Geneviève Sellier,
Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (trans Kristin Ross).
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0822341925
US$22.95 (pb)
280pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)

Anyone interested in the French cinema will want to own this book. It offers a radical and provocative account of the New Wave and its immediate precursors from a feminist perspective. As the title implies, Ms Sellier aims to show that the early New Wave films consisted largely of blinkered masculine fantasies, reactionary projections of the (male) individuals who authored them, perpetuating romantic stereotypes of women as the eternal feminine, as a witless victim of mass culture, or as a deadly constraint on the creativity of the artist. Since this is a position I myself have adopted at times about certain key films and filmmakers, and since I admired enormously the previous book that Ms Sellier wrote with Noël Burch focussing on the period 1930-1956 (The Weird Sex Wars of the French Cinema!), I expected a great deal of pleasure in reading this new one, which deals with the succeeding five years. And I did, though not to the extent that I expected.

The main problem is that this is a schizophrenic book. Large sections of it are written by Geneviève Sellier the perceptive critic, who analyses subtly the complex representation of gender relations in a number of relevant films, but other sections are written by Geneviève Sellier the aggressive feminist who sweeps aside all subtlety and complexity to make some crude generalisations in line with the title, totally ignoring the material that she herself has just laid before us. The first Geneviève Sellier is interested primarily in understanding what the films mean, in gender terms, and how they come to mean it; the second is not interested at all in understanding, but rather in further establishing her reputation as a radical feminist critic, and incidentally ensuring a powerful selling point for the book. It is particularly disconcerting, for instance, to have the ambiguities and complexities of the topic foregrounded by chapter titles only to have then swept aside by simplistic assertions damning all filmmakers except the few enlightened women, all actors except the few forceful women, and all critics except the few perceptive women. The contradictions between these two aspects of the author are revealed, for instance, in a startling disjunction within her account of Astruc’s films, which on the one hand she condemns for “inaugurating the first person singular as the enunciative instance of modern cinema”, then on the other acknowledges as dealing with “the point of view of the heroine”, “a woman’s interior voice” and “a woman taking charge of her own story”. Again, she exults in Jacqueline Audry’s ‘road film,’ Les Petits Matins (France 1962), despite recognising that it deals in crass gender stereotypes of the sort that she constantly castigates male filmmakers for employing. Elsewhere she praises Brigitte Bardot for bringing to the screen for the first time the sexually emancipated woman, and for resisting the attempts by male directors to reduce her to a representative of mass culture, while at other times she dismisses her as “a sex symbol”.

On those occasions however when the interests of the two Geneviève Selliers coincide rather than contradict, she skewers a number of films with some justice for their ideological cowardice. This happens frequently with Truffaut and Chabrol, and more than once with Godard. I am not so convinced by her treatment of Rohmer’s protagonists, though no-one could deny Rohmer’s profound conservatism. I still enjoy enormously several of the films that she lambastes for their male misogyny, but it is exhilarating to watch her get in some vicious but deserved body blows on them and on their directors. A particularly valid point that she makes is that the New Wave’s emphasis on an aesthetic revolution was all too often at the expense of the socio-political. In focussing on the personal and the sexual (typically, vulnerable but creative males who fantasise about ideal women only to discover that the reality is treachery and death) the films too often stripped the personal and the sexual of all context, all socio-historical specificity. Her own attempt to counteract this depends largely on a review of sociological surveys and of funding laws, but this is better than regarding the auteur as autonomous origin of everything connected with the films, or as having access to eternal truths.

There are however other problems with this book – lesser, but still too important to pass over. Firstly Ms Sellier is never entirely explicit as to what constitutes the New Wave. The real subject of her attack is the ideologically conservative Cahiers du Cinéma group consisting of Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard Rohmer and Rivette, but her generalisations seldom limit themselves to that group. On those occasions when she mentions the other major faction, namely the left-wing Left Bank crowd of Resnais, Franju, Demy, Varda and Marker, it is often with a high degree of sympathy. This important distinction is only tardily acknowledged in a late chapter. Secondly, she is rather vague about timelines and the notion of ‘precursors.’ She lists Pierre Kast, Doniol-Valcroze and Alexandre Astruc as the principal precursors of the New Wave, while belatedly admitting that the first two of these made their first film in the same years as the Cahiers group; and she doesn’t include Varda or Vadim as precursors despite the fact that they did make their first film before that, because she wants Varda and Bardot as New Wave figures. Thirdly the uncertain timelines are exacerbated by her accepting Françoise Giroud’s 1958 article as the launch-point of the New Wave, when in fact the term had already been used for some years by commentators describing the previous generation of filmmakers, and crediting them with precisely the revolutionary characteristics that came to be associated with the New Wave (whose credentials as revolutionaries were subsequently accepted largely because of their own more effective publicity). More generally, she doesn’t convince me that the New Wave directors were significantly different from their predecessors in the attitudes for which she criticises them. Indeed the statistics which she herself quotes tend to show this. Finally Ms Sellier spends a lot of time on critical reception and box office success without sufficient pay-off. The quoted sections of reviews are often desultory and uncoordinated, while the box office figures are limited to exclusive release. The figures for exclusive release, as she surely knows, are not at all reliable as indicators of popular success (and therefore of the mythic significance of the material in the film) which can only be judged by including general release. Exclusive release is prestigious and more expensive, attended mainly by cinephiles and the middle classes, whereas general release figures record the broader interest (or lack of interest) of the population.

Despite these reservations I persist in recommending this book, if read with due caution, because of the splendid analyses provided by Ms Sellier the perceptive critic, because of the swinging blows the united Ms Sellier gets in at certain films that warrant such treatment, and because more generally this book constitutes a necessary counterweight to standard accounts of the New Wave, which all too often take the grandiose Cahiers claims at their face value. There is a lot to like in this book, then, but it is not only the two voices that are at odds in it. Despite having been revised for the present book, the various chapters still bear the traces of having been written at different times for different purposes. The contradictions and inconsistencies within and between them are too apparent, and it would have been worthwhile taking the time to reconcile or at least to work through the conflicting values and attitudes apparent in them before finally publishing them in book form.

Colin Crisp,
Australia

Created on: Saturday, 14 March 2009