What does the film Xiao Wu reflect in the new wave period?

The new wave film movement is the third film movement with world influence after the European avant-garde and Italian neo-realism which started in 1950s. It has no complete artistic program, unified declaration and fixed organization, but it subverts and innovates the traditional film aesthetics and film expression. The main filmmakers who set off the "new wave" are a group of young film critics who unite around Bazin, the editor-in-chief of the Film Handbook. Deeply influenced by existentialism, they put forward the slogan of "subjective realism", opposed the "rigid state" in the past films, and emphasized the director's "personal style" in filming, also known as "film manual school" or "author film".

These creators use film criticism as a weapon to attack the self-righteous traditional French films and try to create a new film with a more personal style. Although each director's film production methods are different, they have many characteristics that constitute the core of the "new wave" film aesthetics. Next, it briefly analyzes the aesthetic characteristics and historical significance of the French new wave film movement.

French New Wave films abandon indoor shooting and emphasize real-life photography, which has obvious documentary style. Bazin's long lens theory and photography ontology are regarded as a monument of realistic style by new wave movies. Therefore, the new wave film adopts a more direct production method completely different from the "high-quality film", with light equipment, low film cost, short production cycle, real-life shooting, natural lighting effect and a large number of non-professional actors.

First of all, directors of New Wave movies advocate that everything should return to movies, which is a breakthrough in classical narrative to some extent. In order to break the audience's recognition of classical films, and make the film narrative no longer necessarily related to classicism, directors of New Wave are good at replacing and disrupting the plot structure with illogical and accidental combinations of events, even the open story ending. This change of narrative structure is consistent with the film author's existentialism, that is, the rational structure of traditional art can no longer reflect the chaotic and irrational real world, and it is necessary to explore a new artistic expression.