The title of this chapter takes its cue from one of Jean-Luc Godard’s well-known articles, published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1956, which engaged with Bazin’s conception of cinematic realism in an attempt to effect a generational break with the past by proposing a revised understanding of montage, not simply as an integral part of mise-en-scène, but as a form of deliberate authorial statement and, in that sense, as a practical extension of the New Wave ideology or politique des auteurs. In highlighting Bazin’s formative influence on the New Wave directors (in particular, his relationship to Truffaut and Godard), this chapter also focuses on the revived interest in early avant-garde experimentation (as evidenced, for instance, by Godard’s use of silent era shot transitions, image/sound disjunction and quotations from Surrealist poets in A bout de souffle), as well as the emergence of postmodern strategies and notions of rhythm, movement and time in French cinema (again present in the early work of Jean-Luc Godard), which prefigured Deleuze’s re-appraisal of montage as part of his theory of the movement-image and the time-image.
Steven Ungar. Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave. U of Minnesota P, 2018.