French New Wave

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 Ethics of Realism may be too tame a title for the rambunctious scholarship this book contains. Lúcia Nagib has a sharp eye for what, through her lens, become stupefying motifs and moments within films that she just as sharply cuts out of the vast herd of movies. You can sense her pleasure at relaying to us the cinematic power she has found in cast-off ‘failures’ like I am Cuba or that she resuscitates in films we thought we knew , such as The400 Blows. Ultimately tying these to historical struggles of filmmakers and the societies they worked within, she does in fact make good on her title. This is a truly high-minded argument for cinema as the conscience of the past century. The films Nagib illuminates made and kept promises to the world they came from. This book honours the importance, not just the beauty of cinematic art.’
Dudley Andrew

‘Lúcia Nagib’s book World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism injects new vitality and energy into some important but familiar debates in film theory. In the first instance, her surprising selection of films challenges existing concepts of world cinema. More radically, however, these films have a unifying aesthetic out of which Nagib’s own approach to realism comes into focus. These are films that privilege rawness and physicality, that place extreme demands on performers and producers, and inescapably work with the reality of event as well as the recording function of the medium itself. Nagib’s grounding for the aesthetic of realism is based on an ethical commitment to the living, temporal, spatial and dramatic exchange between the camera as mechanism and the extreme event it is filming. Nagib has successfully turned the theoretical kaleidoscope, reconfiguring the crucial concept of realism, its significance for film theory, into new, exciting, sometimes shocking, patterns of thought and perception.’
Laura Mulvey

       
World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism is a highly original study. Traditional views of cinematic realism usually draw on the so-called classical cinema and its allegiance to narrative mimesis, but Nagib challenges this, drawing instead on the filmmaker’s commitment to truth and to the film medium’s material bond with the real. Starting from the premise that world cinema’s creative peaks are governed by an ethics of realism, Nagib conducts comparative case studies picked from world new waves, such as the Japanese New Wave, the French nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Russo-Cuban Revolutionary Cinema, the Portuguese self-performing auteur and the Inuit Indigenous Cinema. In all cases, making films is making history, entailing change in the real life of casts and crews, and therefore producing, rather than reproducing, reality. Drawing upon Badiou and Rancière, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism revisits and reformulates several fundamental concepts in film studies, such as illusionism, identification, apparatus, alienation effects, presentation and representation. Its groundbreaking scholarship takes film theory in a bold new direction.

Many studies centred on Godard do not relate his films and ideas to other film practice. This study of essay film, taking as its central object Godard's Histoire(s), uses cognitive mapping to relate his work to Resnais, Marker, Debord, Pasolini.

If “every tracking shot is a moral act,” as Jean-Luc Godard has once remarked, then filmmaking in the aftermath of colonialism must have posed numerous challenges to a fresh offbeat Nouvelle Vague director like himself. How is filmmaking possible after colonialism? What needs to be changed, salvaged, ridiculed? How does technique work thematically and content stylistically to “track,” with candid morality, the state of art and politics in postcolonial France? This is what this papers about.

Key words: A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Theodor Adorno, French Colonial Algeria, Colonialism, Bretolt Brecht , le cinéma de papa, Postcolonial Studies, Fin de cinema, Frantz Fanon,
Jean-Luc Godard, La Nouvelle Vague/ French New Wave,
Le Mepris (Contempt), Verfremdungseffekt
(Defamiliarization, Estrangement Effect)

This book chapter considers how Godard re-adapts the thematic concerns of his 1963 film Contempt in his later projects, including Soft and Hard (1985), and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98). The chapter considers Godard as a prolific, albeit unconventional adapter of literature and other media, a filmmaker whose use of citation is bound up with his interests in translation and adaptation.

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962) has emerged as one of the foundational texts of postwar European cinema. Yet film studies’ predominantly formal emphasis on Marker’s play with movement, stasis, and temporality has undermined investigations of the film’s political content. Focusing on the film’s central theme of torture, this article shows how the relays between La jetée’s two dominant settings—the concentration camp and a Paris in the not-so-distant-past—generate a series of displacements between the colonial and consumer contexts of early 1960s France.

"YARININ FİLMİ bana bir romandan daha kişisel geliyor; bir itiraf ya da
samimi bir günlük kadar kişisel ve otobiyografik olacak. Genç filmciler kendilerini birinci tekil şahıs olarak ifade edecekler ve başlarından geçenleri anlatacaklar — bu onların ilk aşkları olacak ya da sonuncusu; politik uyanışları; bir seyahatname; bir hastalık; askerlik hizmetleri; evlilikleri; en son tatillerinin öyküsü — ve bunun her zaman tadına varacağız, çünkü bu gerçek ve yeni olacak. ”

PDF z całą książką.
Abstract:
Ophelism should be defined as a visual code. It emerged at the turn of 18th century, when images of young female body immersed in water and/or flowers begun to function as the representation of the mystery of femininity. Usually, 19th century Ophelism have been treated as examples of misogynist convictions, framing femininity as madness, untamed sexuality or unreasonable and passive nature. At the same time opposite meanings have been attributed to Ophelic images present in contemporary feminist art. The book "Ophelism. Romantic Reappropriations, Feminist Interventions" origins in an intuition that neither was 19th century Ophelism a homogenous, univocal phenomenon nor its 20th century embodiments should be seen in this way either. Providing case studies of works of literature, painting, opera, film, and performance, the author  discusses representations of female (at times, effeminate) body, where the motives of water and/or flowers unsettle traditional narratives, questioning gender dualism, opposition between nature and culture, hierarchical orders.
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Ofelizm nie jest pojęciem analogicznym do hamletyzmu. Oznacza rodzaj wizualnego języka, który wyłania się na przełomie XVIII i XIX wieku i rozwija niezależnie od teatralnych reprezentacji, za podstawę mając nie sceny z udziałem Ofelii, lecz przedstawienia jej śmierci. Przyjęło się uważać, że te wizerunki ciała młodej kobiety w otoczeniu kwiatów i/lub wody wcielają mizoginiczne wyobrażenia, które kobiecość  ujmują w kategoriach szaleństwa, nieujarzmionej seksualności, przynależności do sfery natury. Książka "Ofelizm. Romantyczne zawłaszczenia, feministyczne interwencje" wyrosła z przekonania, że w ofelizmie od początku istniało i nadal istnieje kilka nurtów. Tematem zamieszczonych w niej studiów są przedstawienia kobiecego (niekiedy ukobieconego) ciała, w których woda i kwiaty służą rozsadzeniu tradycyjnych narracji i zakwestionowaniu dualizmu płci, opozycji natury i kultury, porządku opartego na hierarchiach. Omówienia wybranych tekstów, obrazów i inscenizacji tworzą tu alternatywną historię ofelizmu, w której stawką jest pytanie o jego wywrotowy potencjał.

Nous avons tous encore en tête ses fameuses Trois petites notes de musique ou le ton canaille de Brigitte Bardot et Jeanne Moreau distillant leur joie de vivre dans Viva Maria.
Le Mépris, Platoon, Le dernier métro, Un homme pour léternité, ou encore Jules et Jim, cétait lui, Georges Delerue. Plus de 400 partitions pour limage. 40 ans de carrière. Trois Césars, un Oscar...
Mais il faut regarder au-delà des chiffres. Georges Delerue, cest le destin extraordinaire de lenfant du Nord qui se lance en autodidacte dans la musique faute de pouvoir payer ses premiers cours. Pris en charge par Darius Milhaud, Delerue acquiert ensuite au Conservatoire de Paris une formation classique poussée, couronnée par un Grand Prix de Rome.
Laventure de la musique de scène débute dans les premiers festivals de province daprès-guerre. Engagé par Vilar au T.N.P., Delerue servira parallèlement durant de longues années les uvres de Clavel, Shakespeare, Ionesco ou Beckett, tout en laissant une uvre contemporaine considérable pour le ballet, le son et lumière et la musique de concert.
Puis cest le passage au cinéma, porté par larrivée de la Nouvelle Vague et de ses jeunes réalisateurs Colpi, Truffaut -dont il fut longtemps le complice musical- Godard, Resnais, Kast... Cest dailleurs au cinéma quil connaîtra lessentiel de sa renommée, signant par la suite outre-Atlantique les bandes originales des films de Jack Clayton, Mike Nichols, Fred Zinnemann ou Oliver Stone.
Au début des années 80, il sinstallera définitivement aux Etats-Unis, et deviendra rapidement lun des compositeurs les plus aimés et les plus admirés dHollywood. Il y décèlera tragiquement en 1992, au moment même où sortait sa dernière uvre originale, Dien Bien Phu, de Pierre Schoendoerffer. Il était âgé de 67 ans.
Sappuyant sur près de quatre années de travail et sur le recueil de nombreux témoignages de première main, ce livre constitue la première biographie consacrée à Georges Delerue, un des musiciens les plus couramment associés aujourdhui au cinéma français des années 60.

COUPURES DE PRESSE

"Un bourreau de travail, constamment inventif, capable de composer pour trois films par an en variant sans cesse son inspiration, sa facture musicale, son orchestration. Un musicien qui avait choisi de fuir sa tour d'ivoire afin de combler l'ouïe de tout un chacun."

L'Humanité



"Georges Delerue eut une activité considérable... S'il nous plaît de retenir plus volontiers son apport au cinéma français, c'est qu'il y a trouvé son véritable domaine d'expression lyrique. Mais il sut se renouveler et sa réputation de compositeur international était parfaitement justifiée."

Le Monde



"La beauté de ses musiques résonne encore en nous"

Télérama



"Quels que soit ses succès dans le 7ème Art, Georges Delerue n'a jamais abandonné ses amis du "classique". Toujours la tentation de la musique pure pour le docteur Jekyll. Mr Hyde n'acceptait pas pour autant de composer de la musique "impure"..."

Le Figaro



"On ne se lasse pas des contes de fées... Ils sont faits pour être dits et redits le soir avant d'aller dormir. La vie de Georges Delerue en est un..."

Roubaix Informations

Les rapports de Chris Marker à la Nouvelle Vague seront complexes, car tout opposait ce proche de Bazin aux cinéastes des Cahiers du cinéma, tant sur le fond que sur la forme. Des liens entre Marker et Godard se constitueront au moment du cinéma militant de Mai 68 mais les malentendus vont demeurer...

This essay examines the "Introduction to the method of Alfred Hitchcock" segment in episode 4A of Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma to argue that what appears to be a straightforward salute to Hitchcock's poetic power and control of the universe is, in fact, a complex attempt on Godard's part to distinguish his own videographic montage. Godard is shown to build towards a moment of distinction that turns on the device of superimposition, which Godard retools in Histoire(s) as an instrument of detection, the discoveries of which are potentially miraculous. The stakes of Godard's reworking are shown to be public rather than private, and ethical as much as formal.

This article examines Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme (2010) through its references to the fiction of William Faulkner. This article contends that Film Socialisme's distinctive method of allusion serves a poetic function, beckoning our attention to how language, representations, and ideas recirculate, and what this means to us—or should mean to us—in a world pervaded by digital technology and intellectual property regimes. Godard's references to the fiction of William Faulkner serve as a case study, not only because they offer a rich illustration of how Godard reworks his source material, but also because the filmmaker has consistently gestured to the work of Faulkner throughout his career, from his first feature-length film to his most recent. This article finds that the film's circuitous and prolific method of allusion functions both as a means to critique commonly held notions of authorship, and to point out the absurdity of copyright laws, or as they are known in France, droits d'auteur. Further, Film Socialisme's use of Light in August in points to an epistemic anxiety regarding the limits of language and narrative to faithfully represent lived experience, and in turn, the world.

In 1965, worldwide acclaimed French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard created a dystopian world governed by a totalitarian system, and to be specific a computerized entity, criticizing exactly what the present societies of the 21st century are considered victims of. His attempt to recreate Paris as, on one hand the heart of European modernism and on the other a foreground image of the future metropolis, has not only exploited the common background thoughts of European cinema, but also reimagined a whole universe of technological totalitarianism. The striking aspect of Alphaville (1965) is the extreme similarity with the current world’s commodified image. On a narrative level, the main protagonist’s name ‘Caution’ comes from a place known as the ‘Outlands’, strong repelling names that are referred, according to the movie, as every place or person that does not correspond to the technological rules and principles of the city of Alphaville. Mapping these names on today’s reality, they can refer to certain political actors who deviate from the state’s exerting-power approach, of which in my opinion would be the future of Paris in Godard’s perspective. On a symbolic level, the city imposes certain policies and regulations to be followed, exerts political power and control over its citizens through artificial intelligence, and encompasses symbolic signs, e.g. arrows, whose aim is to force individuals to move in a directed path with limited freedom or flexibility. On an architecture level, Alphaville is represented physically with modern features and hard reflective surfaces, which basically identify the soulless society that has become imprisoned within its own modern computerized buildings.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the similarities between Godard’s dystopian picture and the world today, with the focus on Paris during the 1960s and today, from three perspectives: the characters, the symbolic images, and the architecture features. My objective is to explore Godard’s personal stance on the political world through Alphaville, and how he attempted to re-draw and at the same time predict the future of the modernized society.

Through the lens of Russian Formalists this paper explores how Robert Bresson narrows the expressiveness of his individual shots to expand his stylistic ability to liberate the cinema from its dependence on theatrical conventions and literary expectations.  Using many early observations concerning cinematic form by the Russian formalists, Robert Bresson's film PICKPOCKET is discussed as an anachronistic fulfillment of the Formalists discussion of unique aspects of cinematic expression: That Robert Bresson limits what can be seen with the naked eye in his films to open new vistas of cinematic expressiveness.  4 shots from a sequence of the film PICKPOCKET are analyzed to reveal how limiting visual expression potentially increases cinematic expressiveness.

While much has been written about Jean-Luc Godard in relation to his formal experimentation or his political activism during his Nouvelle Vague period in French Cinema of the 1960s. However, little has focused exclusively on the politicized creation of discursive space between sound and image. In this research paper, I point to this discursive relationship between visual and sonic sources of information within Godard’s work, and showcase how it subverts Classical Hollywood conventions and enables Godard to use film style to express his political views.

This paper received First Class Honors at Trinity College, Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

This article explores an overlooked aspect of Agnès Varda’s pioneering La Pointe Courte (1954)—its function as a literary adaptation. La Pointe Courte was significant to the French New Wave not only in its use of American literary modernist narrative strategies but in its execution of a new model of adaptive poetics that brazenly flouted expectations of fidelity to a literary source. La Pointe Courte’s adaptation of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner—a central literary reference for French film critics after the Second World War—supplied an important, but often uncredited, blueprint for directors like Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, whose films modelled on literary modernist prose and abstracted, deliberately unfaithful filmic adaptations would be more readily recognized by critics for their originality. Varda’s analogical literary adaptation anticipated shifts in cinematic style that would echo throughout later works by directors affiliated with the Nouvelle Vague, including Godard and Resnais. This article seeks to revise how we understand the Nouvelle Vague’s origins, which, as Geneviève Sellier has argued, has all too often been told from the perspective of the masculine singular.

Cette étude du film de Jean-Luc Godard "Le Mépris" se fonde sur une analyse comparée du "scénario" conservé à la Cinémathèque française et du manuscrit autographe publié en 2013. Elle le réinscrit aussi dans son contexte de création et de réception en convoquant diverses sources filmiques et critiques.

This essay studies the long-overlooked and long-forgotten French New Wave filmmaker, Paule Delsol, focusing on her debut feature, La Dérive (Drift, 1962–1964). Using archival primary documents, the essay first examines Delsol's artistic emergence, her independent mode of production, her interactions with François Truffaut and her outlier status within the New Wave. Second, the essay examines the feminist design of
La Dérive, its stylistic and temporal agitations, its considerations of
female-centred domestic binds in 1960s France, versus better-known
New Wave texts. Third, the essay contrasts La Dérive’s polarised
reception, especially its censorship and distribution problems, with
Delsol’s enfranchised status at Cahiers du cinéma, emphasising her
many published contributions to the New Wave’s agenda. In sum, we discover the full embattled range of Delsol's long-repressed career, and finally correct the often reproduced line that Agnès Varda was the only woman associated with the French New Wave.

This article explores the New Wave's divergence from Bazinian principles of cinematic realism. While Bazin undoubtedly helped shape the future auteurs' realist ambitions, providing them with a discursive framework for considering questions of cinematic truth, the New Wave filmmakers soon realized the inherent difficulties in Bazin's belief that photography and cinema were tools for achieving phenomenological "truth." They therefore developed intricate strategies for critiquing their own films' truth claim as well as for infusing their films with subjectivity. The resulting "actuality aesthetic" is a showcase for cinema as art's most translucent medium; aspiring to represent life "as it is," but in the process of doing so, manipulating the image and subjectifying reality.

The article locates Le Joli Mai within the context of cinéma vérité to reconsider its status as documentary with regard to Marker’s historiographic concerns. It does this through analyzing the director’s multivalent aesthetics that is formulated by his unorthodox focus on the hand and cinephiliac references throughout this filmic document of May 1962.

Sokourov et l'humanisme, une affaire de cadre. Libre, il faut avoir senti le cadre. Dans un entretien avec les Cahiers du Cinéma (novembre 2015, n°716), le réalisateur russe Alexandre Sokourov défend Pétain au nom d'une certaine idée de l'humanisme : « Pour moi, la décision historique de Pétain a été bonne pour la France. Il y avait beaucoup de circonstances morales très dures, mais c'était une position justifiée. Plus de vies humaines ont été sauvées de cette manière. Le film part de ça, de cette balance : quel est le prix de la vie humaine ? Pendant que vous pouviez aller au café à Paris, les Russes mouraient en masse. Peut-être qu'on est morts pour cela d'ailleurs, pour Paris et pour la culture. Mais personne ne nous a dit merci (…) Au cours des huit premiers mois, trois millions de Russes ont été tués ou faits prisonniers sur le front de l'Est. Mais on ne peut pas dire qui est coupable. Le choix de Pétain, sa décision de trouver un compromis, était sans doute très dure mais aussi plus humaniste. Toute décision humaniste a un versant moral compliqué ». On serait tenté de dire que M. Sokourov a parfaitement raison. L'humanisme de Pétain dans son refus de livrer à la mort des millions de français est, dans une perspective littérale, incontestable, et toute décision humaniste a un versant moral compliqué. Mais nous serions tentés de le dire pour préciser aussitôt que M. Sokourov ne peut avoir raison que dans un certain cadre, un cadre ancien, oublié, qui nous apparaît à sa lecture étranger, cadre qui est celui de la nation, cadre qu'il adopte d'ailleurs explicitement, par l'utilisation régulière du « on » renvoyant à ses compatriotes russes (« Peut-être qu'on est morts pour cela d'ailleurs »). Sauf que l'on se rend vite compte – immédiatement, intuitivement, par analogie à cette idée de cadre – que M. Sokourov ne peut avoir tout à fait raison, parce que le cadre dont il parle, dont il part, la nation, n'existait alors pas, puisqu'elle ne respectait pas ses promesses – son propre discours – et excluait ceux qui lui appartenaient légitimement, tout un pan de la population, les juifs bien entendu, et les autres victimes de la politique nazie, sans que rien ne justifie ce geste.

This article will analyse how cinema can be used to challenge dominant representations of war by comparing two French coordinated portmanteau films, and examine the role of the film-makers as public intellectuals in France. Its starting point will be Chris Marker's Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam, 1967), which was primarily about America's war in Vietnam. This film will be compared with Alain Brigand's 2002 film 11'0901 September 11 (known in French under the title 11 minutes 9 seconds 1 image), which uses the portmanteau format as a means of exploring representations of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and the ensuing War on Terror. It will be shown that both works share several cinematic and political preoccupations, notably concerning the use of images in justifying and opposing war. It will be concluded that both films demonstrate how challenging representations of war can provoke a great deal of aesthetic as well as political debate on both sides of the Atlantic.