A hard day's Night-or, hard?

Based on the story of The Beatles, the film A Hard Day's Night not only mirrors the personal life of the four members of The Beatles, but also reflects the Britain's life during the 1960s. As a famous New Wave film, A Hard Day's Night, emerges a lot pop-cultural elements of Britain youth during 1960s such as the hairstyle, fashion (the student girl's school costume), pop music, fan culture and etc. We can see from this film that it criticized the traditional, or conventional Britain culture, regarding to making fun of the gentleman on the train, and the traditional plays in the theatre.
Also, in this film, numerous new film techniques are utilized. For instance, the hand-held camera, location shooting, jump-in cuts. These new techniques in some extend, also suggests the new identities that Britain young filmmakers want to achieve during producing the film.
Britain New Wave, as a major film activity in British, is remarked for its concentration on working class's life and pop culture. A Hard Day's Night, jointing the two elements perfectly, thus attained huge success.

Perceive the world with your heart, convey your heart with the camera

Beginning with a couple (Andrzej and Krystyna) driving a car on a narrow road in countryside, stopped by a hitchhiker. They decided to take him with them and they took this young man to their sailing trip. Everything seems good but the situation changed when Andrzej found his wife and the young man talking while he slept. He got mad at them two and began to the provoke young guy and finally dropped his knife into the water. The young man was extremely angry and fought with Andrzej. The young man fell into water and disappeared, which made Krystyna thought he dead and thus she blamed Andrzej for killing the young man. Andrzej consequently jumped into water to look for the young guy. However, the young man did not die and instead he climbed on the boat, making sex with Krystyna and left. Krystyna navigated back to the harbor and Andrzej was waiting her there. He wanted to drive to the police office and the film ended up with the scene that the car stopped at the sign which written with "10 miles from the police office."
For the content, Knife in the Water is a typical art film because of its ambiguous storyline. It is hard to tell the protagonists and the antagonists in the films and the main roles lack a clear goal to achieve. It seems like the director just followed what was happening during the whole trip, using his own povs to perceive the whole world and film what he perceived from the world around him. The ambiguous ending also illustrates the director's personal choice, which gives audiences a broad imagination to think about what's going on. Or what if the most important of the film is not whether the couple went to the police office, but what's going on in the film and how the actors react to all the randoms happened to them.
In the technique respect, the filmmakers utilized a more "documentary" format to express the whole film due to the considerable location shooting within the whole film. Also, the deep focuses which were in the films are also great. Moreover, the composition is another good part of this film. For example, when the young man came closer to Andrzej, the shot of Andrzej's legs composed a perfect triangle. It is not hard to see that the director was trying to use the camera to make the audiences follow his povs. All the delicate design track shooting is very elegant and fluent, such as the boat sailing in the lake.
Knife In the Water exemplified how art film illustrated a filmmaker's perception towards the world and how he conveyed his perception into films, taking a giant leap which influenced mainstream films a lot in the future. Art cinema, as an increasingly important film style in post war era, began to draw more and more attentions from the mainstream.

Rashomon, an art film about humanism

In postwar era, the development of modernist art and the influence the war brought to people, culturally and socially affect the emergence of art cinema. During this period cinema does not any more have the straight storyline and characters do not have clear-cut persona any longer. Oppositely, filmmakers were trying to search another way to express their inner thought with camera, using multiple-persona characters and complex structure of storyline.

At this point, Rashomon is a good example to illustrate this occurrence, by using parallel storyline to tell a story about complexity and selfishness of humanity. Everyone in this film is a representation of deceit and feign. For example, the robbery lies because he wants to seem strong enough and show his masculinity; the woman lies because she wants to keep an image of her innocence and her faith to her husband; the man lies because he wants to let others respect and honor him after he died; the witness lies because he stole the expensive dagger. As a result, there are four stories of the same affair, which shocked the Buddha and the witness, simultaneously shocking the audiences and showing the fact that people are selfish creatures. If the deepest humanism is dig out and shown in front of people, it is hard to accept the coldness of the fact.

However, at the end of the film, the positive aspect humanism is shown since the witness' adoption of the kid. The hope is lit up again when the heavy rain stopped, and maybe the kid is the representation of the new generation of Japanese after World War II, hope and bright future.