Pérennité du dilettantisme néo-vaguien. Rémanence et filiations des masculinités oisives dans le cinéma français
As the cinematic installment of a social revolution, the French New Wave was able to embody the changes that disrupted european societies during the early sixties. From sexual emancipation to its interest for a troubled and often rebellious youth, it is safe to say that the New Wave became the cinematic mirror of a liberation that ushered Europeans into a new era. If a new conception of cinema is usually enough to give a prominent place to the movement in film history, its trailblazing directors (Truffaut, Godard among others) also contributed to forge a new figure of male heroism in the French cinematographic landscape. Taking its distances from the blandness of academism or the trademark melancholy of poetic realism’s heroes that preceded it, the New Wave conception of heroism breathed lightness, idleness and carelessness to characters whose actors’ Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jean-Paul Belmondo (for example) arguably constituted the epitome. This masters thesis will mainly aim to examine how this singular breed of heroism seems to have tainted the voices of contemporary French cinema who have offered a vast array of reinterpretations (from pastiche to reappropriation) and remodelings of a similar kind. As a movement whose influence do not seem to have dried up – its legacy is still claimed by many filmmakers – and that goes beyond the sphere of cinema, we will primarily aspire to account for the sustainability of the New Wave through the examination of the body of work of new generations that have perpetuated its legacy. Thus, this thesis will try to establish a model definiton of the contemporary French cinema hero who does not seem so far removed from the one advocated in the sixties by French New Wave pioneers.
French New Wave Postmodernity French cinema