Lines of Flight: Jean-Daniel Pollet, Méditerranée, and the Tel Quel Group

Abstract

It may be that Richard Roud’s designation of what he termed “Left Bank cinema” was intended as much to provoke reflection on the consequences of classification as to name a particular group of three post-war French filmmakers (Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker) with obvious intellectual and aesthetic affinities. Why else would Roud begin his 1962 essay on the Left Bank with the claim that classification “proves nothing and is only valuable if it tells us more about what is being classified” (24)? Perhaps the time has come to ask whether the distinction between a Left Bank group and the Nouvelle Vague still “tells us more” about the films and filmmakers under discussion. What other questions are deferred by the goal of categorization? Which films and filmmakers fall out of film histories because they cannot fit neatly into either category? Bracketing the question of classification allows films of the period to be inserted into broader thematics and debates that touch on multiple aspects of post-war French film culture. For a case of critical neglect, it would be difficult to find a better example than Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Mediterranee (1963), an experimental short subject hardly known outside France, but which played a crucial role in the development of film theory from the 1960s to the early 1970s. For French film critics, the importance of Mediterranee stems from its adaptation of experimental writing practices associated with the nouveau roman to the medium of film. Due in part to Pollet’s collaboration with avant-garde novelist and literary theorist Philippe Sollers, who wrote the voice-over commentary, the film became a primary example of revolution ary film practice during the period preceding and immediately following the events of May 1968, when literary theorists linked to the avant-garde journal Tel Quel made their first, highly influential forays into the field of film theory. Core members of the Tel Quel group—including Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, and Jean-Louis Baudry—all published articles and interviews discussing Mediterranee, collectively provoking a