There is a commonly held assumption that the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement was a left-wing, politically-charged attempt to destroy the film-making establishment and re-write the rules of Cinema for a new generation – a sort of cinematic punk rock, if you like. It is easy to deduce, from the protagonists’ involvement in the May ’68 uprising, their outright written condemnation of an entire generation of filmmakers, and from the sheer impact of their output, how such an assumption could arise, but it is entirely misconceived. The principal protagonists: filmmakers François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, were a group of relatively cosy right wing intellectuals who, having bitterly criticised the state of French cinema in print, felt compelled to show how they thought it should be done. Insodoing, they mined numerous influences of their own, including documentary films, Jean Renoir, and most of all, the cool aesthetics of American crime cinema. The idea of a ‘Nouvelle Vague’ arose over a decade later, when it was concluded that a revolution had indeed occurred, not just in Cinema, but in all of French culture. As is often the case, commentators were thus moved to categorise the phenomenon, and gradually suck various directors and writers into it, after the event.

In hindsight, the principal techniques espoused by the New Wave: the use of handheld cameras, outdoor locations, unconventional narratives and unknown actors, were nearly all explainable by a lack of funds. The key tangible difference which marked this rather disparate collection of young filmmakers out from what had gone before, was the achievement of ‘Cinéma Vérité’ (a quest for ‘truth’ through feature film-making) as opposed to the ‘Cinéma de Papa’ (the academistic and formulaic pseudo-literary tradition). The latter ‘daddy cinema’ had strangled the industry since the war and according to Truffaut, was infantilising France and ripping the heart out of the ‘Septième Art’ which the French had invented with the Lumière brothers and Méliès, and without their knowing it, they were about to re-invent.

The colossal influence of the movement (in particular that of Godard, whose pronouncement: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order” remains as iconic a statement as any in the medium) may be important to film scholars and enthusiasts, but what of the films themselves? How have these historical timepieces survived over time? Not all of them well, if we’re honest. A handful, though, remain untouchable classics. Les Quatre Cents Coups was one of the first key films of the Nouvelle Vague and won Truffaut the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It is possibly the finest example of the movement’s richest achievement: Cinema Vérité, in its triumphant depiction of a raw and exhilarating truth about childhood. The film tells the story of a misunderstood adolescent, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who bunks off school (‘faire les 400 coups’, hence the title) and gradually drifts into a life of petty crime. The SMIC, whose appeal is as direct and straightforward as any SMIC could be, comes from a scene where a puppet show is performed at the school. The children gaze in awe upon the crude marionettes, whilst Antoine and his accomplice sit at the back of the hall and plot their next escapade. Without exposition, Truffaut portrays so much about childhood (its innocence and its sophistication)…as well as the very nature of Cinema itself.

The hardest thing about writing about Martin Scorsese (particularly bearing in mind the Minister’s admiration for the man) is finding something new to say about him. Since the death of Stanley Kubrick in 1999 it is difficult to think of a more respected filmmaker alive. What is more, Scorsese himself is such a scholar of Cinema that if there is anything that hasn’t been said about his work by his many admirers in the critical establishment, it has probably been said by Scorsese himself.

It struck me after selecting this SMIC that if one were to try and draw up a short list of contenders for sublime moments in Scorsese’s films, about half a dozen would have one thing in common: they would involve a soliloquy, and more often than not, it would be delivered by Robert De Niro. For a director who appears to love the use of the camera, this is perhaps surprising, but it reveals a lot about what makes Scorsese a great filmmaker.

Whether it be the edgy, childlike, improvised repartee of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), in front of his mirror (“you talkin’ to me?”), the edgy, childlike, fantasy banter of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1979) (again in front of the mirror) (“Six weeks? It’s impossible!”), or Johnny Boy’s edgy, childlike protestations in Mean Streets (1974) (“I’m gonna pay ‘im next week. I’m gonna PAY HIM!”) there is a fascination in Scorsese’s work with letting the protagonist lay himself bare through talking, uninterrupted, at length…and eventually talking himself out.

No-one has ever better captured the combination of danger and pathos of that most complex of species: Scorsese is the great director of the American male. And De Niro, like Brando before him, was its finest prototype on screen. What the “physical” tradition of male actors (Cagney, Brando, Dean, De Niro, Kinski, Depardieu) brought to Cinema, apart from the absence of any artifice whatsoever, was the sometimes painful experience of watching an actor appearing to genuinely undergo an emotional experience as he acted.

But it isn’t as simple as De Niro the actor being the mouthpiece of Scorsese the tortured male. Both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull were written by the venerable angry beast of 70s cinema, Paul Schrader, who also collaborated with Scorsese on The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) (where the prime De Niro role of Judas was taken by Harvey Keitel, presumably for fear that Willem Dafoe might be lost in the flames if De Niro were cast).

In addition, Scorsese had with him on these films the considerable talents of editor Thelma Schoonmaker and above all, director of photography Michael Chapman. Chapman had cut his teeth as Gordon Willis’s camera operator on the not insignificant The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and also held the camera for Spielberg on Jaws (1975), before lighting Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. There is no element of luck in this: Welles was lucky on Citizen Kane (1941) that RKO designated Gregg Toland to look after him, but Scorsese is ruthless and meticulous in his selection of only the finest available talent to work on his pictures, all of whom must share his scholarly cinematic sensibility.

It is the importance of this collaboration which makes Scorsese a “Hollywood” auteur – a director of great artists, like Griffith or DeMille before him, but every bit a European-style auteur like Rossellini or Bergman, whose films he had secretly admired whilst growing up in the tough New York district of Queens.

So whilst this artistry is what helps make the SMIC sublime – consider the mise-en-scene and editing of what would otherwise be a simple shot of a man in his dressing room – the icing on the cake is the substance of the scene itself: the perfect use of an apposite cinematic reference to exemplify the state of La Motta’s life, the legendary car scene in On The Watefront (Elia Kazan, 1954) where Terry Molloy (Brando) upbraids his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) for having ended his career in its prime by forcing him to take a dive.

And this is where De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull goes beyond anything else in Scorsese’s work and beyond almost anything else besides. La Motta is certainly a Terry Molloy, a washed-up boxer, firmly ensconced in ‘Palookaville’, but one who has transferred his meagre celebrity to showbusiness – delivering monologues from theatre and film to cabaret audiences. And naturally, he is a mediocre speaker. Just as to see a magnificent athlete reduced to a pathetic hulk of a man, to see one of the most demonstrative actors of his generation monotonously mumbling mistiming and misquoting classic lines of dialogue delivered by his predecessor 30 years before, piles pathos upon pathos. Ambitious, courageous, devastating filmmaking. Oh, and as Mark Kermode might say, men are permitted to cry.

And the original version of the speech from On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954):

The first notable use of ironic juxtaposition between a scene and its soundtrack was in the final scene of the James Cagney film Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) wherein Cagney winds up his gramophone and selects an instrumental version of John Kellette’s Broadway classic I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, which then continues to play out during his unexpectedly violent death. The shock of the scene (and the subsequent notoriety of the film) was as much due to the jarring contrast with the traditional emotions associated with a showtune as it was to the brutality of the character’s execution (and consequent downbeat ending). Since then, the technique has been deployed with alacrity by many a director and with mixed results.

For one of the best examples of ironic juxtaposition, we have to turn to film makers who have made the confusion of genres and audience expectations into their own personal hallmark: the Coen Brothers. Their films might appear on their face to be firmly placed in clearly definable categories, whether it be film noir (Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996)) comedy (Raising Arizona (1987), The Big Lebowski (1998)) or period fresco (Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)) but to lovers of their work, their voice is so unique (and so richly varied) as to be uncategorisable. None of the abovementioned films can be so easily nailed down. They play with audiences’ preconceptions of genres within all their films and continually mix and match different dramatic impulses to create a fully sensurramic experience for the viewer.

But this isn’t all playful nonsense or overt artistry. There is a deeply uncomfortable scene in the Coen’s latest, highly-decorated and engaged film No Country for Old Men (2007) wherein the psycopathic Anton Chigurh toys with an elderly gas station attendant and invites him to toss a coin for what the audience knows to be his life. The scene is satisfying because it provides the thrill of danger (the fear of death) with the quotidien humour of misunderstanding and the sadness intrinsic in the film’s title: the audience finds itself genuinely laughing, genuinely frightened and genuinely sad. The mix of emotions intended for the entire duration of the film is thus brought down to a micro-level.

But lest we forget ourselves, back to the SMIC. In the Coen’s uber-stylish Irish gangster film Miller’s Crossing (1990) Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) is a wanted man, and two men are despatched to dispose of him, but O’Bannon, who has just put on folk classic ‘Danny Boy’ and settled into bed with a cigar, is having none of it. A moment of pure pleasure and indulgence, quite apart from its virtuosic mise-en-scene, the sequence has suspense, slapstick humour, pathos and what amounts to ultraviolence, all underscored with the purest, sweetest of tunes. Enjoy.

In the restaurant section of the weekly Parisian tourist guide, Pariscope, there is a class of restaurant defined as hors-catégorie (“uncategorisable”) which denotes the dozen or so very finest gastronomic establishments – Lucas-Carton, La Tour d’Argent, Lasserre etc. Jean-Pierre Melville is the one post-war French filmmaker who could be described as hors-categorie. He belonged to no movement or group, operating between 1950 and 1970 as a sort of lone gunman in the industry, with no contemporaries either inviting or deserving of comparison.

He occupies a unique position in French Cinema, partly in that his films are inspired almost entirely by American film noir but principally because he created a singular style of brutal minimalism which ran counter to every instinct present in French Cinema before or since. The Nouvelle Vague troika of Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, who borrowed Melville’s occasional habit of “reportage-style” shooting for their early films, were far too self-conscious about their need to make artistic statements to ever come close to matching the stripped-down, fatalistic brilliance of Melville’s best work.

Apart from his resistance drama l’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969) which on its re-release by the BFI a couple of years ago, promptly gatecrashed most major film critics’ Top Ten Films of 2006, almost all of Melville’s films deal with organised crime and in particular, heists. The depth Melville brings to these tightly-crafted genre pieces resides in the almost unbearable sense of restraint which pervades both the acting and cinematography. The actors internalise all emotion, speaking only when and to the extent that it is absolutely necessary to do so. The effect is deliberate and almost theatrical, but the action, when it comes, has twice the impact. The world he portrays is all the more powerful for what you do not see and hear than for what you do.

Few if any filmmakers in the crime-thriller genre have shown this same understanding of Cinema’s power to take the audience to a place and to keep them wondering what is happening and what will happen. By remarkable coincidence, the recent Cannes prizewinner: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) provides what must be one of the strongest of modern examples of this. It is almost as if the audience is exhorted to feel the emotion that the actors will not display.

Those modern filmmakers who have discovered and loved Melville, in particular Walter Hill, Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch and the Hong Kong directors Ringo Lam and John Woo, manifest an obsessive need to pay homage through their work. Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is a devotional treatment of Melville’s existentialist masterpiece Le Samouraï (1967) a film which defined the brooding intensity of its star, Alain Delon. To borrow a football term, Melville was also a set-piece specialist, hence the existence of at least half a dozen contenders in his work for the title of SMIC.

It is almost be impossible to avoid the word ‘cool’ when describing Melville’s films, so I will not try. Yes, they are ‘cool’ (until something else is considered cool), but they are worth discovering because they are so much more. I’ve chosen a scene from his most famous film, Le Cercle Rouge (1970) in which the character of Corey (Alain Delon) having just been released from prison, has burgled the personal safe of the Marseille drug baron who put him there. He seeks late night recreation in a billiards club.

To the Americans, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was a disciple of John Ford, a foreign film-maker whose sensitivities were closest to the quintessential American art form, the western. To the Europeans, with their worship of technique, Kurosawa was simply one of the modern masters of Cinema, along with Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Tarkovsky and Kubrick.

To the Japanese, Kurosawa, when he was at his peak in the 1950s and 1960s, was the equivalent of an Andrew Davis, a Simon West or a Michael Bay. A resolutely commercial action film director with significant studio backing and a rather tiresome penchant for samurai.

It’s ironic that “Action”, which is after all the most important word in Cinema, the word that on the lips of the director gives birth to the moving picture, seems to have become synonymous with an insignificant form of film, or “low art”. Kurosawa was the first and greatest action director and elevated it to a high art through his mastery of movement on the screen.

His films describe, enact and exploit movement as a cinematic technique like no other film-maker. Entrances of cavalry into shot are a blur across the screen; characters snap into action from a standstill in a whirl of violence; even an actor’s facial movements will go from slow to fast and back. This ‘modulation of motion’ is underscored by innovative and virtuosic editing: at times expository, at others, staccato. The effect is instinctively gripping on the viewer.

Unlike Kurosawa’s natural successors in the action genre, Chang Cheh (Dubei Dao, 1967; Wu Du, 1978) Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969; Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, 1974) John Woo (The Killer, 1989; Face/Off, 1997) and John McTiernan (Predator, 1987; Die Hard, 1989) it wasn’t just about violence, though his films were certainly violent in parts. Kurosawa used movement in the service of an emotional reaction to the story. This gave his films an extraordinary depth and made them universally popular.

The climactic scene in Seven Samurai has Toshiro Mifune rescuing a baby from a fire and being struck with the realisation that the same event had happened to him as an infant. It’s a moment of chaos, poetry and pathos (the mill behind is ablaze, the baby’s mother has handed the child to him in the act of dying, Mifune is knee deep in water, confusion scorched on his face, shrieking his epiphany). But it isn’t the SMIC.

The SMIC occurs earlier in the film and for me sums up the three things that best encapsulate Kurosawa as a film maker: his innovation, his mastery of movement, and his colossal influence on action cinema. One can only imagine the reaction of the first audiences to the scene, such is its visual impact.

To place the scene in context, the villagers have hired ronin (itinerant samurai) to protect them from repeated attacks by outlaws. In this scene, a samurai runs into a hut to prevent an outlaw from killing the family inside. Mifune and the villagers (and the audience) watch from the outside. Eventually the outlaw emerges.

The sequence remains one of the earliest and (arguably) most memorable uses of slow motion (or overcranking, where the camera is operated at a faster speed to create a slow motion effect when projected at normal speed). Notice that the slow motion is intercut with the shots of the onlookers at normal speed.

[I should like to thank YouTube contributor "Archicinema" for (despite appearing to be barking mad) having the presence of mind to isolate this very clip and upload it for our viewing pleasure.]

The French philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard once said that no matter how many times he had watched it before, he couldn’t sit through the musical numbers of Singin’ In The Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952) without feeling his heart pounding in his chest. This is precisely the reaction I get when watching The Band Wagon.

Though released the following year and conceived primarily as a vehicle for an ageing Fred Astaire, The Band Wagon took a much more traditional approach to the musical comedy than Singin’ In The Rain, which was more of a compilation of stunningly rendered musical pastiches than a musical in its own right. In The Band Wagon, a pretentious egotistical director (Jack Buchanan) is hired by an ageing hoofer (Astaire) to direct a Broadway musical with ballerina Cyd Charisse. That’s it.

Whilst it owes a number of things to Singin’ In The Rain (a pair of writers (Comden and Green), the idea to bet heavily on Cyd Charisse’s dancing (inspired by the stunning ballet cameo she offers in Singin’ In The Rain) and the general all round raising of the stakes), what makes The Band Wagon stand out from its predecessor is an effortless chemistry and lightness of touch which seems to have been entirely fortuitous. Whilst Singin’ In The Rain had a tendency to get a bit po-faced about “the biz” and the characters’ “careers”, it is as though the participants in The Band Wagon are rejoicing in their appreciation of the innate superfluousness of the genre. Astaire’s character is washed up, knows it and in case he forgets it, the first reel rams it down his throat. But he doesn’t turn out not to be, he just finds out how to make do. The inspired addition of British classical actor Jack Buchanan to the cast as the arthouse prig Jeffrey Cordova (said to have been unkindly modelled on polymath Jose Ferrer) paints the entire production with a topcoat of class.

I feel it is right that the first SMIC is deliberately uncomplicated and direct, in that it takes the adjective ‘sublime’ at face value. What is put on the screen is sublime because it looks and feels sublime, it does not require deep understanding or analysis to make it so. There are two contenders for SMIC status in this picture. I will leave readers to discover the climactic ballet ‘Girl Hunt’ for themselves, for as stunning as it is, it represents an attempt to outdo Singin’ In The Rain which, whilst successful in this regard, doesn’t quite achieve the poetry of its competitor or the sheer fusion of mise-en-scene with medium which a SMIC must do – it must exist for the camera. The technicity of the camerawork in the “Dancing in the Park” sequence (also referred to as “Dancing in the Dark”) is practically indistinguishable from that of the dancers. The context is simply that Astaire and Charisse have found, whilst mounting their disastrous musical production, that they are from different worlds and are struggling to find much in common. But when he joins her for a walk in the park, not a word needs to be exchanged.