Editorial: late work and legacies

Abstract

It is widely assumed that the New Wave has been singularly influential in the history of French cinema. In fact, while the nouvelle vague remains a constant point of reference for both filmmakers and critics (Morrey 2019), the movement itself can be seen to have marked such a unique conjunction of social, demographic and cultural shifts in France (de Baecque 1998; Neupert 2002) that it is unlikely ever to be repeated in the cinema. James Tweedie (2013) has argued that the New Wave was essentially a response to economic modernisation and the consequent rapid urban renewal in France and he suggests that comparable film movements can be found in subsequent decades in Taiwan and China as a result of broadly similar cultural transitions. Yet the New Wave can also be understood as a late example of a widely shared public culture that was soon eclipsed by the private consumption of television, gradually leading to the extreme fragmentation and specialisation of popular culture that we experience today. Still, any new and youthful development in French cinema must inevitably measure itself against the nouvelle vague and critics have been making these comparisons, with results both negative (the 1980s cinéma du look) and positive (the 1990s jeune cinéma français) for several decades (Morrey 2019). More broadly, any French director who looks upon filmmaking as a kind of artistic research, rather than purely as a mean to entertain, is bound to find models and inspiration in the New Wave. In this issue, Fiona Handyside explores the debt owed by Mia Hansen-Løve to the work of Éric Rohmer, in particular around the close attention paid by both directors to the mise en scène of speech in developing a philosophical cinema and in representing female experience. More pragmatically, the New Wave, as a movement that developed formal innovation partly as a response to economic necessity, can sometimes offer practical filmmaking tips to younger directors. Thus Handyside shows how Hansen-Løve borrows Rohmer’s trick of filming in ‘natural amphitheatres’ – that is, on location but in secluded spaces such as park benches enclosed by foliage – in order to preserve the clarity of speech in the sound recording. At the same time, the New Wave can serve as a sort of shorthand for French cinema’s ongoing dialoguewith Hollywood. Handyside demonstrates how Rohmer’s work was influenced by the comedies of Hollywood’s classical era. In turn, Rohmer’s persistent focus on ironically conceived love stories can be read as a kind of parallel commentary on the development of romantic comedy in Hollywood, a genre to which Hansen-Løve’s work obliquely responds. The remainder of this issue looks at late work by surviving New Wave directors, arguably justifying Edward Said’s definition of such work as characterised by ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’ (Said 2006, 7). It is a curious historical twist that the two New Wave directors who have survived the longest – and whose late works have widely been regarded as among their best – are the two whose filmmaking has been, from the beginning and throughout, arguably the most radical: Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard. STUDIES IN FRENCH CINEMA 2019, VOL. 19, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2018.1527972