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

One of the most important movements in cinema history, the French New Wave of directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais not only revitalised French cinema, but permanently shifted cinema’s aesthetic horizons by incorporating the narrative complexities of emerging modernist literature such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Jean Cayrol. This volume is the first title to comprehensively analyse these links between the New Wave and the New Novel, exploring intellectual figures such as Roland Barthes and Jorge Luis Borges, and their relationship with French cinema and its theorists, including Christian Metz and Noel Burch, as well as discussing groundbreaking films such as Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1962). Examining these connections between the cinematic and the literary avant gardes, Reading the French New Wave locates France’s filmmaking revolution as a part of a wider artistic reevaluation of the mid-twentieth century.