Masculine Singular , livre ebook

280

pages

English

Ebooks

2008

Écrit par
Sellier Genevieve Sellier ,
traduit par Ross Kristin Ross

Publié par
Duke University Press

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280

pages

English

Ebooks

2008

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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

25 mars 2008

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822388975

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France's leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Genevieve Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema's formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they "wrote" in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema.Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers' focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave's iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier's thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy-the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an "auteur theory" recognizing the director as artist-came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema's modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

25 mars 2008

EAN13

9780822388975

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Masculine Singular

Masculine Singular French New Wave Cinema

Geneviève Sellier Translated by Kristin Ross

Duke University Press Durham and London 2008

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

vii

Acknowledgments

Introduction The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

Chapter One A New Generation Marked by the Emergence of Women

Chapter Two Cinephilia in the 1950s

Chapter Three Auteur Cinema: An A√air of State

Chapter Four Contrasting Receptions

Contents

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Chapter Five The Precursors

Chapter Six Between Romanticism and Modernism

Chapter Seven Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity

Chapter Eight The Women of the New Wave: Between Modern and Archaic

Chapter Nine Jeanne Moreau: Star of the New Wave and Icon of Modernity

Chapter Ten Brigitte Bardot and the New Wave: An Ambivalent Relationship

Chapter Eleven The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank: A ‘‘Feminist’’ Alternative?

Conclusion The New Wave’s Legacy: ‘‘Auteur Cinema’’

Appendix One Box O≈ce Results

Appendix Two The Press

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Noël Burch and Ginette Vincendeau for their intellectual support and for their friendship throughout the period of time I spent writing this book. My thanks to Michel Marie and Laurent Creton for their attentive reading of the ﬁrst draft. I am grateful to the Film Archives (Bois d’Arcy) for making it possible for me to view its prints ofThérèse Des-queyrouxandVacances portugaises. For the American edition, my deepest thanks go to Kristin Ross and Alice Kaplan. For its illustrations, I thank the Bibliothèque du Film in Paris. I thank Alain Gresh for being by my side.

Introduction The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

What is striking about New Wave cinema is the fact that it gave rise to such an abundant literature, beginning as soon as the movement itself began in ∞ 1959. Essays and commentary about the New Wave appeared not only in the mainstream press and in the journals that supported or critiqued the movement—Cahiers du cinémaandPositif, respectively—but also, almost instantaneously, in works written by André Labarthe in 1961, by Jacques Siclier the same year, and by Raymond Borde, Freddy Buache, and Jean ≤ Curtelin in 1962. Outside the immediate cinematic milieu (which, by the way, is still briskly tearing itself apart on the subject) New Wave cinema immediately awoke the passionate interest of the academic world: witness, for example, the investigation published in 1962 by a group of sociologists headed by Edgar Morin, which attempted to evaluate the changes in ﬁlm representations linked to the emergence of the new cinema. The movement was, from the outset, ‘‘overmediatized,’’ as we might say today, and it was

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