Abstract

"None of this is serious and it feels more like distraction than conviction", laments a French film critic in 1960 regarding a New Wave court-metrage1. But therein might lie the very significance of this cinema. The present study proposes that the New Wave's innovation in thought and cinema is precisely a logic of distraction. Its discoveries in film technique, esthetics, and production are generated by a mental experience of discontinuous movements and sudden encounters between disparate elements. The New Wave's logic of distraction emerges from both a new mental connectivity and the mediatic transmissions that infuse a 1950's France increasingly characterized by "consumption" and "spectacle". This dissertation combines film history, cultural history, theory and readings of films by canonical and noncanonical auteurs such as Varda, Resnais, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rozier, Tati, Malle, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rouch, Demy, and Marker. Individual chapters explore how new forms of vision, reading, spectacle, time and economics are produced by distraction. Characters of the New Wave are "movement-beings", unfocused, aimless and erratic in their mobility. The camera's vision is also perturbed by movement. The New Wave's emphasis on ambient light and real settings does not merely aim at a greater realism, but at a mobile, tactile optics where the image is obliquely experienced---felt by the eye in passage rather than simply contemplated by it. The visual function of literature and writing in New Wave cinema is also linked to distraction. Seen, rather than "read", scriptural elements are mobilized in a new way of reading the image, combining mass-cultural and literary practices. Taking up Guy Debord's concepts of spectacle and detournement , and analyzing films by Varda and Rouch, I show how the New Wave generates forms of storytelling and "real-spectacles" from the very experience of distracted spectatorial consumption. A new experience of time also emerges, mixing different temporal dynamics of "the event". Linear and non-linear times erupt and disrupt each other in films by Resnais and Marker. Finally, an investigation into "econesthetics" shows how New Wave films and film production both engage and divert the market logic of cinema. ;1Bruno Gay Lussac, Review of Claude Chabrol's "Les Bonnes Femmes" in L'Express, 28 April, 1960