Who Killed Brigitte Bardot?: Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty

Figure 1.

A bloodied and lifeless Bardot sprawls across a red Alfa Romeo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris [Les Films Concordia, 1963]).

Let us begin by contemplating an image of Brigitte Bardot, the most famous woman in the world when the New Wave was taking shape fifty years ago. The image comes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) and is of a bloodied and lifeless Bardot sprawled in a red Alfa Romeo (Figure 1). This image of her violent death not only reminds us of the New Wave’s deep discomfort with Bardot’s celebrity at the time, but also serves as a marker of a greater historiographic unease with Bardot more generally within Film Studies. Her career and films have been largely sidelined in favor of a narrative that has overplayed and privileged the history of the New Wave; Bardot becomes important only insofar as she starred in the films of directors such as Jean- Luc Godard who then self-consciously offered visual unpackings of her enormous celebrity while (perhaps unwittingly) contributing to furthering it. Louis Malle, in A Very Private Affair (Vie privée [1962]), explicitly treats the issue of celebrity by having Bardot play a character so trapped by her own fame that she even suffers one of the earliest paparazzi “death by flashbulb” murders depicted on the screen.

Now that the New Wave is by some accounts “officially” fifty, perhaps, like a wise middle-aged person, it can be sober and mature enough to admit its excesses and exaggerations, its partis pris, and, finally, come to terms with who “it” murdered to get ahead. In particular, I am interested in bringing together recent feminist reevaluations such as Geneviève Sellier’s in Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (which has recently underscored the New Wave’s troubled relationship to women, gender, and sexuality) with broader historical contextualizations that shed light on certain aspects of the marketing of French film about which we ought to know more—marketing that made the New Wave possible in the first place—and in reintegrating film audiences when we are thinking about the New Wave’s history.¹

The first step in coming to terms with middle age is to stop lying about it. We now accept that, while the term “nouvelle vague” was first used by Françoise Giroud in the pages of L’Express in 1957 in relation to an article about the youthful postwar generation, it had nothing to do with the cinema. Critic Pierre Billard coined the term in relation to film in the pages of Cinéma 58 when he made a list of forty filmmakers under forty. The year 1959 has become the benchmark date for the birth of the Nouvelle Vague because Claude Chabrol released Le beau Serge and Les cousins in February/March of that year, and because during the Cannes Film Festival, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) won for Best Director, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (Orfeo Negro) won the Palme D’Or, and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour played then as well, making it seem as if something was happening in French cinema. But 1959 has also been pinpointed because it was in that year, during the Cannes festival, that UniFrance Film (the French Film Export Association) gathered a group of filmmakers and critics at La Napoule, near Cannes, hoping they would proclaim that they collectively stood for a new and unified vision of film. They could agree on nothing more than that films should be an act of personal creation and that filmmaking was a vocation rather than a profession. In some measure, these two points of agreement have stuck as vital aspects of the New Wave’s notion of “auteurism,” although the problem of whether there is any unified artistic expression in the French New Wave seemed then, as much as now, to be a hopeless cause. Yet, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, ever since its “declaration,” the New...