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

In Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France, Dorota Ostrowska sets out to reveal the extent to which the histories of avant-garde film and literary movements in France during the 1950s and 1960s are inextricably intertwined. The murky relationship between the nouveau roman and nouvelle vague has been addressed by other scholars,¹ but Ostrowska approaches the subject from an innovative angle: instead of training her eye on the films and novels themselves, her focus is on the contemporaneous critical discourse generated around literary and cinematic production. This wide-ranging, ambitious study gathers together an array of figures that helped to shape French literary and cinematic developments in the latter half of the twentieth century, including such unexpected protagonists as Jean- Paul Sartre, Gérard Genette, the Surrealists, Alfredo Bioy Casares, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Reading the French New Wave is presented chronologically from 1951 to 1967, with special emphasis on Holocaust survivor, critic, novelist, and filmmaker Jean Cayrol, to whom Ostrowska devotes an entire chapter. Some of the most famous members of the nouvelle vague, such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, appear only marginally in the book. This is a deliberate strategy on the part of the author, whose focus is on figures such as Cayrol whose ties between the nouveau roman and nouvelle vague are clear, and on figures who meditated directly on one medium from the vantage point of the other (e.g., director Eric Rohmer, who thought film might eclipse the novel and attain the status of “new visual literature”).² One of the merits of Ostrowska’s study is her insistence on looking beyond the few names and concepts that have come to be associated with these movements; as she highlights in the introduction, the most intense phase of the nouvelle vague (from about 1959 to 1962) comprised dozens more directors and critics than the eight or so filmmakers normally associated with the term. The author carefully weaves each strand of her historical narrative in order to define a very specific, yet stubbornly elusive concept: the “cine-literary,” in which cinematic and literary elements “are presented as equivalent to each other and hybrid in nature.”³

Ostrowska begins by painstakingly outlining the historical conditions that brought the two movements into being. The author’s overall strategy is to be synthetic and recursive; she stops to summarize within chapters as well as at the end of each one, which is particularly helpful given the range of material she covers. She connects theoretical developments of the cinematic and literary avant-gardes from the 1920s to those of the 1950s (e.g., photogénie and roman pur) and adumbrates the creation of the journal Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, foregrounding the nouvelle vague’s filmmaking as it emerged out of the crucible of Cahiers’ critical practice. Ostrowska contends that far from being truly emancipated from the language and concepts of literature, the Cahiers critics in the 1950s created a taxonomy of cinema based heavily on literary comparisons and antecedents. The theoretical terms developed by them (écriture, mise-en-scène, politique des auteurs)—many of which have been foundational to cinematic discourse—are also derived from literary references. “This created a paradoxical situation,” she explains, “where the definition of pure cinematic form was based on a literary framework.”⁴ At the same time, the novelists and critics associated with the nouveau roman—including Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jean Cayrol—drew on many of the same inspirations as the Cahiers group: American authors such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the interconnection between artistic production and strong critical practice.

Though filmmaker Alain Resnais has mostly abstained from writing about film and has never fit neatly into the nouvelle vague mold, Ostrowska locates a kind of apotheosis in his partnerships with nouveau roman...