The Cinematic French Exception: The Autobiographical Auteur

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Notes

Notes

1 I use the masculine pronoun here not in conformity to convention but because the New Wave was to a great extent a “boy's club.” There was, of course, one giant exception to this—Agnès Varda—but an exception that, sadly, proves the rule.

2 “… [H]uman speech is like a broken pot on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” —Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part II, Chapter XII.

3 For a discussion of this focus on the object as revelatory of the supernatural in Bresson, see Paul Schrader's citing of Bresson: “The supernatural in film is only the real rendered more precise. Real things seen close up” (62). See also the excellent analysis by Allen Thiher.