On The Influence Of The French New Wave On Chinese Contemporary Cinemas

The French New Wave, which is one of the three aesthetic movements in the movie history, refers to the upsurge that the unfamous youth competed to direct their maiden works in the French moviedom from 1958 to 1962. They criticized the traditional rigid "good-quality movies" , instead, they insisted that directors should produce movies of their own personal style, and that movies should be reshaped thus to become a personalized art. Depending on their brandnew movie concepts and aesthetic skills, movies like Les Cousins by Claude Chabrol, Les Quatre Cents Coups by Francois Truffaut, and A Bout de Souffle ( Breathless) by Jean-Luc Godard won awards one after another in various film festivals, which astonished the global moviedom , aroused the new movies wave in countries such as the United States of America, Britain, the former West Germany, Japan, and started the global aesthetic revolution in the global moviedom. The French New Wave also deeply influences the contemporary cinema of China, which refers to movies produced in mainland China, Taiwan and Hongkong after 1977.The thesis comprises five chapters. Chapter one introduces the background, aesthetic thoughts, and aesthetic natures of the French New Wave. Chapter two discusses the illumination of the realistic aesthetics and existentialist aesthetics of the French New Wave on Chinese contemporary cinemas. Chapter three presents the influence of the French New Wave on Chinese contemporary cinemas from the perspective of practical skills. Chapter four reviews the transmitting process of politique des auteurs in China and discusses its influence on movie critiques and practice. From the perspective of moviemaking-system reform, chapter five discusses the influence of aesthetics innovation in the French New Wave on Chinese contemporary cinemas.This study aims to examine the influence of the French New Wave on Chinese contemporary cinemas from a broad perspective, hoping to figure out the reasons of the flourishing, waning and resurging of the Chinese contemporary movies in the recent thirty years, and to seek some rules underlying the development of Chinese movies, thus to supply a reference frame for the current Chinese movie production, and to explore the prospect of Chinese movies in the future.