When film made waves

At a certain point in “Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s,” Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s brisk, sharp-witted primer on one of the most explosively creative periods of filmmaking, I was struck by the realization that I had spent a substantial portion of my life thinking about Catherine Deneuve.

This didn’t come to me because the author pores over the French actress’ glacial magnetism but simply because he makes a glancing mention of her “ability to undergo humiliation without being the least bit humiliated.” This is by way of considering the psychosexual mix of fantasy and realism in Roman Polanski’s 1965 film “Repulsion” before moving on to examine the same forces at work in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s 1970 film “Performance.” But it was that succinct, almost offhand observation that captured an essential mesmerizing contradiction about Deneuve and stuck with me. Next, I was thinking about her paradoxical nature in many of the movies that form the spine of my film-going career -- “Belle de Jour,” “The Last Metro,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” “Time Regained,” “8 Women.”

This experience of sudden recognition triggering a chain of associations is one of the delights of Nowell-Smith’s overview of 1960s filmmaking, a series of Pop Rocks explosions for the cinephilic brain. It is not, however, the only pleasure, nor is it necessary to have seen all the movies covered. “Making Waves” inspires curiosity as much as recollection, touching on such lesser-known works as “Lonely Boy,” Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor’s short documentary on Paul Anka, in a section on cinema verite.

The former head of publishing at the British Film Institute, Nowell-Smith also edited “The Oxford History of World Cinema,” and this survey of film movements has an encyclopedic scope, organized in self-contained chapters, such as “Britain: From Kitchen Sink to Swinging London,” “From Polish School to Czech New Wave and Beyond” and “Young Godard.” Used here, “survey” is a somewhat deceptive term, though, suggesting an objective overview of the era. Happily, Nowell-Smith is not a neutral observer, airing a sly, sometimes biting sensibility.

Did you hear the one . . .

“It tended to be assumed in European films,” he notes of the differing strains of censorship on either side of the Atlantic, “that human beings were born with sexual organs and at a certain point in their lives began to use them, not always in socially approved ways.” Later, in a chapter reappraising the French New Wave and its disparate bands, he slips in some jokes about Agnes Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ feline attachments as opposed to the tendencies of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, who, he maintains, “had no attitude to cats, for or against.”

Nowell-Smith does not pretend to paint an all-encompassing portrait of a period that revolutionized filmmakers’ approaches to production, narrative, style and audience. His self-described reluctant decision to exclude the underground or avant-garde movements leaves some notable gaps; the work of Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey and Shirley Clarke, for instance, would seem to rate a mention.

“This is not a learned book,” the author declares in his introduction, citing the absence of secondary sources in addition to acknowledging his focus on cinemas that began in Britain, France and Italy -- though he does devote sections to Eastern Europe and Latin America. That may be true, but by drawing easily on technological innovation, like the zoom lens, and historic events, such as the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 as foreground to the radicalization of filmmakers-to-be, he manages the neat trick of making the reader feel smart.

By Nowell-Smith’s criteria, “It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture” is an extremely learned book, citing as it does academic studies and film archive research. In it, Vanessa R. Schwartz argues that the exchanges between France and the United States in cinema have long been critical components in the globalization of culture. The author, a professor of history, art history and film at USC, endeavors to present a “more dynamic narrative of the history of transnational cultural circulation” than the one that she maintains has been charted by other scholars.

Schwartz begins by examining the popularity of such 1950s films as “Gigi” and “An American in Paris,” followed by an account of the early years of the Cannes Film Festival. Later chapters trace the rise of Brigitte Bardot’s career as well as producer Mike Todd’s cameo-packed 1956 novelty “Around the World in Eighty Days.” It’s clear throughout that the book is intended for a scholarly audience. Archival research into annual reports and trade association meetings is extensive. Certain passages are marked by an earnest if somewhat bloodless prose. “The Can-Can dance,” Schwartz writes at one point, “included the lifting of the leg not only in kicks that revealed the bare upper thigh and the dancer’s undergarments, but also the slow lift of one leg in a circular motion that highlighted an exposed and moving buttocks.”

The author repeatedly frames her material as a matter of contention. “I argue” she writes, “that the Belle Epoque is the most pervasive cliche of Frenchness, but that its signification is complex.” Leaving aside the question of whether one can quantify a cliche, the assertion illustrates a perplexing rhetorical tic throughout the book, that of positioning a description as an argument. It is possible that the academic reader will be fully acquainted with the claims Schwartz appears to be disputing, but without giving space to those counter-positions, the analysis starts to fall flat.

Well, who said it was?

Lending further confusion is the author’s frequent use of the term “cosmopolitanism,” a concept she finally defines in a later chapter first as what it is not. It is not, Schwartz writes, “simply Americanization through film.” Who, the unlearned reader may be prompted to ask, said it was? “It was instead,” the author continues, “a key moment in the construction of film as a global cultural practice.” And who said it wasn’t? These questions are not meant glibly. Schwartz has done a formidable amount of research. The accounts of media coverage at Cannes mutating into coverage of the coverage itself with the rise of paparazzi is an intriguing line of analysis. The author is clearly fascinated by transnational relations in cinema, as exemplified by her enthusiasm for “An American in Paris.” Having spent a fair amount of time considering what Schwartz describes as the “seemingly unmanly wiggle of Gene Kelly’s behind,” I would never protest an opportunity to contemplate it anew, but it would help to follow the terms of the larger debate here and throughout the work if the author told us what they were.

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Liz Brown has written for Bookforum, Frieze magazine and the New York Times Book Review.