2016 Theses Doctoral

Outside the Metropolitan Frame: The Nouvelle Vague and the Foreign, 1954-1968

Astourian, Laure Maude

In Outside the Metropolitan Frame: The Nouvelle Vague and the Foreign, 1954-1968 I examine the significance of the Nouvelle Vague directors’ engagement with the world beyond metropolitan France, through formal analyses of seminal films by Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Jean Rouch, as well as close readings of archival documents pertaining to their promotion and reception. I contend that the directors of the Nouvelle Vague were concerned with the shifts in national, transnational and colonial dynamics that marked their era. I demonstrate that their texts and films are structured by a dialectical relationship between a gaze turned outwards onto the world beyond metropolitan France, and a gaze turned inwards, onto the French. In my first three chapters, I inscribe the Nouvelle Vague in a cultural longue durée by examining its formal and thematic continuities with the tradition of French ethnography; the inter-war artistic movement, Surrealism; and the cinéma vérité documentary tradition of the early 1960s. I illustrate that the films of the Nouvelle Vague were fundamentally shaped by their directors’ engagement with the decolonization of the French empire. In my final chapter, I reexamine the most conspicuous example of foreign influence on the Nouvelle Vague, American cinema, in light of my preceding demonstrations. I determine that there are two levels of foreign influence on the Nouvelle Vague, and that the influence of American cinema was above all textual and superficial, whereas a grappling with the end of the French empire was, though far less conspicuous, fundamental to the form of the Nouvelle Vague films themselves.