Poetic Realism

https://whitecitycinema.com/2012/05/18/lets-talk-about-poetic-realism/

This is an interview with a professor and explains a lot about Poetic Realism. It's of course a movement in french cinema, but more specifically it deals with problems of love and hardship. One thing I did not realize before this interview was that it was heavily influenced by french painting such as Impressionism and Surrealism. It even mentions the film we saw a clip from in class- L'atalante. It mentions this being a good example of the contradictory nature of poetic realism because it features working class characters

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

François Truffaut on Vigo's L’Atalante

This week in class, we watched the beginning of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934). In this movie, following in the style of Poetic Realism, the audience is privy to an unconventional way of life, along with all the grit that can accompany such a life. Jean Vigo's films often animated a feeling of anti-establishment in an urban city/realist background, and favored the side of the weak/powerless; in class, we discussed this along with a brief discussion on Vigo's use of depth of field and in-camera editing, with such, decisions of focus are made by the camera. For this week's blog, I have found an interview, from 1968, between Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante . This interview is interesting as it shows the impact Vigo had on Truffaut as a film maker. In the interview, Truffaut communicates how he saw  L'Atalante at a young age and it deeply resonated with him as a child with a keen sense of reality; Truffaut goes on to say how Vig...
Read more

The Panopticon--A look at the United States

Image
On April 21st 1895, Woodville Latham, and his two sons Otway and Gray, first demonstrated their "Panopticon" (later renamed Eidoloscope) film projector; this was the first ever film projector in the United States. Up until this time, the U.S. populous had only ever been exposed to Edison's Kinetoscope; with the Kinetoscope, films could only be viewed one-viewer-at-a-time through "peep-show" style boxes. The Latham's are also credited with the invention of the Latham Loop; a loop placed in the film strip that enabled the film to gently wind over from back to front; allowing for longer sequences of film to be projected smoothly. As we learned in class last week, the Lumière Brothers also first debuted their first film projector to audiences in France in 1895; this film projector was named the "Cinematographe". I find the close proximity of these two innovations very intriguing and wonder what these two film engineering contemporary families ...
Read more

Truffaut's Last Interview

For this week's blog post I have chosen to contribute the last known interview of François Truffaut, conducted in May of 1984; I have chosen this interview as Truffaut speaks a great deal on his first film of the New Wave period, "The 400 Blows", and, moreover, the beginning of the French New Wave--which was the focus of our class this week. An excerpt from the interview that best relates to what we talked about in class this week, and which also coincidentally happens to be my favorite part of the interview, is when Truffaut is asked about the success of the French New Wave, to which he replies the following: At the start of the New Wave, people opposed to the young filmmakers’ new films said, “All in all, what they’re doing is not very different from what was done before.” I don’t know if there was actually a plan behind the New Wave, but as far as I was concerned, it never occurred to me to revolutionize the cinema or to express myself differently from previous fil...
Read more