Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema

Cinema has always been "literary" in its desire to tell stories and in its need to borrow plots and narrative techniques from novels. But the French New Wave directors of the 1950s self-consciously rejected the idea that film was a mere extension of literature. With subversive techniques that exploded traditional methods of film narrative, they embraced fragmentation and alienation. Their cinema would be literature's rival, not its apprentice. In Screening the Text, T. Jefferson Kline argues that the New Wave's rebellious stance is far more complex and problematic than critics have acknowledged. Challenging conventional views of film and literature in postwar France, Kline explores the New Wave's unconscious obsession with the tradition it claimed to reject. He uncovers the wide range of the literary and cultural texts-American films, classical mythology, French literature, and a variety of Russian, Norwegian, German, and English writers and philosophers-as "screened" in seven films: Truffaut's Jules et Jim; Malle's Les Amants; Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad; Chabrol's Le Beau Serge; Rohmer's Ma Nuit chez Maud; Bresson's Pickpocket; and Godard's Pierrot le fou.

ISBN:	9780801874314
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Published date:	01 Jul 2003
DEWEY:	791.43750944
DEWEY edition:	22
Language:	English
Number of pages:	308
Weight:	499g
Height:	229mm
Width:	152mm
Spine width:	18mm

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