Screening decolonisation through privatisation in two New Wave films: Adieu Philippine and La Belle Vie

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses images of domestic space in two New Wave films: Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1963) and Robert Enrico’s La Belle Vie (1964). In existing scholarship on the period, critics often define French cinema made during the country’s experience of the Algerian War (1954–1962) in apolitical terms, as a corpus of films stifled by the rise of an insidious censorial regime led by the state. The first part of this article will expand upon this hypothesis by examining the atmosphere of domestic depoliticisation that characterises Rozier’s highly censored film. The second part of this article will then examine how La Belle Vie begins with a desire to flaunt the authority of the censors, before somewhat puzzlingly retreating into the same landscape of apolitical privatisation that defines both Adieu Philippine and popular discourses of the era (for example, women’s magazines). Finally, the author will identify these privatised and politically neutral images of domesticity as one of the reasons that the violent reality of the conflict was initially ‘screened’ from the public imaginary, leading to a war that remained – at least until the wave of highly political films that emerged in the early 1970s – misunderstood, taboo and largely invisible.