Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema - Hardcover

Kline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801842670 ISBN 13: 9780801842672

Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, 1992

Synopsis

Cinema has always been "literary" in its desire to tell stories and in its need to borrow plots and narrative techniques from novels. But the French "new wave" filmmakers of the 1950s self-consciously rejected the idea that film was a mere extension of literature. With subversive techniques that exploded traditional methods of film narrative, new wave directors embraced fragmentation (borrowing from Eisenstein's theory of montage) and alienation (borrowing from Brecht). Their cinema would be the rival, not the apprentice, of literature.
In Screening the Text T. Jefferson Kline argues that the new wave's rebel stance is far more complex and problematic than critics usually acknowledge. Challenging conventional views of film and literature in postwar France, Kline explores the new wave's unconscious--even oedipal--obsession with the tradition it claimed to reject. He focuses on the technique of "screening" a literary or cultural reference, at once revealing and obscuring it with fleeting images and suggestive dialogue. Constructing virtual hieroglyphs from montages of literature, painting, and popular culture, new wave directors found a revolutionary style to match their revolutionary subjects--ambivalence, fragmentation, and the unconscious.
To make his case, Kline establishes the international range of the literary and cultural texts "screened" by Truffaut, Malle, Chabrol, Rohmer, Bresson, Godard, and Resnais. Their fascination with American film is well known, but their references extend well beyond--to classical mythology, to contemporary and classical French literature, and to a variety of Russian, Norwegian, German, and English writers and philosophers. Armed with terms such as auteur and camera stylo, the new cineastes engaged directly in "film writing," even while rejecting the orderliness required by straightforward adaptation of written works. In exploiting film's unique capacity to be "intertextual" and imitate unconscious narrative, Kline concludes, the new wave directors were skillfully, if ironically, literary.

About this title

Product Description

308 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in Fine condition throughout.

Review

"Kline's readings are immensely persuasive. His book is scholarly and erudite, and his familiarity with the byways of French and American literature is impressive." -- Screen

"This is a book which will provide useful literary background to students and teachers of the New Wave." -- Sight and Sound

"Important [and] valuable... The French 'New Wave' may well have brought an end to the cinema de qualité but doubt is frequently expressed about the real importance of its own achievements. Kline's very welcome book manages to mark out new terrain for investigation in this area, as well as indicating some unexpected depths in the films he examines." -- Thomas Ennis, Modern and Contemporary France

"This is a remarkable book, the first (known to me) of its kind and something of a tour de force... [Kline's thesis is] applied with rigor and sensitivity." -- Keith A. Reader, French Studies

Edition details

• Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801842670
• ISBN 13: 9780801842672
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336