New Wave Cinema

"I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between."-Francois Truffaut.
The French new wave which can be marked in history by the late 1950's, was an outcall to refutation of the iconoclasm and traditional conventions of film making. They tried new methods in camera angles, editing and style of narrative. The term came to usage by a group of film critics who rejected the idea of the tradition of quality with shots and images that required an in depth thought. It was in 1954 that Francois Truffaunt wrote his essay on the French new wave which was demarcated as the founding father moment of the French new wave.

The paper is part of the ‘Back Home’ research project carried out by a group of PhD students from the Polytechnic University of Milan within the framework of the Paquebot Laboratory. The goal of the present research is to reveal historical premises and sociocultural circumstances that provided the basis necessary for the development of the British post-war housing.
As one of the major sociocultural and architectural phenomena in the modern history of Great Britain, the new residential development has been taking shape under the impact of new realities of the post-war life. A descriptive research method has been applied in order to determine the most significant among these realities, such as the exigency of rebuilding and reforming the country immediately after the World War II, economic upheaval of the next two decades, introduction of new governmental policies, multiple cultural tendencies – form the Swinging Sixties to the Electric Eighties – and an intense critical debate of the period.
The study aims to answer the following research questions: what are the preconditions of the British post-war housing phenomenon, and what has determined the emergence of a new generation of architects ready to exploit new approaches to modernism and avant-garde in Great Britain in the 1950s-1980s. Special attention is paid to revealing innovative tendencies of art, fashion, music and cinema, which have transformed the country into the world’s cultural trendsetter for several decades and become a cardinal requirement for the residential development in post-war Great Britain.

The article explores cinematic and photographic images of the ‘Greek crisis’ in order to show how the visual can render the crisis both visible and invisible, clear and opaque, normalized and contested. Greek new wave cinema, iconic repetitive images of suffering in the center of Athens, and the group of visual artists Depression Era are discussed in this context. I argue that the images in focus articulate the crisis and render it visible. At the same time, however, they challenge one's expectations of what the crisis is and how normalized it has become. I argue that these images can encourage civic responsibility and a dialogue about freedom and democracy in the current predicament.

Indian cinema, born under the clutches of imperialism, had undoubtedly maintained the space or difference between the elites and the marginalised. In recent years, the audience as well as the cinema industry have made a gradual but apparent shift in the screen space for sharing the voice of the voiceless in mainstream cinema and celebrating the identity and understanding the film critically. Caste has been considered as one of the elements of oppression in the society. Caste stratification attached with religion, particularly the Varna system with Hinduism is undeniably a benchmark of the Hindu society to establish caste differentiation. When it comes to Tamil Cinema, it showcased caste either as glorification of the elites and intermediate castes or as eradication of the prevailing caste system. Many scholars in the domain of caste and cinema opine that mostly films try to eradicate caste dominance between the higher and submissive caste groups, but it is very rarely represented in mainstream Tamil Cinema. Tamil cinema maintained a space and difference in terms of projecting the dominant and the subaltern classes through the cinematic medium. It represented the subaltern as a sidelined body, submissive and impure; whereas the dominant- intermediate caste are heroic characters with imaginary heroism – lordly, generous, fearless, gore, assertive, violent and even trouble-makers. As similar to the Gramscian thought of hegemony and counter-hegemony, the dominant caste holds the hegemony and the narratives of subaltern caste groups in Tamil Cinema holds the counter-hegemony. Many scholars in this realm of caste and Tamil Cinema have used the ‘common-sense theory’ of Antonio Gramsci to critically analyze subalternity in Tamil Cinema.

In recent years, we have witnessed a rising international interest in the “new waves” of East Asian cinema–the new waves as “national cinemas” that offer an alternative to the ever-increasing dominance of the mainstream. Consequently, this course will pay primary attention to this re-conceptualization of the new wave as a critical and aesthetic problem. How has the model of a national cinema been re-interpreted from its initial European iteration, and how has it informed both the production and reception of East Asian cinema? How has the question of constructing a national identity through cinema been promoted or challenged by the various new waves with a radicalization of both content and form? Focusing on internationally acclaimed auteurs of Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea, this course will address key historical issues that have shaped the contours of East Asian cinema from the post-war to the contemporary moment. With a close formal analysis of each film, we shall see how the radicalization of film-making is intricately intertwined with not only attempts to assert an identity in the midst of de-colonization, modernization and globalization, but also endeavors to move beyond the binds of nationalism via issues of class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity.

I would also like to express my gratitude towards my in-laws to be for their love and support. A special thanks to Mr. Saurabh Shekhar for being such a good brother-inlaw to be and a friend. Finally, my Guru, Swami Purnatmanadji Maharaj for guiding me with the spirit to survIve and fight challenges III a foreign country. v ABSTRACT AN ANALYSIS OF HINDI WOMEN-CENTRIC FILMS IN INDIA Srijita Sarkar November13,2012 My study examines women-centric cinema in India that are in Hindi. In 'these films women have revolted against the injustice. The content analysis of the movies (parallel and middle) focuses on representation of women-centered issues. The Parallel Cinema is serious and artistic in its representation, mainly attracting the elites, whereas, and the middle cinema is a cross between the commercial and parallel cinema, and is meant for the masses. This study compares and contrasts both types of cinema. The main implication of this thesis was that representation of women in such films encourages social change in the treatment of women in Indian society, which is very male-dominated and patriarchal, by showing women as emotionally and economically independent. Therefore, by acknowledging the open-secrets like domestic violence, abuse etc, it brings these problems upfront, by allowing women to talk about it in public.