Making Waves, Revised and Expanded

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London.

• AcknowledgementsA Note on Names and Film TitlesPreface to the 2013 EditionIntroduction: What Were the Sixties?Part I: Before the Revolution1. World Cinema in the 1950s2. Criticism and CulturePart II: The New Cinemas3. New Cinemas, New Politics4. Sex and Censorship5. Outside the Studio6. Documentary, Cinéma Vérité, and the ‘New American Cinema’7. Technological Innovations: Colour, Wide Screen, the Zoom Lens8. Narrative9. New Cinemas, National CinemasPart III: Movements10. Britain: From Kitchen Sink to Swinging London11. France: From Nouvelle Vague to May ’6812. Italy13. From Polish School to Czech New Wave and Beyond14. Latin AmericaPart IV: Four Auteurs15. Young Godard16. Antonioni17. Pasolini18. OshimaConclusionFifty FilmsBibliographyIndex of Film TitlesIndex

Veteran film scholar Nowell-Smith (The Oxford History of World Cinema) is indeed ‘making waves’ as he demystifies the new cinemas of the 1960s in Europe and Latin America. He doesn’t hesitate to point out that a new-wave director’s use of a documentary style or black and white was because of financial rather than aesthetic reasons, or that some of the innovative techniques used (e.g. shaky camera, jump cuts, and strangely accentuated location sounds) actually reflect incompetence in overcoming difficulties in location shooting. Particularly interesting is his analysis of the change in British culture and how it affected free cinema in that country and the contrast between the diversity of new filmmaking in France and the corresponding dearth of new wave in Italy... this work distinguishes itself as an all-encompassing text on the subject, unlike others that focus on an individual country during the 1960s. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.