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Abstract
Real revolutions, those that transform the lived structure of everyday existence, create their own time. New Wave and Rive Gauche films first invent a new kind of non-linear, disruptive temporality that then allowed a revolution, May ’68 in France. Evidence of this new time and new kind of future can be found in films from the era, notably in Godard’s À bout de souffle, and Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad. The 1968-era ciné-tracts, anonymous productions to which Marker and Godard greatly contributed, are examined as evidence of influence of the New Wave on May ’68, and as encouraging the spread of a collective and unconventional model of filmmaking.
Notes
1 See Andrew, Dudley. “On Certain Tendencies of the French Cinema.” A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier, Harvard UP, 1989, pp. 993–1000; Farmer, Robert. “Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group.” Senses of Cinema, vol. 52, Sept. 2009. sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/marker-resnais-varda-remembering-the-left-bank-group/; Michel Marie, La Nouvelle vague: Une école artistique.
2 Raymond Bellour was inspired by Marker and Deleuze to elucidate the nature of time in relation to the still image in “The Film Stilled” (Camera Obscura, no. 24, Sept. 1990, pp. 99–123), while Catherine Lupton in Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, in a related vein sought to determine how Marker, in La Jetée, created still images that were nonetheless imbued with cinematic time (90–96).
3 My translation.
4 See Marie 81–82, who notes that Alain Resnais had used an analogous process of discontinuous shots in Hiroshima mon amour to evoke another kind of time, in this case one in which memories of the past enter the present.
5 Higgins, Lynn. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France. U of Nebraska P, 1996.
6 In his Alain Resnais, Bounoure notes that in Marienbad “The tracking shot concretizes the horizontal flow of time,” rendering horizontal movement objective and vertical movement the subjective time of the interior self (54–55). Ward conducts a treatment of time and memory in Resnais using the work of Henri Bergson in Alain Resnais, or, The Theme of Time (Doubleday, 1968). More recently, in Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2013), Nadine Boljkovac notes in the work of both Resnais and Marker the presence of two kinds of temporality: Chronos, that is, determined, chronological time with beginnings and endings, and Aion, which is boundless, or eternal.
7 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations, Cambridge UP, 1983.
8 Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and its Afterlives. U of Chicago P, 2002.
9 On the ciné-tracts in general, see Layerle 141–146. On their place with the États Généraux du Cinéma, see Grant 29.
10 For a description of the original idea of the ciné-tracts, see the contemporary pamphlet “Ciné-tractez!” in Layerle, Annexe XII, p. 291.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James F. Austin
James F. Austin, Associate Professor of French, is Chair of the French Department at Connecticut College, where he also teaches in Film Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 2003. His book, Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters, was published in 2013 (Bucknell UP, paperback 2015). He has published on French film, edited a special cinema issue of Yale French Studies, and is working on a monograph on the New Wave.