Search Results

This chapter focuses on Maurice Pialat's relationship to the Nouvelle Vague and to two major filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s against whose work Pialat measured his own: Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. Pialat's outburst reflects his longstanding resentment over the fact that the young directors of the Nouvelle Vague had already begun to make names for themselves in the 1960s while he was still struggling to make films. His sense that he had not been given the same opportunities as the little group of friends at Cahiers led him to reject the Nouvelle Vague and belittle its importance. He turned elsewhere to find a model for a successful career in film, looking back to the popular cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, to films by major directors such as Pagnol, Carné or Renoir and the Saturday night cinema he had loved as a child. Yet the small-budget revolution associated with the Nouvelle Vague made it increasingly difficult for any filmmaker to aspire to a career in the mould of Pagnol or Carné.

The ‘author - auteur’ appears in the disjunctions and hiatuses not as the artist who creates the complete work, but rather in the formula of Godard, ‘the work and the idea of the work’, ‘the work and the theory of the work’, the presence of the author as critic and as reflecting on the work and its processes, questioning what the work is and so completely as to efface the author - in the tradition of the Nouvelle Vague.

This chapter seeks to contextualise Chabrol’s extensive filmography; reassess its place and significance in French Cinema; and shed light over key influences on Chabrol’s aesthetic. The detailed analysis of his first four films, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, A Double tour and Les Bonnes Femmes, helps to understand the formal inventiveness and diversity of his overlooked Nouvelle Vague palette whilst offering key insights into recurrent Chabrolean motifs: the gradual blurring or undermining of realistic / naturalistic modes of representation; expressionistic mise en scène; self-reflexive structures and theatricality; voyeurism; oppressive relationships and family dynamics. Whilst the influence of Lang, Hitchcock and Renoir on Chabrol is already well established, in this chapter Balzac’s pragmatic aesthetic is identified as pivotal: beyond the numerous diegetic references to Balzac, Chabrol draws on Balzac’s ‘mosaic’ approach in order to conceptualise his œuvre. It is argued that the Balzacian strategy of the recurrence of characters (see the recurring trio of Charles, Paul, Hélène) helps Chabrol to turn contemporary material into ‘myths’ and build his own dark Human Comedy.

In surveying the reception of the nouveau roman in Britain from its initial emergence in the late 1950s, this chapter begins by looking at the various names given to the phenomenon of the nouveau roman, and their significations. The predominance of Alain Robbe-Grillet and his notion of chosisme is considered. Then a number of vituperative conservative critiques are discussed. Existentialism, the nouvelle vague, and modernism are shown to be major points of reference in the reception of the nouveau roman. The chapter concludes with two codas. The first considers the edges of a reception history of the nouveau roman in Britain by looking to creative responses from the cinema (Tony Richardson, Peter Brook), visual media (Martin Vaughn-James, Ian Hamilton Finlay), life-writing (W. G. Sebald), and music (Harrison Birtwistle). The second looks at the adoption of the nouveau roman in British academe, and the rise of Theory.

Several decades after the inception of the Hong Kong New Wave, critics still struggle to respond to the charge that "[t]here was no new aesthetic landscape"; that this so-called New Wave was only an imitation of the French nouvelle vague with an emphasis on local political and social issues. However, because of the imaginary grid of the term "New Wave," critics have failed to take into account the intensely physical aspect of these films; blood, gore and severed limbs litter the new landscape. Elements of body horror are deployed to excite and disgust the audience, and to question the impossible formation of Hong Kong's identity by returning to its corporeal vessel. This new corpo-reality is a characteristic shared by the films of Ann Hui, Dennis Yu, Tsui Hark and other Hong Kong directors at that time. In other words, these directors not only turn to contemporary Hong Kong for inspiration, but they also reconfigure the limitations of body-image à la Deleuze to reflect upon individual dilemmas faced by a community surrounded by various imperial regimes, including China, Japan and the British colonial government. My essay contends that it is impossible to recognize the innovations of the Hong Kong New Wave without reexamining the corporeal manifestations on screen.

This chapter argues that the French popular film is a contradiction in terms: French cinema has long been associated with high culture, and despite the iconoclastic verve and youth appeal of the Nouvelle Vague, the longer-term impact of this hugely influential movement was to reinforce perception of French film as self-reflexive and demanding rather than aimed at a wide audience. It defines cinema as an intrinsically popular medium. Not only does cinema's visual storytelling appeal across levels of education and class, but the ontological shift its invention produced in the subject's relationship to space, time and other subjectivities gave pleasure to the mass of the population. Developments in cinema's wonderful capacity to take people elsewhere continue to thrill a socially diverse public, and to inflect their vision in the widest senses of the word.