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Lauren Du Graf, The Wild Palms in a New Wave: Adaptive Gleaning and the Birth of the Nouvelle Vague, Adaptation, Volume 10, Issue 1, 1 March 2017, Pages 34–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apw042
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Abstract
This article explores an overlooked aspect of Agnès Varda’s pioneering La Pointe Courte (1954)—its function as a literary adaptation. La Pointe Courte was significant to the French New Wave not only in its use of American literary modernist narrative strategies but in its execution of a new model of adaptive poetics that brazenly flouted expectations of fidelity to a literary source. La Pointe Courte’s adaptation of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner—a central literary reference for French film critics after the Second World War—supplied an important, but often uncredited, blueprint for directors like Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, whose films modelled on literary modernist prose and abstracted, deliberately unfaithful filmic adaptations would be more readily recognized by critics for their originality. Varda’s analogical literary adaptation anticipated shifts in cinematic style that would echo throughout later works by directors affiliated with the Nouvelle Vague, including Godard and Resnais. This article seeks to revise how we understand the Nouvelle Vague’s origins, which, as Geneviève Sellier has argued, has all too often been told from the perspective of the masculine singular.
