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Let us begin by contemplating an image of Brigitte Bardot, the most famous woman in the world when the New Wave was taking shape fifty years ago. The image comes from Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le mépris, 1 963) and is of a bloodied and lifeless Bardot sprawled in a red Alfa Romeo (Figure 1). This image of her violent death not only reminds us of the New Wave's deep discomfort with Bardot's celebrity at the time, but also serves as a marker of a greater historiographie unease with Bardot more generally within Film Studies. Her career and films have been largely sidelined in favor of a narrative di at has overplayed and privileged the history of the New Wave; Bardot becomes important only insofar as she starred in the films of directors such as JeanLuc Godard who then self-consciously offered visual unpackings of her enormous celebrity while (perhaps unwittingly) contributing to furthering it. Louis Malle, in A Very Private Affair Vie privée [1 962]), explicitly treats the issue of celebrity by having Bardot play a character so trapped by her own fame diat she even suffers one of the earliest paparazzi "death by flashbulb" murders depicted on the screen.
Now that the New Wave is by some accounts "officially" fifty, perhaps, like a wise middle-aged person, it can be sober and mature enough to admit its excesses and exaggerations, its partis pris, and, finally, come to terms with who "it" murdered to get ahead. In particular, I am interested in bringing together recent feminist révaluations such as Geneviève Sellier's in Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (which has recently underscored the New Wave's troubled relationship to women, gender, and sexuality) with broader historical eontextualizations that shed light on certain aspects of die marketing of French film about which we ought to know more - marketing that made the New Wave possible in die first place - and in reintegrating film audiences when we are thinking about the New Wave's history.1
The first step in coming to terms with middle age is to stop lying about it. Wc now accept that, while the term "nouvelle vague" was first used by Françoise Giroud in the pages of L'Express in 1957 in relation to an article about the...