“Film Scholarship and the 50th Anniversary of the French New Wave.” (original) (raw)
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This dissertation develops a comprehensive study of the influence exerted by Hollywood “genre” cinema, in particular the B-series film noir, on the French New Wave. Initially, I ask if this relationship is not the principle identifying criterion of New Wave cinema. It is, after all, a matter of record that Hollywood’s cheaply-made B-movies were championed by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma as permitting authorial self-expression and as encouraging cinematic innovation and evolution. Genre cinema subsequently remained a preoccupation for the New Wave auteurs, who made no fewer than fifty gangster and crime films between 1958 and 1965, including many of the New Wave’s most iconic films. I therefore embark on a comparative study that considers in great detail the New Wave’s reprisal and adaptation of the film noir format, with my analyses focused not only on character and plot conventions, but also on the tropes, aesthetics and filmmaking production techniques common to both cinemas. I show how the two cinemas cross-pollinate, especially given that the French polar itself exerted influence on Hollywood film noir and that French critics were among the first to identify the new tendency towards making film noir in postwar Hollywood. I also draw a number of important conclusions. Primarily, I show that while the New Wave borrows extensively from Hollywood aesthetics, its manipulation and subversion of American film noir conventions are also at the very heart of the politique des auteurs. This politique is characterized by a profound dissatisfaction with their era, the Americanization of French society, France’s involvement in Algeria, and a reticence about the impending sexual liberation movement. I contextualize my project within the current debate in film and French studies regarding the legacy of the New Wave, particularly in light of a tendency to cast doubt on the movement’s involvement with “the political,” as well as to dispute the New Wave’s status as a defining moment in French cinema.
The French New Wave, New Hollywood, and the role of Post Modernism.
The following paper is a comparative study of the French Nouvelle Vague and its subsequent influences on the cinema of New Hollywood during the 1970's based around the artistic and cultural ideologies of Postmodernism as expressed in the works of Frederic Jameson's Postermodernism in Consumer Society and Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I will be exploring the cultural and socio-political parallels between the evolution of the two movements and their reflections of new cinematic conventions and ideologies such as auteur theory and visual experimentation looking in particular at the films and culture of French Cinema from 1954 to 1968 and American cinema from 1967 to 1983. In this respect I will be drawing on comparative textual examples from Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and Jean Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1960) and exploring the common reciprocations in each piece of work comparing them in a broader ideological framework as productions and representations of an artistic culture and post modernist trend. I will also place an emphasis on the philosophies and ideologies expressed by key French film writers Alexandre Astruc in 1948 with his essay on the birth of the new Avante Garde: La Camera Stylo , and later in Cahiers du Cinema by the philosophies of Francois Truffaut and Andre Bazin and how these ideas were reflected in the films of the French New Wave and subsequently later in the films of New Hollywood. The main argument of the dissertation as such will examine this cultural exchange and enduring cinematic legacy of both film cultures by exploring the recurring narrative and character motifs in both to deem whether they can be defined as deriving from Post modernist ideologies.
Anatomy of a film revolution: The case of the Nouvelle Vague
Poetics, 1993
This paper examines the social requirements for successful movements of change within cinema. Using the case of the French Nouvelle Vugue (1958-611, I argue that the explanation of stylistic revolution in film requires a model significantly different from that developed for painting (White and White 1965, Crane 1987). The substantial cost of film production means that movements in film require some form of mass base, a base that, at least in the case analyzed herein, is formed by a combination of social, economic and cultural forces with which film has little to do. Consequently, the critical issue with respect to the success of film movements is not the formation of an audience as it is in painting, but rather the act of recognizing the potential of an audience already formed. In undertaking this process of recognition, cinema, because of its deep cost structure, is dependent on efforts within 'cheaper' media like literature and journalism to prove the viability of the audience for a particular range of styles, themes and narrative techniques.
The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax
JCMS, 2023
Reading Daniel Fairfax's The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973), a spirited, brilliantly researched, and cogently written reevaluation of the militant period of the world's most famous French-language fi lm magazine, is to be reminded of a time when fi lm theory, practice, and politics were conceived as one. The year 1968 has long been mythologized in France as a rupture that brought the country to the brink of revolution and radicalized a generation; it also transformed French fi lm criticism into a political enterprise above all through the eff orts of Cahiers du cinéma. While the narrative of Cahiers du cinéma's revolution from an avatar of postwar cinephilia, which launched the careers of François Truff aut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette as part of the French New Wave, into a radical organ of ideological struggle by the end of the 1960s is well known, it has only been available in piecemeal fashion to Anglophone readers. Fairfax not only synthesizes preexisting literature on the subject in French and English but also provides the opportunity to assess anew the theoretical nuances of this attempt to create a Marxist materialist theory of cinema and society. To this end, Fairfax addresses three key questions about Cahiers du cinéma's political project. First, how did it attempt to intervene in its contemporary historical moment? Second, how did it help shape the
The New Wave's International Influence and Legacy Today
The French New Wave
A s we have seen, the New Wave 's appearance in France at the end of the 1950s marked a rejuvenation, bringing a new generation into the film industry at a time of creative sclerosis. It arrived 10-15 years after the Liberation, an interval that is both characteristic and original in the evolution of French society's cultural production. The sort of post-World War II disruption brought on by the Italian neorealist model of 1944-6 never occurred in France. The only emblematic film of the French resistance was La Bataille du rail (Battle of the Rail), directed in 1946 by René Clément, about the resistance of railroad workers, but Clément's ultimate career would be very different from that of his Italian counterparts such as Roberto Rossellini or Vittorio De Sica. Moreover, French directors like Clément, Becker, Bresson, and Clouzot remained strong individualists, isolated from one another, never coalescing into a collective cultural movement like the mythical neorealists of the same period just over the border in Italy. The milieu of French intellectuals was thus much further removed from the film industry than was the case in Italy. Even when a philosopher as prestigious as Jean-Paul Sartre collaborated on scripts or dialogue for films like Les Jeux sont faits (The Chips are Down, 1947) by Jean Delannoy, or Les Orgueilleux (The Proud Ones, 1953) by Yves Allégret, the results were not always definitive or aesthetically productive. An important area of inquiry posed by cinema history concerns the period just before the French New Wave and its relations to other "young
Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film
2016
As with many aspects of European cultural life, film was galvanized and transformed by the revolutionary fervor of 1968. This groundbreaking study provides a full account of the era’s cinematic crises, innovations and provocations, as well as the social and aesthetic contexts in which they appeared. The author mounts a genuinely fresh analysis of a contested period in which everything from the avant-garde experiments of Godard, Pasolini, Schroeter and Fassbinder, to the “low” cinematic genres of horror, pornography and the Western, reflected the cultural upheaval of youth in revolt—a cinema for the barricades.