I started to really get into
cinema when I was at university after first watching a couple of Martin
Scorsese’s early movies. I was dumbstruck by the guerrilla style of Mean Streets and easy flow and strange editing of Taxi Driver as well as the way that both
movies captured a time and place which although I’d never personally
experienced, felt familiar. In the near decade since then I’ve expanded my
cinematic experiences and ventured down many genre avenues, finding much that
to like. It’s taken me to my late twenties though to venture towards The French
New Wave, a period and collection of film makers who inspired those early
Scorsese pictures perhaps more than anything else.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless or À bout de souffle in its native France
is one of the most famous examples of the New Wave films which steamed across
the Atlantic in the late 1950s and into the 60s,
influencing the next generation of American directors. The influence follows a
similar pattern to British rock music of the period as Godard and his
compatriots François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and others were themselves being
influenced by what they saw in American cinema. It’s almost as though the
French put their own spin on what they saw in Hollywood and then this was subsequently
appropriated and re-Americanised by ‘movie brats’ of the 70s.
