The French New Wave: A New Look (review)

The French New Wave has become a hardy perennial on both film and modern French studies courses, not least because of its social as well as its aesthetic significance. After the recent monographs by Michel Marie and Richard Neupert, it might nevertheless be felt to afford little scope for a new overview. Naomi Greene's book —more accessible perhaps to an Anglophone readership than Marie's, more succinct and in many ways less tendentious than Neupert's —belies such a supposition thanks to the careful contextualization it provides and in particular its stress on the symbiosis between documentary filmmaking and the fiction films of the New Wave directors, which in this light appear as in some sense documentary records of their own making. The work's scope is chronologically tight, going into little detail about films made after 1962, but inclusive in auteur terms, encompassing the early features of the 'Left Bank' grouping that included Varda and Resnais and New Wave precursors such as Bazin —not a filmmaker, but a seminal critical influence —Marker and Melville along with the former Cahiers critics to whom the term is sometimes confined. This double focus, in its first aspect at least doubtless due to pressures of space, makes it a rich and valuable survey of a necessarily brief moment whose context —sociological, political, economic and artistic —receives welcome attention. The analyses of individual films are often perceptive, but sometimes marred by inaccuracy. Thus, most of Chabrol's Les Cousins takes place not in the Latin Quarter but in the chic, and distinctly right-wing, residential suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, while Greene perpetuates the misunderstanding fundamental to the ending of Godard's A bout de souffle by asserting that Michel tells Patricia that 'she is really dégueulasse' (p. 83), whereas what he actually says is 'c'est vraiment dégueulasse.' The importance of the 'culture wars' between France and the United States is also understated in her reading of the Godard film, by some way the shakiest in the book. The work is attractively presented and adequately illustrated, and the brevity which renders it necessarily incomplete may also prove to be one of its major selling-points, for as Paul Willemen states in his cover endorsement, the series of which it forms part is 'tailor-made for a modular approach'. The bibliography makes useful suggestions for further reading, though I was a little surprised not to find Colin MacCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy or the 2006 studies of Resnais by Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues/Jean-Louis Leutrat and Emma Wilson name-checked. It should also be noted that the title of Louis Malle's début feature is Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, not L'Ascenseur à l'échafaud as given herein.