Hélas pour Nouvelle Vague
Hélas pour Nouvelle Vague

Summary/Abstract: Nouvelle Vague has always been aware of its place in Movie History. Contempt (Le mepris, 1963) already shows the complex relationship between classical cinema and modern cinema in the guise of Myth. In 1990 Godard makes a film called Nouvelle Vague, a film declaredly about Myth and Resurrection. The politique des auteurs’s myth of the author consisted (as myths usually do) in a dichotomy: the intentional author seen as the holder of a personal view and style and the author as its own nemesis, being present only insofar as it is invisible, reduced to some sort of zero degree. According to Godard the historical role of Nouvelle Vague is no more to carry on the classical cinema with different means and under the aegis of myth (like in Contempt): it is instead to let Nouvelle Vague/politique des auteurs authorial dichotomy die and resurrect in the “twisted” form of nowadays’ paradoxical importance of the Author, being nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The paper is a close reading of Nouvelle Vague, as a kind of strange prophecy on nowadays’ mediascape situation, and as an example of how Nouvelle Vague (Godard, in this case) conceptualizes its own importance and place in media history.

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