![]() This phenomenon was increased, in the case of The Last Metro, by François Truffaut’s strategic and mythological position in French cinema, in France and among those who, all over the world, had followed his career. ![]() It is a very banal paradox that the most successful film from an acclaimed director would become its least recognized work among movie buffs and film historians. Sur le plan de l'histoire du nouveau médium, ce genre se situe à l'intersection de deux aspirations distinctes : celle, propre à la tendance « documentariste », à sortir des studios pour filmer la vie réelle et celle, caractérisant en particulier les cinéastes russes, à faire du « montage » le principal fondement de la composition ou de la diégétique filmique. ![]() Cette option esthétique, éminemment moderniste, fut à l'origine d'un nouveau type de fi lm : le « portrait urbain » ou « film en coupe transversale », nommé ainsi à partir de sa désignation en allemand : Querschnittfilm. ![]() En s'appuyant sur les acquis des techniques proprement filmiques, il s'agissait de faire du cadrage et du montage – et non du scénario – les principes formels directeurs du nouvel art. Cette orientation, qui apparaît à peu près simultanément en Allemagne, en France et en Union soviétique, opérait une rupture avec les procédés théâtraux et littéraires dominant en grande partie la production. Depuis le milieu des années 1920, pourtant, s'était affirmée au sein du cinéma muet une forte tendance à revendiquer sa spécificité en tant qu'art du visible. C'est l'avènement du « sonore » qui, très rapidement, s'impose et remet en cause les conventions et les genres développés par le « muet ». This leads me to suggest that we should be talking about secret(s) perdu(s) (plural), and that, ultimately, this subject remains open for further exploration.Īu tournant des années 1920 et 1930, le cinéma a fait l'épreuve d'une révolution technique décisive. Finally, it remains to be said that no single definition of le secret perdu exists, or, rather, if it ever did, it has gone to the grave with Truffaut. My findings indicate that the success of Truffaut in his personal quest for “le secret perdu” was predicated on the help of a range of people who shared his passion for the silent era. My research methods included: sourcing affirmative writing on Truffaut and silent cinema isolating key words related to silent cinema, and further investigating their meaning to Truffaut and his work and finally, watching a diverse range of visual material concerning Truffaut and silent cinema. This study is important since no other in existence focuses solely on this area of research and it provides an addition to the relatively small canon of academic literature on Truffaut in English. The focus of my research is the “secret perdu” or “lost secret” of François Truffaut’s cinema, to wit, the means by which Truffaut engaged with silent cinema and how it greatly influenced his oeuvre. Starting from the director ’ s body itself, I will proceed to the examination of physicality in his oeuvre in the light of hitherto little explored historical and aesthetic connections with New Wave and New Cinema movements, in particular the Nouvelle Vague and the Brazilian Cinema Novo. In this chapter, I will investigate the nature and validity of Herzog ’ s claims to difference, its relation to physical filmmaking, and the kind of realism resulting from his mode of address within and beyond the realm of representation. Reality thus becomes synonymous with difference, a fact embodied by the legions of extraordinary beings who populate his entire output. However, physicality, in his case, seems to derive from an irretrievable loss of identity, a rupture between the human element and its environment through which the materiality of the former comes to the fore. Firmly rooted in the New German Cinema and akin to all New Wave movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the oeuvre of Werner Herzog also relies, perhaps more intensely than that of any of his contemporaries, on a physical approach to filmmaking. It is typical of New Waves and New Cinema movements to resort to physicality as a means to establish a material link between cast/crew, the profilmic event, and the resulting film, so as to generate a sense of belonging and identity.
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