POLITICAL

CINEMA

Quote:
Jean-Luc Godard It is not a matter of making political films, but rather making films politically"

Thematic Chapters:
1) 2) 3) 4) Definition and Origin of Political Cinema Important movements and filmmakers Objectives of Political Cinema Political cinema in the 00s

Definition and Origin of Political Cinema

Political cinema that possesses attributes and objectives similar and/or identical to what the genre is consider to hold today, emerged in Russia in the early 20th century, with films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Battleship Potemkin (1925). Such films acted as pure propaganda, with agendas promoting hate and racism against blacks to pro-communism brainwashing. The next era of political motion pictures flourished in post-World War I Germany, when UFA, the nations dominant production company, fell in financial turmoil and was subsequently purchased by future Hitler supporter Alfred Hugenberg. The body was then solely devoted to promoting German nationalism. One, if not the most, politically charged and also ground breaking and influential period for the genre came to be the French New Wave or as commonly known Nouvelle Vague. The filmmakers of the era were driven by a need to tackle socio-political issues of their day, to experiment with the medium and to agitate the audience by posing questions that were not necessarily answered at the end of the film; their goal was to merge objective, subjective and authorial storytelling to create an ambiguous narrative that called for the viewer to make up their own mind. It can as such be considered as the first fully-fledged movement of political cinema whos intention was not to guide but to liberate. Political cinema can therefore be defined a form of the motion picture whos purpose is to deliberately provoke an intellectual reaction, to either impose or prompt the audience to form a certain way of thinking. It can subsequently simply inform, propagandize or liberate.

Important movements and filmmakers

One of the most well known and evolutionary film movements associated with political cinema in the French New Wave or Nouvelle Vague. French directors inspired by the drained resources of their country, their rejection of the cinema of quality and the iconoclast youthful lifestyle they were living in Paris, they created innovative, vibrant and ground-breaking motion pictures with the intention of breaching the rules of classic cinema storytelling and empower the directors to mark their own works, to make them highly personal

and to elevate film to the status of classic forms of art, such as painting and literature, where the artist would have the freedom to express their true thoughts, regardless of how abstract they were. Prominent filmmakers of the movement include Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Louis Malle. It is difficult for audiences today to grasp how ground-breaking the movement was, as they have been conditioned to accept a wider range of cinematic techniques, cinematography, writing and directing. At the time, mainstream cinema had very strict, rigid rules regarding its mechanics; linear narratives, a resolution that was usually a happy one, shots and edits that flowed effortlessly. The so called Nouvelle Vague however was revolutionary in the sense that it pushed cinema to the opposite direction, confusing and stimulating the audience to think and see in different ways. The directors managed that with long shots, shooting on location and using available light, socio-political commentary, breaking of the 4th wall with actors speaking directly to the camera (something anarchistic at the time) and ambiguous endings.