French New Wave Cinema and the Legacy of Male Libertinage

Abstract

it be like if a man were pregnant?” and turned the reigning Latin lover of the 1970s, Marcello Mastroianni, into that man on-screen. Demy worked well past the years of the New Wave. By looking at Demy, we can reevaluate the meaning and signifi cance of the New Wave not only in its own time but also by considering its relation to the longer history of French fi lm after the wave had clearly passed. If adding Demy allows us to follow the wave across time, it also serves as a reminder that the current study of the New Wave has cut it off from the popular cinema to which it was clearly tied. Our understanding of French fi lm in the 1950s and 1960s, especially outside France, has been telescoped unnecessarily into a narrative about the New Wave, and we have been held prisoners to the articulate pronouncements of its most celebrated practitioners such as Truffaut, who was fi lmmaker and propagandist in one. The New Wave’s eloquent proponents accomplished a good many things: they championed new practices in fi lmmaking, codifi ed new modes of narrative, and empowered a young generation who imagined themselves as artists when they made fi lms. Moreover, they gave an enormous boost to those who wrote about fi lm, helping to transform the amateur practice of cinephilia into a legitimate discourse of fi lm criticism and in some ways laying the groundwork for institutionalizing Film Studies as we know it today. The concerned UniFrance report from 1965 cited above complained that only universities and university towns would book French movies after the New Wave. University courses on the New Wave have, at least, created a steady market for French fi lm. Yet we must rethink the New Wave long enough to remember the audience and to try to understand their love of Bardot and Demy.