Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France's leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Genevieve 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 representations in early 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 principle legacy--the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an auteur theory recognizing the director as artist--came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema's modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Duke University Press
ISBN-13
9780822341925
eBay Product ID (ePID)
96775593
Product Key Features
Author
Genevieve Sellier
Publication Name
Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Subject
Zoology, History
Publication Year
2008
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
280 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
229mm
Item Width
156mm
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Genevieve Sellier
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States
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