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La Bande Des Quatre: Nineteenth-century Artistic and Literary Sources in Late Nouvelle Vague Filmmaking

Tavassoli Zea, Zahra (2016) La Bande Des Quatre: Nineteenth-century Artistic and Literary Sources in Late Nouvelle Vague Filmmaking. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. (KAR id:61010)

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Abstract

This thesis examines the different ways the cinemas of Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard adapted literary and artistic motifs characteristic of the nineteenth-century romantic and realist traditions, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The selection of these four directors is based on their early and formative commitment to the politique des auteurs, a film criticism trend that was significantly indebted to central aesthetic precepts of the realist and naturalist novels. The profound social changes of the 1960s led directors, artists and writers to question long-accepted ideas about representation and authorship. The left-wing culture in France, which envisioned art and political protest as an inseparable whole, extensively criticised the nineteenth-century discourse on the realist novel as the outward revelation of the author's inner life. As a result, critics rapidly considered the politique des auteurs and, by extension, the universalist and openly westerncentric premises of the Nouvelle Vague as unpersuasive and dismissible. This thesis acknowledges that the relation these directors maintained with nineteenth-century thought has been overshadowed by scholarship on their individual careers, a research tendency that consolidates the notion of rupture and discontinuity between Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut and Godard's filmographies. However, each one of them commonly returned to nineteenth-century sourcing and imagery in the post-1968 period through adaptations and transpositions of Heinrich von Kleist, Honoré de Balzac, Adèle Hugo, Prosper Mérimée and so on. As the first work to regroup this 'gang of four' in the aftermath of Rohmer's forced resignation in Cahiers du cinéma, this thesis argues that their approaches to the nineteenth-century cultural legacy should be assessed as distinct forms of reaffirming, revising, challenging and commenting on their former vision of cinema as a novelistic space, able to manifest the essence of sheer appearances. As the chapters will demonstrate, their engagements with nineteenth-century art and literature are complex. They are, on the one hand, inflected by their personal responses to the politicisation of the 1960s and 1970s French film culture and, on the other hand, informed by their individual understanding of the role of nineteenth-century narratives and aesthetic patterns within the framework of modern filmmaking.

The introduction chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the Nouvelle Vague's early engagements with notions of romanticism and realism and, in light of the existing scholarship, establishes the aims and methodology of this thesis. Chapter two examines Rohmer's cinematic transposition of Balzac's rhetorical realism and analyses the paradoxes and modernist potential of the director's neoclassical film aesthetics in Die Marquise von O... (1976). Chapter three explores the ways Rivette turns the Balzacian myths of Icarus and Pygmalion into more immediate accounts on his contemporaries' struggle for unalienated and totalising works of art through Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991). Chapter four analyses Truffaut's long series of engagements with nineteenth-century imagery and explores the reasons why L'enfant sauvage (1970), Les deux anglaises et le continent (1971), L'histoire d'Adèle H. (1975) and La chambre verte (1978) coincided with his growing conservatism. Chapter five develops Godard's relationship with the romantic legacy through the case-studies of Passion (1982) and Prénom Carmen (1983) - films which allude to Charles Baudelaire's entangled notions of spleen and the ideal and give an unprecedented attention to the aesthetics of chiaroscuro. The conclusion chapter establishes points of convergences and contrasts between the four directors through a comparative account that also addresses the ways in which their individual stands towards the romantic and realist legacies have evolved.

Item Type: Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy (PhD))
Thesis advisor: Frey, Mattias
Thesis advisor: Kear, Jon
Thesis advisor: Baldwin, Thomas
Uncontrolled keywords: Nouvelle Vague French New Wave Rohmer Rivette Truffaut Godard Bazin Barthes Balzac Kleist Mérimée Delacroix Baudelaire Henry James Henri-Pierre Roché film adaptation nineteenth century impure cinema cahiers du cinema French film criticism nineteenth-century literature romanticism realism realist film theory poststructuralism auteur cinema politique des auteurs may 1968 arthouse cinema French cinema Die Marquise von O The Marquise of O Out 1 noli me tangere La Belle Noiseuse Fahrenheit 451 Les deux anglaises et le continent Two English Girls L'enfant sauvage The Wild Child L'histoire d'Adèle H. The History of Adele H. La Chambre Verte The Green Room Vanishing Fiancee Passion Prénom Carmen Victor de l'Aveyron Carmen myth myth of Icarus myth of Prometheus myth of Pygmalion Bizet The History of the Thirteen The Unknown Masterpiece The Altar of the Dead
Subjects: N Visual Arts
P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Arts
Depositing User: Users 1 not found.
Date Deposited: 23 Mar 2017 12:00 UTC
Last Modified: 08 Dec 2022 13:30 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/61010 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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Tavassoli Zea, Zahra.

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