Between representation and figuration. Nouvelle Vague's cinema: a history revision

Abstract

50 years after the birth of the Nouvelle Vague, the inheritance that the contemporary cinema receives from it is inevitable. Figures and visual motifs; stories, themes, faces or common places; aesthetic and language devices. The echoes appear in various ways, each affiliation involves a different relationship and therefore a dissimilar approximation to its analysis. And yet, both the academy and the film critics maintain their will to think the Nouvelle Vague as a whole, a universe, a stream or an aesthetic trend. However, does a Nouvelle Vague's aesthetic exist? And if so: why and how to address their historical revision? Taking Deleuze's thesis on the time-image and Serge Daney's assertion according to which the Nouvelle Vague contributed to the passage of the cinema of the ideal to the cinema of otherness, the following article places its protagonists filmmakers in front of the conviction that their cinema did not create a style, but it established a method. This method came through a particular gesture: when the filmmakers saw in cinema a movement of desire that fails to reach the desired object and the failure of which allows to think about the nature of the image. From this discussion emerges a logic of images halfway between representation and figuration. To address this, the article revisits the early works of Francois TrufTaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and the cinema of Philippe Garrel as a representative of the first French generation after the Nouvelle Vague.