Abstract:

            In France, where cinema was born, this century-old art has found one of its most dynamic and innovative expressions. Cinema, apparently an art of both verbal and visual resources obsessively indulged by silent and later audible means, could be realized as an effective means of expressions communicable to mass audience. Had it not been for the technological breakthrough buttressed by the economic and industrial infrastructure, it could never have been possible for French cinema to be what it is in the history of celluloid. French cinema has always been known for creativity, imagination, innovation and originality. Thanks could be given to the pool of geniuses that included serious practitioners such as directors, actors, writers, editors, technicians, photographers and producers who lent French cinema its iconic forms and images, unforgettable masterpieces and subjects for serious academic and critical study. The New Wave in French cinema, which is also the focus of my study, represents a radical break—a break which coincides with an upheaval in technical means and funding structures, and which also profoundly renewed both the forms and practices to the point of redefining the very functions assigned hitherto to the medium. This shift of the New Wave from the earlier engagements in terms of practice and concept could be understood as a radical change to meet the intellectual, critical and polemical urgencies required and cultivated at the time.