms of the image of the characters, the main character Michel appears like a broken and slightly nervous person, and one of the features of the film is that he will be like a program host, communicating with the audience at the other end of the camera, either introducing himself or spouting off about the society, similar to the form of a documentary, where the character can look directly into the camera without any hesitation. On his way to become a fugitive, he meets Patricia, the female protagonist who sells newspapers on the street, and expresses his love to her frantically, and she is also very different from the traditional image of women, she has short haircut, dresses fashionably, she is naive, aspires to be free, vibrant but also has her own values. Through the special characterization, the director wants to tell the audience that he wants to tell them that the film is about breaking the rules and not being trained by the mundane, the world that people think is the norm.
In addition to the above-mentioned main character’s boldness to look directly into the camera instead of avoiding it, the film also breaks the traditional structure of events, reflecting the absurd irrationality and anti-traditionalism. For example, when the main character Michel is caught by the police halfway and shoots a policeman, he simply uses a few close-ups of his hands and gun, and then passes by, rather improvising to show the death of the policeman. The film is simple, giving people a unique sense of challenging tradition, so much so that the camera jump cut is not very smooth, but also to the police, the previously recognized authority of society’s disdain and disintegration, the irony of police ability, weakening the police presence, reducing the police footage, more shots on the main character.
It is worth mentioning that at the end of the film, close to two minutes of long shots, Michel is shot and runs forward, running in an unusually comical manner, and finally falls to the ground with four pairs of feet surrounding him, including his girlfriend Patricia. He exhaled a puff of smoke made three think faces. Quite a generous death, the topic of death for people, is the basic state of human existence. Patricia, his girlfriend, looks directly at the camera, her face is in close-up for almost half a minute, and finally she circles her lips with her finger, an action that Michel has done before, asking herself “What is abomination? There is an inscrutable question for people to think about.
In terms of lines, Michel keeps showing the audience everything, and some of the ideas he wants to express are subjectively conveyed to the audience through his words, for example, Michel says “My car has no brakes, because my car is used to drive without stopping”; there is also “What is the greatest wish in life? –To become immortal and then die.” When his friends told him that the police were coming, he calmly spat out the words “I’m tired, I want to rest” and said “Damn it” before he died …… The lines are all intriguing.
A brief description of French New Wave films
In the history of Western cinema, there are three major film movements, one is the European pioneer film movement (around 1920), the Italian neo-realist films (1942-1952), and then the French New Wave film movement (1958-1962), which arose due to social and political reform, unrest, and the young generation’s contempt for film. The second reason was that the emergence of “quality cinema” in French cinema aroused the industry’s discontent, and the uniform studio style erased the director’s personal style, and the film industry lost its originality and vitality. At the end of the 1960s, a group of young directors emerged to transform cinema into a personalized art.
At the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, films such as Godard’s Exhaustion, Truffaut’s Four Hundred Blows, and Aron René’s Hiroshima Love caught people’s attention, and in 1963, one of the anti-mainstream cultural camps in the film industry, Film Manual magazine, officially used the term “New Wave Cinema”, indicating that the concept was socially accepted and the film industry was becoming more and more dynamic. In 1963, one of the film industry’s counterculture camps, Film Manual, officially used the term “New Wave Cinema”, indicating that the concept was socially accepted.
As an indispensable wave of the New Wave, “Exhaustion” is the most intuitive demonstration of the rebellion and awakening consciousness of that generation, which was abandoned by the society and was in a more marginal generation. Minutes are 60 seconds of the world.