Making Waves, Revised and Expanded

New Cinemas of the 1960s

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781623565084
• eBook ISBN: 9781623565626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The 1960s was famously the decade of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. It was also a decade of revolution and counter-revolution, of the Cuban missile crisis, of the American intervention in Vietnam, of economic booms and the beginning of consumerism (and the rebellion against it). In Hollywood, the genres which had held audiences captive in the 1940s and 50s - musicals, Westerns, melodramas - were losing their appeal and their great practitioners were approaching retirement. The scene was therefore set for new cinemas to emerge to attract the young, the discriminating, the politically conscious and the sexually emancipated. Making Waves, Revised and Expanded is a sharp, focused, and brilliant survey of the innovative filmmaking of the 1960s, placing it in its political, economic, cultural and aesthetic context - capturing the distinctiveness of a decade which was great for the cinema and for the world at large. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith pays particular attention to a handful of the most remarkable talents (Godard, Antonioni, Oshima) that emerged during the period and helped to make it so special. Nowell-Smith updates his classic text with a focus on 1960s Japan and the burgeoning New York scene.

revised and expanded edition

Making Waves

New Cinemas of the 1960s

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

1385 Broadway	50 Bedford Square
New York	London
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www.bloomsbury.com

First published 2013

© Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 2008, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey.

Making waves : new cinemas of the 1960s / by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. -- Updated and revised edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62356-508-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. New wave films--Italy--History and criticism. 2. New wave films--France--History and criticism. 3. New wave films--History and criticism. I. Title.

PN1993.5.I88N69 2013

791.43'611--dc23

2013000298

ISBN 978-1-6235-6562-6

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on Names and Film Titles

Preface to the 2013 Edition

Introduction: What Were the Sixties?

Part I: Before the Revolution

1. World Cinema in the 1950s

2. Criticism and Culture

Part II: The New Cinemas

3. New Cinemas, New Politics

4. Sex and Censorship

5. Outside the Studio

6. Documentary, Cinéma Vérité, and the ‘New American Cinema’

7. Technological Innovations: Colour, Wide Screen, the Zoom Lens

8. Narrative

9. New Cinemas, National Cinemas

Part III: Movements

10. Britain: From Kitchen Sink to Swinging London

11. France: From Nouvelle Vague to May ’68

12. Italy

13. From Polish School to Czech New Wave and Beyond

14. Latin America

Part IV: Four Auteurs

15. Young Godard

16. Antonioni

17. Pasolini

18. Nagisa Oshima and the Japanese New Wave

Conclusion

Fifty Key Films of the New Cinemas, 1958–70

Bibliography

Index of Film Titles

Index

Acknowledgements

The chapter in this book on Antonioni is adapted from an article first published in Sight and Sound in December 1995. It is republished here with the kind permission of the editor. Sections of the chapter on Oshima were also published in Film Quarterly 64:2, Winter 2010, and again their reproduction here is with the kind permision of the editor. Stephen Crofts, Lúcia Nagib, David Nowell-Smith, Erminia Passannanti, and Sam Rohdie read and made useful comments on parts of the manuscript of the first edition of the book while I was writing it. For the chapter on Oshima in this revised edition special thanks are due to Cecily Nowell-Smith. I should also like to thank the staff of the BFI Library in London and the Bibliothèque du Film (BiFi) in Paris for their kind assistance throughout.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

London, November 2012

This book is dedicated to the memory of Tom Milne (1926–2005), film writer and translator without peer.

A Note on Names and Film Titles

Throughout this book I have tried wherever possible to refer to films under a generally accepted English-language release title, where such exists. Many films, however, were never released commercially, or had different titles in Britain and North America, have acquired new titles on re-release, or were given titles which for one reason or other simply didn’t stick. Faced with a potentially confusing situation, I have applied a mixture of common sense and personal prejudice. Some films are uncontroversially referred to by their original title: for example, L’avventura, Hiroshima mon amour, Les Carabiniers. Others have an equally uncontroversial release title: Before the Revolution, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Antonio das Mortes. In cases where choices have had to be made, I have used original titles for a number of films where the available English title or titles seemed to be in some way unsatisfactory. Thus François Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups has two English titles. One is The Four Hundred Blows, which is a literal rendering of the original but means nothing at all in English. The other is Wild Oats, which captures the sense of the original but never caught on. Since neither is satisfactory I have stuck with the original. I have also stuck with the original for Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature À bout de souffle, rather than use the translated title Breathless, which is the name of Jim McBride’s 1983 remake. For Eastern European and Japanese films, English titles are used throughout. (In the case of the films of Nagisa Oshima this has involved choosing among a plethora of British and American, cinematic and video release titles, the rationale for which is explained in a note on p. 225.) In general, as between British and American titles, I have tended on the whole to prefer British as (again on the whole) they tend to be more accurate. Thus, for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud I have chosen Lift to the Scaffold rather than Elevator to the Gallows: in France criminals are (or were) executed by guillotine, not hanged on gallows. I have, however preferred the American Loves of a Blonde for Miloš Forman’s Lásky jedné plavovlásky to the British A Blonde in Love, and Sandra to the abstruse Of a Thousand Delights for Luchino Visconti’s Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa. Nothing much hinges on these decisions, but since the issue can be problematic in some cases, the index of film titles at the end of the book contains original, US, and UK titles for most films referred to in the book.

Accents and diacritical marks on names in European languages have been preserved as far as possible, though I cannot guarantee 100 per cent accuracy in every case. Roman Polánski as Roman Polanski is deliberate, since that is how his name has been spelled ever since he left Poland for the West in 1963; any other absent diacriticals are an oversight. Japanese names are given in western order, given name followed by family name, and without macrons: thus Nagisa Oshima rather than Ōshima Nagisa.

Preface to the 2013 Edition

When this book first appeared in 2008 it...

Table of contents

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