Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France (review)

This is an original and well-researched study that successfully places the Nouvelle Vague into an expanded frame of artistic and cultural reference by directly linking its critical and discursive practices with the narrative complexities of the Nouveau Roman. The author concentrates on the period from 1951 to 1967, which saw an increasing engagement by writers and filmmakers with the nature of the visual versus the verbal. Following an excellent introduction, the book divides chronologically into four main sections: ‘Prehistory: 1951–1959’, ‘Revisions: 1959–1961’, ‘Fusions: Jean Cayrol’ and ‘Theory: 1963–1967’. Ostrowska teases out methodically the often paradoxical twists and turns of this dazzling period of experimentation across form, revealing the extent to which the emerging definition of the Nouveau Roman reflected the cultural impact of cinema. Indeed, in order to be purely literary, the novel had to become ‘hybrid – visual and textual at the same time, or cine-literary’ (p. 24). The collaboration between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet on L’Année dernière à Marienbad produced first and foremost a ‘cine-novel’, or textual film, while the film itself was regarded more as an example of literary cinema. Ostrowska recuperates the often forgotten importance to French cinema of foreign writers such as Borges and Bioy Casares (whose La Invención de Morel was a determining influence on L’Année dernière à Marienbad) and highlights exactly why Robbe-Grillet’s own entry into film-making was so much derided by Cahiers du cinéma, still then under the sway of Bazin. She also argues very convincingly for the strategic importance of Metz who overcame the separation between formal inquiries into cinema and the novel later favoured by Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou by reintroducing narrative as the key common denominator of the visual and literary arts. The chapter on Cayrol, scriptwri-ter of Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard and Muriel, is perhaps the most satisfying because if offers the rare chance for personal close readings and explores the powerful parallels drawn in Lazare parmi nous between the camps, dreams and the cinematic screen. Ostrowska can at times be a little too sweeping in her judgements, for instance, summarily dismissing Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste as inferior to Les 400 coups and presenting Duras unproblematically as a canonical new novelist without acknowledging that Duras herself consistently refused this label. This is a volume that delights in its references and associations, yet occasionally the weight of detail can be counterproductive. Moreover, the accuracy is not always assured. For example, Léger’s first-name is rendered as ‘Férnand’, Resnais’s short Le Chant du Styrène is truncated to ‘Le Styrène’ and the term ‘tradition de qualité’ becomes ‘tradition de la qualité’. Finally, the wonderful cover image of reading in action taken from Godard’s La Chinoise (the book’s only illustration) is a little misleading, since it gestures towards a filmmaker and period (May 1968) that are not really examined. Indeed, Godard gets rather short shrift here on the reductive grounds that he privileged language and sound over the image (p. 175) and never engaged creatively with the new novelists. So rewarding is this study, however, that such problems and concerns, while important, do not seriously detract from its overall achievement.