Dorota Ostrowska,
Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France.
London: Wallflower, 2008.
ISBN: 978-1-905674-57-2
£16.99 (pb)
207pp
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)

The links between the literary and cinematic avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s are often hinted at in scholarly studies of the period, but rarely examined in detail. It is the first strength of Dorota Ostrowska’s dense but meticulously researched study of the period that the implicit links between the nouvelle vague and the nouveau roman are for once made central. Yet this desire to find clear connections between fields that are perhaps more tangentially related to one another than the author would have us believe may also be its greatest flaw, precluding the possibility of more subtle forms of cross-pollination between the various art-forms.

Ostrowska’s principle thesis within the book is as follows: that film and literary criticism in France during the 1950s and 1960s were interlocked to such a degree that they became inextricable, and that for this reason, reading the nouvelle vague “only really makes sense win the context of literary criticism associated with the nouveau roman” (p. 8). It is an ambitious claim, one which the author sets about demonstrating via a systematic comparison of critical discourses of the nouvelle vague and the nouveau roman. This is not, then, a book about about filmic or literary texts so much as the theory that surrounds them, and it is this bent towards the metatextual that distinguishes Ostrowska’s books from the handful of other works that have drawn links between the new novelists and the new filmmakers (namely Jean-Marie Clerc’s 1993 Littérature et Cinéma, Lynn Higgins’ 1996 New Novel, New Wave, New Politics and Claude Murcia’s 1998 Nouveau Roman, Nouveau cinéma).

Concentrating on a period which begins in the early 1950s and finishes in the second half of the subsequent decade with the events of May ’68, Ostrowska claims that “cinema was the key reference for the definition of the art of the novel while literature was a model for establishing the art of cinema” (p. 10), citing the incorporation of reflections on the art of the novel into the theoretical writings of new novelists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and the embedding of critical arguments about cinematic form in references to the literary canon as evidence of such. The knitting of cinematic and literary concerns finds an empirical apotheosis, Ostrowska goes on to contend, in the collaborative work of Robbe-Grillet with Alain Resnais on L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (France 1961) and in the concomitant birth of the cine-roman as art form. Robbe-Grillet’s own move into film-making in the mid-1960s offers a further elision of the distinction between cinematic and the literary, although one with a surprising conclusion: that the exploration of the formal aspects of both arts should be kept separate – a position contested by theorists such as Christian Metz and Noël Burch, who find in narrative a common ground between the two art forms. Thus, Ostrowska finds, a constant process of exchange and interchange between the novel and the film, between writing and filmmaking, between literary theory and film theory, allows each art form to be defined.

Accounts of the nouvelle vague are all too often guilty of reducing the subject to a handful of key names and titles. Godard, Truffaut, Rivette and Rohmer on the one hand, Resnais, Marker and Varda on the other – all too often these names are employed as ciphers for an extremely diverse group of filmmakers producing a body of nuanced and often oppositional works. Invariably, the hulking presence of Bazin looms Godfather-like above all. One of the great pleasures of reading Ostrowska’s book lies in its privileging of those figures often overlooked or marginalised in accounts of the nouvelle vague. Long-overdue attention is finally given not only to filmmakers such as Alexandre Astruc and Marcel Hanoun, but also to writers Jean Ricardou, Claude Ollier and, crucially, Jean Cayrol, to whom Ostrowska devotes an entire chapter of her work. Consideration is made, too, of figures from outside France: the impact of both the Argentinian writer Aldofo Bioy Casarès and the American John Dos Passos, for example, on the emerging cultural movements is discussed at some length.

This critical resurrection of forgotten figures in the history of French cinema comes, however, at a price – namely the wilful exclusion of certain key figures who might complicate or detract from the book’s main arguments. While the book’s amnesty on Godard (excluded on the grounds that “his contacts with the new novelists were sparse” (p. 16)) offers a refreshing break from the norm, the marginalisation of Duras, one of the few figures to be considered an auteur both within the context of the nouvelle vague cinema and that of the nouvelle roman, because “she was not interested in critical writing or theory” (p. 17) is less welcome. Of course, every study must have its limits, but the unfortunate implication of thus consigning Duras to the sidelines is that women are once more effaced from cultural history, especially given that both Natalie Sarraute and Agnès Varda are given similarly short shrift here.

The decision to downplay Duras’ significance is particularly surprising in light of the seminal status that the author accords to Hiroshima Mon Amour (France/Japan 1959), for which Duras of course wrote the screenplay. For Ostrowska, “A bout de souffle was a pile of notes and ideas, Hiroshima was a polished argument” (p. 23); as a result the Cahiers critics were “truly perplexed” by it (p. 21). The observation ironically suggests something of the problem with the author’s own work: in producing a clearly defined argument, she shuts down some avenues of engagement. Nonetheless, Ostrowska must be applauded for offering an original and thought-provoking lens through which to view a body of work whose potential for analysis appears to be inexhaustible. And while the book’s claims may fail to fully convince, there is certainly no doubt that it is a rich source of information about the nouvelle vague and the nouveau roman alike. As an account of French culture of the period more generally, too, it would make a stimulating companion and counterpoint to Vanessa Schwartz’s excellent study It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (2007).

Catherine Wheatley,
University of Southampton, Hampshire, UK.