Movies

The silent movie Battleship Potemkin depicted the struggles of the soldiers in such a comic kind of way in which no dialgoue was ever heard and the sound was the primary element in progressing the story from one theme to another. Unlike in the movie Les Quatre Cent Coups in which there was an extreme use of voices, Battleship Potemkin reflected uses fast movements and emphatic actions to relay to the audience what had been happening. In the Les Quatre Cent Coups, which was one of the New Wave Films, uses more of the cinematic effect of the environs of the main characters rather than focusing on the direct movements of the main characters to portray what the movie was all about.
In the Battleship Potemkin, the key elements in silent films, which are the conclusions and abstractions (Reisz  Millar 1995), were clearly manifested as evidenced by the way the narration was written. The utilization of emphatic words such as  Dont Shoot   Give us this day, our daily bread,  and the way the chapters were titled such as  The Men and the Maggots  had greatly contributed to the progression of the story without the use of dialogues and even the sounds created by the environs.
 Both the films differ in this feature because the  in Les Quatre Cent Coups, the sounds of the environs were present and there was no use of the comic-like narration. Also, being a product of New Wave Cinema, Les Quatre Cent Coups appeared more edited with the use of technology as they were no unintelligible sounds or noises heard in the background.  It was noted tha the New Wave cinema had incurred changes in film-making technology after the World War II. Such innovation was able to render the film a scratchless appearance on the screen plus the equal sharing of the black and white shades which were enough to make the characters and the emotions they conveyed stand out from their environs.
The equal distribution of black and white shades could be attributed to the avoidance of sophisticated lighting and the usage of the natural light instead coming from natural locations. The element of lighting in film editing is crucial and the proper distribution of shading were crucial in film-editing (Fairservice 2001). This feature was not applied in the Battleship Potemkin because it was evident that the film contained some unintelligible noises which were derived from editing and shadows of the actors were not properly. Blocking was also the weakness of the Battleship Potemkin as it violates the use of light in emphasizing certain scenes in the movie. Also, there was an improper use of the black screen technique in the particular scene involving the baby in the stroller falling down the stairs. The story was not able to show what happened next which stomped the excitement of the viewers.  
     The  autobiographies in the Les Quatre Cent Coups, even the least sophisticated, involved elements of stylization in which experience was fused into language resulting to an autobiographical narration charged with meaning (Gillain 1990).  Compared with the Battleship Potemkin, Les Quatre Cent Coups used  a dramatic dialogue which were wordy enough and there were scenes, in particular, a teenager running in the woods which were long enough and makes the pacing of the movie slow. In contrast with the Battleship Potemkin, there were fast movements, a feature which could be resembled to a film being pushed into a fast- forward mode. Also, the film did not contain dramatic dialogue, had no lucid moments and every scenario was charged with emotions which ignited the excitement of the audience. Such film expressed the originality and creativity of the director using a freer and more visual film style.
Since the New Wave cinema came before the dominance of the television dramas (Nelmes 2003), street-level and documentary look characteristics were given focus in the Les Quatre Cent Coups. Usage of hand-held camera became a distinct feature in the film which had its primary aim to show the world of the Parisian everyday life. Truffaut worked his wonders on the film by using the unconventional conditions of low-budget productions, mobile equipment, available light, and shooting few retakes (Neupert 2002).
While the Les Quatre Cent Coups reflected a smooth yet dramatic lifestyle of Paris, the main aim of the Battleship Potemkin was to provide a panoramic view of the most relevant events in 1905 from the Russo-Japanese War down to a certain bloody Sunday massacre. In charged with the films editing, Sergei M. Eisenstein said that the he applied some principles on the script the absence of central heroic character, an emphasis on the mass, on collective action, and so on (Taylor 2000).  In contrast, Les Quatre Cent Coupss drama plot necessitated a central heroic character.
Some of Eisenstein visual analysis of the skiffs sequence included the change in the frames articulation from vertical lines to the structure of the arch the plastic arch occupying the foreground and moves into the opposite resolution the contours of a group forming a circle the backs o the small-scale people moving into the background being replaced by large-scale static figures filmed at the front (Taylor 2000). The Les Quatre Cent Coups had a freestyle approach to every scene.
In conclusion, the two films differ in the themes they portray Les Quatre Cent Coups being more focused on lifestyle kind of cinematic effect while the Battleship Potemkin was a panoramic picture of historical events. Both used black and white mode to instigate ingenuity and vintage. The elements of characterization, lighting and film equipment were also used by the films in their own varied ways. Dialogue, script as well as the era which the motion pictures belonged to also varies according to technological innovation in film-making.