> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. Movie shots followed strict guidelines and the creative head of the movie was the producer while the director was akin to a contractor, someone hired to film the scenes.

12 Angry Men and especially Sweet Smell of Success are not good examples of this.

Indeed. And all noir films. American cinema is a lot more than just its best picture nominees. Why is OP ignoring films like Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, The Defiant Ones, Anatomy of a Murder, The Hustler, Paths of Glory?

I love French New Wave and Breathless is one of my favorite films, but OP overstates their case.

OP was simply referring to nominees as best picture in the Oscars between 55-65 to make his point.

With cherry picking you can make any point you want. It not only ignores most of the films in that era, it even ignores most of the best picture Oscar nominees, to say nothing of the fact that OP so wildly mischaracterizes 12 Angry Men and Sweet Smell of Success that I wonder if they've seen the films in the first place.

I have to agree with OP, 12 angry men is a fantastic movie on many levels, but it really feels more like good Shakespeare than 12 real dudes discussing execution and their consience

The noir films was a significant inspiration for the nouvelle vague. They were highly regarded by french critics, which even gave the genre its name.

12 Angry Men is pretty stiff and theatrical. Not a criticism since it is a great movie, but it it wolds apart from say Five Easy Pieces.

Stiff and theatrical are better descriptors. Or mannered and a bit stilted.

I've only seen Breathless and A Band Apart. My sense is that Godard played a big part in transforming cinema from mannered to free-form. But I'd caution against framing that transition in terms of quality. Lots of stiff, theatrical movies are excellent, many of them have really good camerawork, and Godard certainly didn't invent moral ambiguity.

I don't think OP is framing it in terms of quality. Just a different style of filmmaking. A change. Whether the change is for the better - different story!

That's also due to the fact that it's a classical chamber play. I'd say a "theatrical" feel was definitely intended.

And for me, I miss some of that straightforward cinema today. Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters.

Everything is a blockbuster and a franchise.

Matt Damon said that in the past studios could expect to make half of the money back in DVD sales. Now that DVDs are gone studios are a lot more concerned about funding movies that are _not_ blockbusters/franchises. Sucks!

Can you imagine a studio funding a movie like Fracture (2007) today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG1Lxnn8Qa8 - probably not, a movie about a genius man who murders his cheating wife and an egotistical district attorney. But the film is tremendous, can't be made today.

You should hang out around small cinemas and niche festivals, you'd see everything can be and is made. There's a universe beyond studios. I just saw Cronenberg's Futur Crimes (the direct successor to Videodrome and eXistenZ) a few days ago, and Maps to the Stars yesterday. The man is as nuts as ever and he can still get his films made, it just takes producers who do it for fun and inventive financing. Films are the easiest they've ever been to make.

It becomes a 6 episode miniseries.

Exactly. Storytelling format follows the dollars which follows consumer habits. Right now all the dollar is in content made-for-Netflix and franchise movies because most people just want to watch online stuff at home nowadays.

> Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters.

Or antiheroes, or love triangles, or…

You know, ketchup[1] in the right amount can do wonders but slather it everywhere and it’s the delight of a four year old, but it’s really not the way it should be experienced.

[1] pick your condiment of choice.

When a movie has a love story that doesn't involve a love-triangle or infidelity I breath a palpable sigh of relief. Realistic or not, does all romance have to involve competition or deception?

I just watched a romance movie where the plot was one was dying of a terminal disease. I watched it because the protagonist was Feynman, otherwise I'd have turned it off because watching people die is not entertaining to me.

Cinema instead of being a reflection on society is more a mirror of itself. (look at Weinstein/Polanski and people like them in cinema and how they were treated until they could no more --look at their compasses).

Film Noir (which inspired Godard a lot; his 1965 film Alphaville is basically an homage/parody of it) had many of these traits (realistic dialogue, protagonists who weren't 100% good or even antiheroes, endings where the the good guys don't win) -- look at 1940s/1950s movies with Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum.

Specifically, the subgenre Future Noir. See 'How Alphaville (1965) Gave Us Blade Runner (1982) And The Matrix (1999)' [1]

[1] https://nerdist.com/article/alphaville-gave-us-blade-runner-...

Future noir it's just cyberpunk since its conception.

Blade Runner it's film noir in the future, and Neuromancer it's a hardboiled mistery book with computers.

It has sense, a lot of pulp writers wrote both mystery and sci-fi booklets under diferent aliases, and a lot of plots were recycled by changing the setting.

Yep, I immediately thought of "SUNSET BLVD." as a counter example. Even "The 400 Blows" predates Godard in French New-Wave.

IMO the success of "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay) marks the moment when the New Wave truly hit Hollywood.

Although set in New York, it owes a lot more to Godard and other Europeans than American movies of the past.

> "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay)

That was the first time people in Hollywood truly saw themselves represented on screen.

Marty had pompous acting/writing? Seriously?

How is Brando in "On the waterfront" all that different from Brando in "The Godfather"?

It's hard to be more pompeous and recitative than a godard film.

Reminds me of a joke from french comedian Desproges describing the parisian artistic crowd "who would rather die than to be more than 12 having understood the last Godard movie".

"recitative" - great word, I would have never thought to use it.

The Deer Hunter. A great movie I will never watch a second time. Too much reality.

The Deer Hunter is also a great example of how movies have changed. I enjoyed the movie but it's just sooooooooo.... daamn.... slooooooooow. Nothing happens for the first hour. That doesn't make it bad, but it goes to show - audiences in 1978 must have had very long attention spans. I can't imagine such a glacially slow movie being a hit if it came out today, when the average person can't pay attention to anything longer than a TikTok video (and even that needs to be played on double speed.)

People's brains have changed.

It isn't that movies like The Deer Hunter are slow, necessarily. It's that the scenes are doing things other than advancing "the plot". Things like revealing a hidden character trait or depicting the quality of the protagonist's world. I remember someone telling me that The Zero Effect (1997) was "too slow", when I thought it was moving along at a fast clip; I finally realized it was the difference in what we were getting out of (or looking to get out of) the movie that accounted for our differing perceptions.

Not that that can't be done poorly, either. But The Deer Hunter never struck me as slow, and I'm a kid who grew up with Star Wars as my template. But I got really into what we might call (erroneously) "character-driven" movies in the '80s.

(Dammit, I liked Chariots of Fire, but there was no way it should have taken Best Picture over Reds. Same with Ordinary People and Raging Bull.)

I think The Deer Hunter hits a lot harder for folks that lived through the Vietnam war. My dad (a boomer who was in his 20s during the war) connected deeply with the film because it portrayed what was really happening to people in that time. The movie wouldn't have been nearly as powerful or impacting if it just cut straight to the Vietnam and capture scenes, you need the first act to establish the deep and real friendship of the folks going to war. You see their life before the war and how amazing and perfect it is--how it could be your life. And then you see the horror of the war and how it completely fractures and destroys this group of friends. A lot of people that lived through the war experienced the same kind of shock and the film is quite cathartic for them.

If you just want a Vietnam war movie that cuts right to the gory chase about the horror of conflict, watch Platoon. If you want to experience what life was like for a young adult in their 20s and 30s being drafted or going to fight in the war and its impact on their life, watch The Deer Hunter.

And people's brains continue to change.

When I was in my mid-20's, I rented Jaws and couldn't believe how boring it was. Twenty years later I gave it another go when I saw it on some streaming service and I absolutely loved it.

On one hand, people love short videos but at the same time many of them will settle in for a multi-hour podcast or binge-watch six hours of some streaming series on a slack weekend.

Glacially slow, a lot of existential brooding and inner conflict. Curious if Godard was never considered to direct 'Dune', seems like his sort of thing, he might have done a good job.

It's definitely slow, but I don't know what else could draw you into the social intimacy that's dissolved with devastating emotions engagement later in the film. There's a tolerance and intimacy established in the first scenes that I believe fuels the culmination of disassociation in self destruction, despair and rage in the numerous infamous scenes I'm uncertain could have had as much impact otherwise. Another theme may arguably be counterpoint between tolerance or understanding of mediocrity and individual desires for inestimable even incomprehensible realization both in terms of ff everything (the simplest contemporary expression become inseparable from New generation post Viet Nam national identity, and seeking private assessment when all meaningful references are lost. These are only some is a frequent contemporary messages conveyed by making seventies filmmakers reflecting a crumbling human infrastructure. It's possible to imagine the contemporary viewer, as I once could, appreciating the establishing scenes as something other than vicarious observation and more akin to a negotiation of sympathy and even solace. Today, I find the same extraordinary and beautified scenes, Cimino foreshadowing Heavens's Gate hubris had the winter location grass and trees decorated with green paint and faux foliage only for color balance, frustrating. We're ostensibly living in economic good times in unremitting contrast, and yet so little seems to have changed. I'm eagerly looking forward to viewing the moment I can discard my present perspective.

What, you can't spend an hour just watching someone else's creation? Your leisure free time's too important? You gotta quick-flick-swipe through endless new distractions on the web? C'mon. Just watch an old film. Once can't hurt. Don't apply the modern bullshit standards to the past.

Alphaville. Worth a watch. Not everything has to be what you expect. Be confused. Be challenged. At least then you know someone's not making it trying to push your buttons and manipulate you. Maybe you just need to get in the moment.

There's more entropy and information in something unexpected. And how is there not something unexpected to find, something new, in even the slowest oldest film? Just watch it with focused awareness. The quality of your attention determines the quality of your experience. :P ;) xx ;p

There's a difference between someone's personal experience/capabilities and making observations about the broader cultural appeal of a thing.

I can still put in the personal effort to read Charlotte Bronte or watch North By Northwest and take on the appropriate context required to understand that these are landmark works for their era, while simultaneously understanding that they have limited appeal to a general modern audience.

I object to your tone, and I don't understand why you're taking it with me, or wrongly assuming that I didn't see 'The Deer Hunter'; I did see it. I had heard rave reviews about 'The Deer Hunter' but as things happen, I only got around to seeing it ~15yrs after it was released. It was decent, De Niro and Cazale are standouts, but not as great as the accolades it had been showered with. I like most De Niro (Scorsese, Cimino, or other director), but for a slow-boiler character study of a man's descent into insanity, 'Taxi Driver' (or the little-known but superb Danish film trilogy 'Pusher' (1996-2004-2005)) are IMO far superior. Or maybe even Takeshi Kitano. As far as TDH goes, I think the last chapter suffers a break in coherence, and it doesn't advance the narrative to see De Niro unravel in slow-motion at the end. As far as anti-Vietnam war films go, Bogdanovich's 'Saint Jack' made the point more deftly; we don't necessarily need to see people literally blowing their brains out to get the point that they've been systematically dehumanized. Perhaps it's the Oscar hype machine rather than Cimino's directing that's responsible for the perpetual hype around 'The Deer Hunter', and the lack of hype around Nicolas Winding Refn. In any fair universe, foreign directors like Refn would have won an Oscar for his early work, regardless that it was in Danish; which is a Hollywood attitude that persisted until 'Parasite' (2019).

Be assured I've "watched old films" aplenty. (I referenced 'Alphaville' above, earlier; and the David Lynch 'Dune'. I was even gong to reference Tarkovsky). My comment wondering if Godard was ever considered to direct 'Dune' is obviously praise for his work.

Have you seen Pusher Trilogy? or Bogdanovich's 'Saint Jack'? How do you think they compare?

(Also, 'The Deer Hunter' running time is 3h3m, so the "you can't spend an hour just watching someone else's creation" misassumption is offbase for multiple reasons. Ask questions, rather than make wrong assumptions.)

I'm sorry I wasn't directing it at you. It was more just a response to the gestalt of the thread.

I'm sorry I put it under your comment... I wish it was just sort of like taking turns in a conversation with a group of people... But with text and threads, I don't really know where to throw this in...i don't think there was any one comment that I could sort of respond to, it wasn't just one thread, it was vibe from multiple thread.

I guess if we'd been having a conversation and we're next to other people who were talking and I'd said that I probably would have expected you to take it in the sense that I was responding to something that someone else said but it was something that you could appreciate.

I like film, but I'm not a film nut. Thank you for the recommendations

Ask questions, rather than make wrong assumptions

I totally agree with that, and see this all the time. Again I wasn't responding to you, I think there are some people in the thread who what I said could totally apply to though. I guess I just expected you were someone who could appreciate that :) ;p xx :p

Apology accepted! Please take care in threaded discussions who remarks appear to be directed to, also I tend to not make assumptions, rather to ask questions. You could have preambled "This remark isn't directed at you, but the thread audience in general seems to be unfamiliar with..." Use @name to reference people's comments by name.

>The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending.

I thought a big part of this was the Hays Code, which forced (voluntarily adopted by studios) certain standards of morality for filmmakers: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheHaysCo...

But wasn't this inevitable given the declining cost of movie cameras?

After all, I grew up when taking a photograph cost a dollar (including printing). This meant one was very parsimonious that the picture would be worth it. I still have trouble shaking that off when taking pictures with my phone, though I use the phone for all kinds of things I never would have considered before. Such as taking a photo of the back of my head to check on a mole that I can't see in a mirror. Or when I mail a package to someone, I'll text a quick photo of the receipt with the tracking number on it. Or photograph something so I can enlarge it, i.e. use it as a magnifying glass.

(Yes, I've watched Breathless. I thought it was rather dull.)

Cahieurs du Cinema crew were famously obsessed with film noir and american directors who have been pushing doom and gloom ever since the depression.

For what it’s worth they also loved Lubitsch, so it was not all doom and gloom for them.

Italian Neo-realism predates French New Wave.

It does, but it has little to do with the kind of cinema of New Wave, or the later 60s-70s cinema in America.

True, but I believe italian neorealism didn't have international reach until fellini - outside of influencing french new wave which went on to popularize (within the art community at least) those ideas. French New Wave also paired it with new editing and cinematography techniques that made it all work together.

Edit: I had originally prefaced this with "I'm not a scholar" but forgot to readd it - the responses below invalidate most of what I said, but leaving the comment so their responses make sense - though I still stand by the lesser version of what I said - that Godard had a bigger impact on American cinema than pre-Fellini Italian Neorealism, and that parts of italian film influenced Godard.

The French New Wave were all too different to generalise like this. Godard and Rohmer (or Resnais) could't be more different really.

It was actually the previous generation of French directors that they were all reacting against - who were making somewhat pretentious literary adaptation films. You can read about it in Truffaut's 1954 essay 'A certain tendency in the french cinema'.

Neorealism was actually a fairly minor influence - as none of the new wave directors were social realists. But older, maverick French directors like Bresson and Melville were much more influential, as it was their freewheeling sensibility which united all the new wave directors and sent them hurtling off in different directions.

Yeah, it's hard to talk about French New Wave as a cohesive set, since it was so reactionary - I still see influences from earlier italian neorealism in Godard, in the street view slice of life shots and focus on regular people throughout Breathless

Not sure I agree De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine) won a Honorary Academy Award in 1947, which then became the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. In other words it was so influential that it ended up defining its own category at the Oscars.

I am wrong about that then, but I was talking more about influence on American films - I haven't seen any Sciuscia so I don't know if that went on to influence american films in the same way that godard did later.

It goes in waves back and forth from Europe to Usa and back again:

40s: Italian Neo-realism

50s: Hollywood Golden Era

60s: French new wave

70s: New Hollywood

Somehow every wave greatly inspired the next one.

There’s also the Japanese New Wave somewhere in there (the ‘50s and ‘60s) which also had a very great influence.

Me, personally, I’d also put the 1960s-1970s wuxia films from Hong Kong in a list of “stuff that has changed movie history for good”.

Of course, the list wasn't exhaustive. Asian cinema also had a great influence again in the 90s/00s.

For sure, to this day I’m mesmerized by a few Tsui Hark movies from that era, even though I saw them 15+ years ago. Pure art of fluid movement, for lack of a better expression.

> . The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending.

I confess, I rather prefer that approach. Really don't like anti-heros and villains as protagonists.

> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear.

To be fair, they were literally lifting from theater talent that was trained to do this

This is just wildly exaggerated. Italian neo-realism, British kitchen sink dramas and the emergence (in France) of vérité cinema did just as much, if not more, to contribute to the refocusing of cinema on normal, working people.

1955-1965 could be described as Hollywood's McCarthyist era, characterized by Cold War hysteria, the blacklisting of anyone and anything even vaguely associated with Communism, the end of film noir, etc.

French cinema didn't go that way, another important director of the period was Jean-Pierre Melville.

https://www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-essentials-the-10-grea...