Tirez Sur De La Pianiste - Truffaut

Plot

A washed-up classical pianist, Charlie Kohler/Edouard Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), bottoms out after his wife's suicide — stroking the keys in a Parisian dive bar. The waitress, Lena (Marie Dubois), is falling in love with Charlie, who it turns out is not who he says he is. When his brothers get in trouble with gangsters, Charlie inadvertently gets dragged into the chaos and is forced to rejoin the family he once fled.

Truffaut

While maintaining the dark and dramatic atmosphere of the book, Truffaut plays free and loose with genre conventions, consistently undermining our expectations and abruptly changing pace and tone without warning. In the opening sequence we see Chico running for his life through the city streets at night. Shots flash by in a rapid blur in near darkness or the glare of harsh street lighting. Then, abruptly the mood changes, a passer-by helps the dazed Chico to his feet. A long continuous tracking shot follows as they walk along the street discussing the benefits of love and marriage. This playful approach continues through the rest of the picture. The iconography of the musical, western, romance and melodrama genres feature briefly, interrupting the conventional crime story narrative. Abundant comic touches in particular distinguish the film from its source material and other films of the same genre. The hoodlums are portrayed more like the Marx brothers than real tough guys, endlessly discussing and arguing about subjects such as women’s secret desires. In one famous scene one of the gangsters proclaims “May my mother drop dead if I tell a lie” which is immediately followed by a shot of an old woman clutching her heart and collapsing.

The film's script changed constantly during shooting. Truffaut said that "In Shoot the Piano Player I wanted to break with the linear narrative and make a film where all the scenes would please me. I shot without any criteria." Truffaut's stylized and self-reflexive melodrama employs the hallmarks of French New Wave cinema: extended voice-overs, out-of-sequence shots, and sudden jump cuts. The film's cinematography by Raoul Coutard was often grainy and kinetic, reflecting the emotional state of the characters, such as the scene in which Charlie hesitates before ringing a doorbell.

French New Wave

Using light-weight portable equipment, hand-held cameras and requiring little or no set up time, the New Wave way of film-making presented a documentary style. The films exhibited direct sounds on film stock that required less light. Filming techniques included fragmented, freeze-frames, discontinuous editing, and long takes. The combination of objective realism, subjective realism, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end.

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/shoot-the-piano-player.shtml

http://www.classicartfilms.com/shoot-the-piano-player-1960

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot_the_Piano_Player