Screening the text

Cinema has always been "literary" in its desire to tell stories and in its need to borrow plots and narrative techniques from novels. But the French "new wave" filmmakers of the 1950s self-consciously rejected the idea that film was a mere extension of literature. With subversive techniques that exploded traditional methods of film narrative, new wave directors embraced fragmentation (borrowing from Eisenstein's theory of montage) and alienation (borrowing from Brecht). Their cinema would be the rival, not the apprentice, of literature. In Screening the Text T. Jefferson Kline argues that the…