Claude Mauriac (1914-1996) was a French author and journalist. Between 1944 and 1949, he was Charles de Gaulle’s personal secretary before starting to work as a film critic for Le Figaro Littéraire, a French daily morning newspaper with a long tradition in France. He was also a close friend of philosopher Michel Foucault’s. On May […]
Let us take a closer look at Georges Charensol’s evaluation of René Clément’s film, since it is one of the few articles that judge it rather critically. Georges Charensol (1899-1995) was a French journalist, art and film critic. He wrote for several highly distinguished art, film and literature magazines, such as Paris-Journal, La Vie du […]
About Jean Queval In order to understand better where Queval is coming from in his critique of Forbidden Games, a bit of information about Queval himself, whose life is equally fascinating. Queval (1913-1990) was a prolific writer, journalist, film critic and translator with an affinity to English literature. He translated, for example, James Agee, Iris […]
Pierre Kast (1920-1984) was a French film director, TV and screenplay writer, novelist and journalist of the Nouvelle Vague. He wrote film reviews for Action and Cahiers du Cinéma, which was edited by André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. His style of film-making was heavily influenced by Jean Grémillon, a well-known film director and president of […]
Now, a few notes about the narrative style of Boyer’s Forbidden Games (1947). The story is told by a seemingly bodyless third-person narrator who is not explicitly characterized, who appears to stand outside of the narrative (“disembodied”, cf. Klarer 2004: 20; “heterodiegetic”, “hidden”, cf. Booth 1974). While much of the story is told from the […]
In 1954, director François Truffaut published his text “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français“ (“A certain tendency of French cinema“), which formed the theoretical basis of the Nouvelle Vague. The latter became a movement in French cinema that pointed out and went against bourgeois tendencies prevalent in French filmmaking in the first half of the […]