La Nouvelle Vague: un cinéma au masculin singulier (review)

Gendered French analyses of non-canonical literary texts are, as most readers of FS will surely know, extremely rare. The major instances in cinematic terms hitherto, with the major exception of Françoise Audé (Ciné-modèles, cinéma d'elles), have been at least partly produced by scholars who are either not French (Noë l Burch and Geneviè ve Sellier's La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930-1956) or are based outside France (Ginette Vincendeau and Claude Gauteur's Jean Gabin: anatomie d'un mythe). Sellier's book thus represents a significant new departure, one to which hitherto 'la tradition ciné philique française' (p. 7) has been powerfully resistant. The value of her work for a readership in the UK and the USA is multiple. It analyses the politique des auteurs —cornerstone of the Cahiers du cinéma approach in which the New Wave directors were formed — in pungently Oedipal terms, as a 'façon de s'engendrer soi-même en s'inventant des pères' (p.24) from the American cinema in reaction against the 'natural' fathers represented by the execrated directors of the 1950s cinéma de qualité. It points the finger at the sexism implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the New Wave's 'peur d'être absorbée dans une culture de masse féminisée' (p. 19) itself characteristic of a broader French cultural formation which blended class- and gender-based elitism. It deals, at once fascinatingly and frustratingly, with film-makers such as Pierre Kast and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, whose work has become all but inaccessible even to the most dedicated. It gives space to Positif's critique of the apoliticism they saw as characteristic of Cahiers and thus of the NewWave. It does not allow gender considerations to eclipse issues of class, crystallized in the uncomfortable assertion that in New Wave films 'les protagonistes appartiennent à la même (petite) bourgeoisie urbaine cultivée et les rapports amoureux semblent échapper à toute détermination sociale' (p. 88), though Godard in particular might be thought at least in part to refute this. It provides stimulating analysis of the work of leading female stars — not only the 'usual suspects' Bardot and Moreau, but the less often discussed Bernadette Lafont and Annie Girardot. There are infelicities, as when Sellier underrates the androgynous qualities of Alain Delon (never a New Wave actor) or a trifle sweepingly sees the Emmanuelle Riva character in Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour as 'un personnage féminin qui parvient peu à peu à exister grâce à ce démiurge' (p. 187) that is her Japanese lover. Many would see her as endowed with a more powerful subjectivity than that. Nevertheless, this is an indispensable, and massively overdue, revisiting of the most canonical period of French — perhaps of all European — cinema. There are no illustrations, but Sellier detaches herself very positively from hegemonic French practice in providing an index.