Cinema's Doppelgängers

Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema – or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, and thus a world in which Sergei Eisenstein never made movies and German filmmakers like Fritz Lang never fled to Hollywood, a world in which the talkies were invented in 1936 rather than 1927, in which the French New Wave critics didn’t become filmmakers, and in which Hitchcock never came to Hollywood. The book attempts, on the one hand, to explore and expand upon the intrinsically creative nature of all historical writing; like all works of fiction, its ultimate goal is to be a work of art in and of itself. But it also aims, on the other hand, to be a legitimate examination of the relationship between the economic and political organization of nations and film industries and the resulting aesthetics of film and thus of the dominant ideas and values of film scholarship and criticism.

La “Nouvelle Vague Francesa” en la sombra

The “Nouvelle Vague” is one of the main stages in the history of cinema. Despite this importance, there are unknown aspects to make known, a situation that affects most of the short films made by the great masters of the film movement. For this reason, we take advantage of the 60th anniversary of its existence to define its stylistic limits conveniently. An approach that will focus much of your attention on the magazine “Cahiers du Cinéma”, the starting point for most of the creations in short format. This will lead us to carry out a precise chronology that will reveal important conclusions about the scope of the «French New Wave».

La suspensión del sentido: Cahiers du cinéma y la Nouvelle Vague en el comienzo de los años sesenta / The Suspended Meaning: Cahiers du cinéma and the French New Wave in the Early Sixties

¿Cómo reacciona Cahiers du cinéma frente al surgimiento de la Nouvelle vague? ¿Qué estrategias implementa la revista ante el riesgo de que la politique des auteurs se convierta en una politique de l’amitié? Mientras otras publicaciones, como Positif o Présence du cinéma, se dedican a atacar a los nuevos cineastas, Éric Rohmer (que ha quedado a cargo de la jefatura de redacción luego de que sus antiguos colegas han decidido lanzarse como directores de cine) profundiza su predilección por el clasicismo y evita referirse a los films modernos. Su resistencia a comprometerse con la contemporaneidad genera fricciones en el interior de Cahiers y, finalmente, Rohmer será desplazado por Jacques Rivette. Comienza un nuevo ciclo en la revista: el nuevo jefe de redacción entiende que el cine moderno reclama una crítica moderna y que ya no hay que producir sentido a partir de los films sino que, en cambio, se trata de suspenderlo. Desde la perspectiva de una crítica histórica, el presente artículo intenta reconstruir las etapas de ese conflictivo momento de transición. Se trata de mostrar cómo emerge de allí una cierta noción de cine moderno y una nueva manera de concebir el estatuto de la imagen.

The Incipit of Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d’Agnès)

Agnès Varda’s recent death at 90 was received by various newspaper or site titles: “Influential French New Wave Filmmaker” (The New York Times), “Beloved French New Wave Director” (The Guardian). Paying tribute to Agnès Varda by analyzing Beaches of Agnès, her 2006 autobiographical film, José Moure draws attention to the fact that it has the singular form of a narrated puzzle from which (the film itself intermingled with its “making of”) a new kind of documentary emerges. (Dominique Chateau, in chapter 14, completes the tribute by considering Varda’s forays into the world of contemporary art.) Through her most recent films, as well as her exhibitions, Agnès Varda can be considered a major figure in post-cinema.

François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and the French New Wave, Re-viewed

Truffaut’s early protagonists, like many of those produced by the New Wave, were rebels or misfits who felt stifled by conventional social definitions. His early cinematic style was as anxious to rip chords as his characters were. Unlike Godard, Truffaut went on in his career to commit himself, not to continued experiment in film form or radical critique of visual imagery, but to formal themes like art and life, film and fiction, and art and education. This article reconsiders a film that embodies such themes, in addition to featuring characters who feel stifled by conventional social definitions: Jules and Jim.