Melville’s Tools of Bob le flambeur Removing the sound from Melville’s Bob le flambeur might lead one to believe that he or she is watching a Hollywood film noir, circa 1950. Melville, though not professionally trained as a director, manages to create an oddly stirring and quirky French film shrouded in the sheer curtain of Hollywood film noir. Though he retains much of the Hollywood style, he also employs tools of his own—camera movement and voice-over—to embrace the film in Melville-vigilante-style
Through extensive research it is clear that many critics would agree, New Wave of French films has been unsatisfactory, although more than a few respectable films emerged from it. With the appearance of 1960s Breathless, there came a film (for it’s time) that is new, aesthetically and ethically. In a clean, yet rebellious way, Godard makes the statement, ‘Anything is possible when it comes to cinema, that there is no limit to the possibilities of film form.’ Godard understood the rules and clichés
The case for European cinema can be made by pointing out how persistently the different national cinemas have positioned themselves in opposition to Hollywood, at least since the end of the First World War, and increasingly after the Second World War... In the set of binary oppositions that usually constitute the field of academic film studies, the American cinema is invariably the significant (Bad) Other, around which both the national and “art/auteur” cinemas are defined... -Thomas Elsaesser,