Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema

by Geneviève Sellier, Kristin Ross (Translator)

Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France’s leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema’s formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema. Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour . In light of the filmmakers’ focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave’s iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier’s thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema’s modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.

Genres: Film, Feminism, Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Geneviève Sellier is Professor of Film Studies at the University Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux. She is the author of several books in French, as well as Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[J.S.A. Lowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half, really. But Sellier must be commended for the astonishing meticulousness of her research—I can't believe anyone would go back through and pick out those old reviews and Cahiers du cinema articles from 1958-62, but blimey if she didn't do it. And I think ultimately her thesis is convincing, given the very little bits of New Wave criticism I've read, which isn't so much criticism as it is unqualified, slobbery fawning. I'm grateful for the scholarship here and look forward to using her text even more as I watch more of the films she discusses in the book's second half.

[Margot]

j’aime tellement pas la nouvelle vague (sauf Agnès Varda (qui n’en fait pas partie stricto sensu comme expliqué dans le chapitre 11🤓🤓 mais qui reste une figure principale du mouvement (et la seule femme accessoirement))