Cinema Journal

“I have tried on the whole to position myself inside of this cinema rather than outside or above it,” explains Geoffrey Nowell-Smith at the start of Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s, “and to recreate the world of the new cinemas as it appeared to participants in that world rather than view it with conscious or critical distance.”¹ Although this position is difficult to sustain at times, the focus on analysis from a contemporary perspective serves the author well in his attempt to foreground both commonalities and distinctions in a set of cinemas that is primarily European, but that also encompasses movements in Latin American cinema. The structure of the book is elegant and the work itself engaging, tracing a path that begins with more general pronouncements and broadscale observations on cinema’s interactions with the politics and culture of the decade, and that concludes with a critically sharp set of analyses of major movements and filmmakers that includes Antonioni, Pasolini, and Godard.

In the book’s introductory chapter, Nowell-Smith argues that the primary common element across the cinemas in question is rebellion—a dissatisfaction with and turning away from both the formulas and strategies of the classical Hollywood Cinema and from national cinematic traditions that had become stale or outworn. Tied to this notion of rebellion is the author’s assertion that a “narrative of liberation” was developing on several fronts, from increasingly permissive cultural [End Page 167] attitudes about sex and sexuality, to political and politicized representations of human experience, to the rejection of capitalistic excess, to the largely failed attempt by Eastern European countries to free themselves from the constraints of Soviet communism.

Nowell-Smith provides a workable context for his discussion through a brief historical overview of cultural and institutional perspectives in cinema during the 1950s, focusing first upon the inception of a new audience and target market for international cinema, and then upon the Cahiers du cinéma critics’ development of a “realist matrix” context for the 1960s.² The core middle chapters of the book then correlate political, social, and cultural developments of the decade with changes in formal, stylistic, and institutional practices of cinema. Especially enlightening among these are the author’s discussion of how Western imperialist expansion and Soviet communist oppression led to resistance movements that can ultimately be correlated with radical practices in both narrative and documentary film. Nowell-Smith also includes a remarkable chapter on the development of portable, versatile, and more affordable camera and sound recording technologies, explaining how such advancements supported the political and stylistic practices of the cinema verité movement, Direct Cinema, and the French New Wave, permitting new filmmakers to work outside of the expenses and politically unwelcoming confines of studio production. The author also effectively illustrates how narrative filmmakers of the decade adopted documentary stylistics to question the subject’s access to such absolutes as truth and the real. Nowell-Smith situates these developments alongside a discussion of the aesthetic and political implications of such technological innovations as color film production, wide-screen image formats, and the zoom lens.

A shared concern of these cinematic movements, Nowell-Smith argues, “is that they set out to rectify something false or misleading in the way life in their country was portrayed and in so doing came up with an alternative image which they hoped was more accurate or relevant to modern life as they understood it.”³ And in “Movements,” the third section of the book, he focuses upon the intricacies of cinema’s role in both the formation and transformation of national identity. Aside from his praise for the work of Joseph Losey, in his discussion of the “Kitchen Sink and Swinging London” movements, Nowell-Smith is highly critical of British cinema’s general failure to engage with contemporary political and cultural problems. He finds the prospect of a more politically confrontational cinema in the French New Wave, discussing this cinema in light of a new generation’s reaction...