Since the inception of the motion picture nearly a hundred years ago, young people have been attracted to the film medium as a form to express their vision of the world. This vision has ranged from such diverse films as The Battleship Potemkin, made by 25-year-old Sergei Eisenstein in 1927, to The 400 Blows by 26-year-old Francois Truffaut in 1959, to most recently, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, by 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh.
Certainly these debut films by Eisenstein and Truffaut radically affected the work of the filmmakers who followed them. The impact of Soderbergh's film has yet to be tested by time, but his auspicious debut will surely spawn at least a generation of imitators.
Prior to making The Battleship Potemkin, young Eisenstein attended a film workshop in 1923, and he helped edit the Russian version of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse. While considered "too artistic" when it was first released in its native land, Potemkin has since been considered one of the best films ever made by film scholars and critics around the world. It is considered not merely a cult film, but is required study in film courses everywhere. A recent homage was paid to it by Brian De Palma in his film The Untouchables when he recreated the famous "Odessa steps" sequence. Instead of the White Guards shooting as the baby carriage wildly careens down the steps, De Palma has Al Capone's henchmen firing away in a Chicago train station. Audiences laughed knowingly throughout the scene, testifying to the durability of Eisenstein's image.
Sheer Passion
Francois Truffaut was seized not by Eisenstein's revolutionary fire to become a filmmaker but rather by a sheer passion for the movies. He had a wretchedly unhappy childhood, and his only solace was to play hookey from school and slip into the moviehouses to watch American films for hours on end. They offered him a security and hope he could not find in the world around him. His love for the movies led him to write about them, and he was soon noticed by the leading French critic Andre Bazin, who began a correspondence with the young Truffaut and became his patron. As the film critic for the influential Paris weekly Arts et Lettres, Truffaut was, before long, denouncing the leading French directors of the day. And he boldly showed them a new way to make movies, first with a few shorts and then in 1959 with his debut features film The 400 Blows. The film tells the story of a lonely, unhappy 12-year-old who played hookey from school and went to the movies. It broke all preceding cinematic conventions and was a tremendous sensation at the Cannes Film Festival that year, winning the coveted prize for Best Director. With Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut became the leader of the explosive French New Wave, a movement that included such pioneering talents as Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, and Louis Malle. Their work continues to shape and inspire the work of filmmakers today.
I grew up in Montreal at a time when the French New Wave was bursting out on our screens. We saw them all; film was all important, all consuming. A few years later I went to New York where I became involved with the new New York Film Festival. In addition to the festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center produces each spring, with the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film, a program entitled New Directors/New Films.
Where do the new
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