Celluloid and Paper: Rivalries, Synergies, Crossovers

Abstract

This chapter explores New Wave critics and filmmakers' ambivalent relationship with literature as both the main model to emulate and the major authority to challenge. Literature resurfaces not only in screen adaptation, but, more diffusely, in the myriad citations, inscriptions, and allusions punctuating the cinematic text, as well as in the graphological tropes used to legitimise film as an art form ('auteur', 'cinematic writing', 'camera pen'). The chapter assesses novel attitudes of the New Wave directors to adaptation and to questions of cinematic purity, revisits the collaboration between Nouveau roman writers and Nouvelle Vague directors, and analyses the manifold - sometimes irreverent, sometimes celebratory - incorporations of literature in a selection of films. Particular attention is given to the incorporation of the written word in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave films as a symbol of media tensions in the director's work, and as a crucial example of his interstitial aesthetic, which breaks down traditional media boundaries.