Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Geneviève Sellier is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Caen. Her books include Jean Grémillon: Le cinéma est à vous and La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930-1956 (with Noël Burch). Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of May '68 and Its Afterlives and Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture.

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"Thanks to this unwavering translation, Genevieve Sellier's bracing expose has stripped the New Wave of its stylish attire to reveal an unappealing male body. Vigilant and determined, she has trolled a sea of French criticism to net her evidence."--Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Masculine Singular

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................1Introduction The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave...........................................................11Chapter One A New Generation Marked by the Emergence of Women.............................................22Chapter Two Cinephilia in the 1950s.......................................................................34Chapter Three Auteur Cinema: An Affair of State...........................................................41Chapter Four Contrasting Receptions.......................................................................70Chapter Five The Precursors...............................................................................95Chapter Six Between Romanticism and Modernism.............................................................128Chapter Seven Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity..........................................................145Chapter Eight The Women of the New Wave: Between Modern and Archaic.......................................184Chapter Nine Jeanne Moreau: Star of the New Wave and Icon of Modernity....................................199Chapter Ten Brigitte Bardot and the New Wave: An Ambivalent Relationship..................................210Chapter Eleven The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank: A "Feminist" Alternative?.....................221Conclusion The New Wave's Legacy: "Auteur Cinema".........................................................225Appendix One Box Office Results...........................................................................227Appendix Two The Press....................................................................................231Notes......................................................................................................245Bibliography...............................................................................................253

Chapter One

A Sociological Phenomenon

It is well known that the expression "New Wave" first referred to the generation born before the war that entered adulthood after the Liberation. As the last generation before the birth rate exploded, the New Wave would soon be dethroned by that of the "baby boomers" (Sirinelli 2003), but it is the first generation to be understood in its entirety as a sociological phenomenon. At the end of 1957, the Institut Franais d'Opinion Publique (IFOP) and L'Express-two media institutions that incarnate American-style modernization in France-simultaneously launched an investigative survey to attempt to categorize the specific characteristics of the generation born between 1927 and 1939. In the book published by Franoise Giroud in 1958 that provided commentary on a representative sample of fifteen thousand letters received by L'Express, Giroud notes a difference so evident between the men's and women's responses that she decides to present them separately:

Why isolate the women of the New Wave from the men of their age group? Not only is such a separation not artificial-it's frankly necessary.

In the first place, a careful study of the women's responses we received shows lines of division completely different from those we can trace among the men.

Young women define themselves less in terms of their milieu, their social class and the problems particular to that class, than they do in terms of their personal situation inside society.

Together, they constitute a class that has been called "the proletariat of man," of the man-boss, and they feel themselves determined first and foremost by their condition as women, a condition that we will divide into four large categories: single women under twenty-five, single women over twenty-five, married women who work (or who once worked), and those who do not work. (201)

Giroud's after-the-fact reflection suggests that neither the journalists at L'Express nor the analysts at the IFOP had considered ahead of time the pertinence of differentiating responses by gender, a problem that makes the results of the survey undertaken by the IFOP of no use whatsoever for what interests us here. But it at least indicates a solid myopia concerning the importance of the gender variable revealed by the survey of the fifteen thousand letters received by L'Express.

The letters published by Franoise Giroud in fact bear witness to the dominant conservatism of the young men when it comes to their vision of relations between men and women, regardless of their political opinions or social class. Most of the women, on the other hand, emphasize the good fortune they feel is theirs for living in an era of women's emancipation. Even if a majority of these women do not question their primary responsibility as wife and mother, their testimony is accompanied by a strong claim to the right to have access to higher learning and worthwhile employment. They frequently speak of the unbearable contradictions of their situation, torn between the will to be good wives and mothers, the responsibilities that weigh them down, and their desire for emancipation.

Because of this difference in perception, Giroud decides to present the letters from men separately, and differently, than those from women: the men are divided according to the social class of their author and, secondarily, according to his political leanings; for the women, on the other hand, marital status prevails, followed by salaried employment. We can, of course, view this presentation as a result of Giroud's presuppositions, but the content of the letters shows a distinct difference: most of the men speak at length about political and philosophical problems and have little to say about more concrete or personal problems, about which the women, on the other hand, express themselves at greater length, in particular because the difficulties of everyday life (the housing crisis, cost of living, child care) weigh essentially on their shoulders, and because they have personal aspirations whose realization seems to them to be out of reach.

These letters suggest that the new generation, for the most part, internalizes the role assigned to women to be that of maternity and the private sphere, but in a very different way according to gender: upper-class men express their attachment to that gender division of roles with a tranquil egoism; men from the lower classes aspire to it as the inaccessible ideal of having a salary large enough to be able to care for their wife and children. Women, on the other hand, regardless of their social origins and unlike the preceding generation of women, want access, like men, to a good job. But they acknowledge that this desire is nearly incompatible with their wish to raise their children, as well as with their inability to control the spacing of children's births, an anxiety that can be read between the lines of the letters from married women (in the France of the 1950s and 1960s, the state politics of increasing the birth rate meant the allocation of a unique salary and the outlawing of contraception and abortion).

Despite women's desire to marry, marriage is in fact lived by them as a radical loss of liberty, or of the possibility of an individual destiny. Not a single man, on the other...