Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts . By Marion Schmid
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fs/knac103
ISSN1468-2931
Autores Tópico(s)European Cultural and National Identity
ResumoThe French New Wave’s defiant assertion of cinema’s specificity as an art form — now all but a cliché — has perhaps tended to obscure the richness and density of its relationships with other art forms, eruditely explored here. These relationships, at once benign and agonistic, qualify the current as embodying ‘the “impure cinema” the theoretician of the movement, André Bazin, advocated in opposition to the “pure cinema” of the classical avant-garde’ (p. 4). Marion Schmid invokes successively literature, theatre, painting, architecture, and photography, each medium accorded a separate chapter but brought into fruitful dialogue with its peers. There are to be sure omissions: Lynn A. Higgins’s New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) surely merited at least name-checking; the description of Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966) as ‘the only genuinely canonical work adapted by a New Wave director’ (p. 21) gives Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991), made admittedly when the New Wave was no more, short shrift; the chapter entitled ‘Architecture of Apocalypse, City of Lights’ makes no reference to William Klein’s twelve-minute Broadway by Light (1958), lauded though it was by Chris Marker. But Schmid covers a daunting textual range in a relatively short compass with elegance and aplomb. Whether dealing with classics such as L’Année dernière à Marienbad (dir. by Alain Resnais, 1961), which ‘fus[ed] theatre and film into a hybrid space without frontiers’ (p. 61), or exploring texts likely to be unfamiliar even to a specialized readership, such as Éric Rohmer’s early 1960s documentaries for French television, her analyses are consistently stimulating and insightful. Of particular interest is her championship of Guy Gilles — not even a name to this reviewer at least hitherto, and neglected owing to his early death and the ‘blatant homophobia’ of the French industry at the time (p. 115), but clearly a very important figure whose work is now available on DVD. A monograph on this director would be a most welcome addition. The book will be of interest not only to film scholars, but also to those working in the visual arts, adaptation, and urban studies; that ‘the new city […] is not diachronic, but synchronic’ (p. 151) is a formulation at once suggestive and lapidary, emblematic of the work’s amalgam of erudition and conciseness.
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