Film is the product of people’s pursuit of the ultimate visual experience, which always stirs the emotions of the audience. Since 1965, a series of changes have taken place in world movie industry driven by the New Wave movement. There has been a great change in form, style as well as storytelling. However, the constant pursuit of visual effects and emotional resonance never changes. Different movies use different methods to create visual effects. After achieving the dual role of visual effects and emotional resonance, the film will finally realize its commercial value. I will talk about four movies which was made by different directors in different years but achieving the same goal.

Godard’s Breathless is a representative work of the French New Wave, and its emergence has epoch-making significance. In the screenshot below, the same scene with a long shot of 13 consecutive cuts, the “jump cut” editing technique entered the history of film development. Although the appearance of this technique is unexpected, it had an important effect on the visual change and development of movies. Since then, the film’s narrative rhythm has been extremely accelerated, and the amount of information has also increased, accelerating the pace of film language modernization. In addition, the film also creatively used location shooting, with a shoulder-mounted camera or a handheld camera, followed by, snapped, etc., to give the film a natural, occasional creative style. Breathless adopts the types of stories which are similar to Hollywood, having some common elements such as cops and gangsters, thieves, assassinations, women, and hunting scenes. However, Godard used unique shooting and editing techniques to create more realistic and natural processing methods. Then he created a new character image that permeated the themes of love and death, and aroused human beings’ thinking on existentialism. This film is a masterpiece of the 1960s, and the film itself is a testament to the people’s commitment to visual effects. This film is considered one of the greatest works, not only in the past, but now still.

Bonnie&Clyde in 1976 is also pursuing the ultimate visual art effect. This movie was the beginning of New Hollywood movie, which gradually brought dreaming Americans back to reality. Bonnie&Clyde and Godard’s Breathless had some degree of isomorphism in narrative strategy. This not only revealed the direct and indirect connection between New Hollywood movies and the New Wave movies, but also reflected the revolutionary side of New Hollywood movies.

The last scene of Bonnie&Clyde was always praised in history. Tamsen Malone said in his post: “One of my favorite parts of the movie was actually the ending how their unexpected death was so real.” At the end of the movie, the bullets pierced through Bonnie and Clyde’s bodies. The camera magnified this moment infinitely, and the scene seemed extremely violent. But the audience found resonance in the tragedy. Bonnie&Clyde represented the secret desires of their subconscious. Its success prompted other filmmakers to be more open in presenting sex and violence in their films. The film’s ending also became iconic as “one of the bloodiest death scenes in cinematic history.” “Never in the history of film had a movie so embraced violence and sex, and even with as much as violence as my generation is accustomed to, I was still taken aback. “Lauren Heinrich wrote in her blog. In order to win the competition, the New Hollywood films abandoned the narrative rules of the old Hollywood films and adopted the real location scene, using the camera movement, sound and editing skills to emphasize the motion effect of the film. In film making, not only did not hide the movie skills, but expressed the skills as much as possible. Slow motion, close-ups, jumpers and other uses of film making were very rich in this film. The new lens narrative method made the film not only tell stories in a straightforward manner, but also perform a metaphorical expression. The film Bonnie & Clyde is the leader of the new Hollywood film, and its lens narrative method also contains the characteristics of the New Hollywood. The film was intended as a romantic and comic version of the violent gangster films of the 1930s, updated with modern film making techniques. Arthur Penn portrayed some of the violent scenes with a comic tone, then shifted disconcertingly into horrific and graphic violence. The display of sexual and violent aesthetics was also an attempt and breakthrough of visual effect innovation. This attempt has strongly shaken people’s emotions and caused great resonance. Of course, the resonance of the audience brought a good harvest of applications and box office.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a Chinese martial arts film directed by Ang Lee in 2000. Christina Klein wrote that ”Made with a relatively modest budget of $ 15 million, it earned more than $ 200 million worldwide”, and she also said that “In its visual and narrative content, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes across as a resolutely ” local” film–that is, a product of China’s unique history, culture, values, and aesthetic traditions. ” Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a martial arts film, was most famous for its martial arts scenes and action design. Peter Travers said that “If there is a more visually stunning scene on film this year, I haven’t seen it.” This film had many pioneering works in the design of martial arts lenses. Ang used a long lens to shoot two female protagonists performing Qing Kung and chasing and jumping on the roof. At the same time, in accordance with the director’s wonderful scene scheduling, the integrity of the leap and chasing action was retained. The camera followed closely behind the two actress, maintaining the low speed, keeping restraint between movement and stillness, and pursuing diversity of actions. The director kept the long shot while the characters changing the postures, with unique style containing both rigid and soft.

Ang Lee invited director Yuen Woo-Ping to be martial arts director. In order to keep in line with Ang’s film concept, Woo-Ping designed action scenes that unmatched by all other martial arts films. The perfect combination of scenes such as the boundless desert, clouds and mountains, flowing waterfalls, and the concept of martial competition in the film presented a wonderful audio-visual design that maximized Chinese martial arts and oriental aesthetics. Ang once said, “The best movie is not how good a story you tell, but what you stir up in the audience.” Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon used the beautiful visual effects and special oriental characteristics of rigid and soft hit the hearts of many audiences, so that the film won a high box office. Decades later, movie makers still have a constant pursuit of increasingly superb visual effects, which is a normal state of film art.

Until now, human’s pursuit of visual spectacles in films has never stopped. The most typical example is the American director Spielberg’s dual-camera shooting method in his movie Avatar, which has achieved unexpected results. More than half of the $ 300 million of Avatar’s budget was used for 3D technology, and 60% of movie content was produced with a combination of 3D technology and animation. In order to use the 3D technology to the extreme and achieve a real three-dimensional effect, the 3DFusion Camera system and two Sony HD-CF950HD cameras were used for shooting. The actual shooting scene was taken from the sides like human eyes to form a 3D effect.

Tamsen Malone said in his post that “By the beginning visuals alone you can tell that the use of technology is heavily influenced to make the captivating world of Pandora possible.” The use of film technology is very important in Avatar. “The obvious reason people were hyping Avatar was because it was visually spectacular thanks to technical achievements.” Stephanie Merry said. However, some people had some doubts about the movie itself. For instance Jim Emerson said that “Everything is just close enough to “realistic” that it appears unmistakably phony-even the human beings when they’re just sitting around talking.” But we still can’t deny that Avatar’s visual effects reached the height of peaking at that time. Digital technology not only provides realistic simulation for films, but also sublimates our film aesthetic principles well, and combines the most realistic reproduction and expansion with realistic simulation to achieve a true film aesthetics. The continuous development of film technology means changing the true concept of film from traditional content-oriented to means-oriented. The continuous development of technology has provided powerful tools for people to pursue visual effects. Perhaps for the movie, capturing the eyes of the audience means capturing their hearts.

Breathless, Bonnie&Clyde, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Avatar. Although these four films were produced in different countries at different time, with different background behind, their ultimate pursuit of visual effects has never changed. Breathless created the new form of film editing. Bonnie and Clyde inherited the editing style and made sex and violence have more visual impact in movie making. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon gave us great visual experience of fighting scenes. And Avatar used advanced technology to show us brilliant visual effects. With the development of technology and the progress of society, movies with such strong vitality will definitely present us with more visual feasts.