BOOK REVIEWS 439

Making Waves: new cinemas of the 1960s

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH
New York and London, Continuum
230 pp., bibliography, index, $24.95 (paper)

Making Waves adds to a growing body of work focusing on the social, cultural and
industrial changes influencing European cinema in the 1960s. Other titles in this area
include Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma Vol. 1 (1985), Joe McElhaney’s Death of Classical
Cinema (2006), and most recently Beyond the Subtitle by Mark Betz (2009). Nowell-Smith
avoids what he identifies as the two main narratives of 1960s cinema history: the
narrative of liberation and the narrative of modernisation. The liberation narrative held
considerable sway in the 1960s, but gradually fell out of favour as critics recognized
‘that much of what appeared [. . .] to be going somewhere in fact led nowhere’ (p. 9).
The modernisation narrative views the 1960s ‘mainly as a great step forward in a
process [. . .] which continues uninterrupted up into the present.’ The author contends
that this narrative ‘does not recognize the extent to which some developments (such as
consumerism) were fiercely resisted while others (such as colourization) were
unforeseen’ (p. 10). Instead, Nowell-Smith tries to discover what was new about new
cinema in Europe and South America from a cross-cultural perspective. He deliberately
omits Hollywood history, since during the 1960s ‘Europe led the way in cinematic
innovation; other countries followed, and the US looked on’ (p. 14).
Making Waves is divided into four sections. The first (‘Before the Revolution’)
looks at world cinema during the 1950s and the development of the kind of film
criticism that ‘helped to challenge traditional realist assumptions about the
relationship of representation to the objects they purported to represent’ (p. 38).
The second section looks at the defining characteristics of new cinema: its politics, its
representation of sex and sexuality, and its deliberate challenge to censorship
restrictions in different contexts. Nowell-Smith also looks at the conditions of
production: many new cinema products were created outside the studio system,
employing cinematic techniques derived from cinéma-verité and challenging existing
conventions of narrative coherence. He argues that new cinema directors ‘set out to
rectify something false or misleading in the way life in their country was portrayed
and in doing so came up with an alternative image which they hoped was more
accurate or more relevant to modern life as they understood it’ (p. 38). The book’s
third section develops this idea by focusing on new cinema movements in Great
Britain, France, Italy, Eastern Europe and South America. The final section looks at
the young Godard, Antonioni and Pasolini’s contributions to new cinema.
While Making Waves covers well-trodden historical ground, it nonetheless offers
a penetrating analysis of the technological changes that took place during the 1960s,
and how they contributed to the development of new cinema. Godard’s Une femme
est une femme (1961) mixed live and post-synched sound in ways which broke with the
notion of a conventional soundtrack (p. 73). The introduction of Eastmancolor in
the late 1950s instead of Technicolor allowed for a greater range of cinematic effects,
particularly in daylight. The widescreen format proved especially effective in the early
Truffaut films, and in the work of British New Wave directors such as Jack Clayton,
best remembered for The Innocents (1961). The zoom lens was enthusiastically
employed by Rossellini in Italy and Miklos Jancso in Hungary; in the latter’s work in
440 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

particular the zoom lens rendered cinematic space ‘fluid, subject to expansion and
contraction, and a stable point of view is hard to maintain’ (p. 99).
As the decade progressed, so the spirit of innovation characteristic of new
cinema declined. In some countries—notably Czechoslovakia—the spirit of
innovation was brutally suppressed by the Soviet invasion of 1968. By contrast,
Nowell-Smith argues that in Britain the new cinema movement had little or no lasting
effect: ‘It was not really at the forefront of anything’ (p. 133). In France and Italy new
cinemas did not die, but rather dispersed. Some directors (Godard, for example)
produced art-house material outside the world of commercial release, while others
(Antonioni) went to Hollywood to work on international co-productions such as
Zabriskie Point (1970), which allowed little or no room for experiment. Nonetheless,
Nowell-Smith claims that new cinema has left a lasting legacy in the way it
communicates a message of modernity as liberation (p. 216). This spirit might no
longer exist in contemporary cinema, but filmgoers can still identify with it when they
purchase DVDs of Godard, Antonioni, or other new cinema directors. Entertainingly
written by a former Head of Publicity at London’s British Film Institute, Making Waves
offers a lucid introductory survey of a tumultuous period in world film history.

LAURENCE RAW
Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey
ß 2010, Laurence Raw

Redesigning Women: television after the network era

AMANDA D. LOTZ
Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2006
224 pp., tables, bibliography and index, $50.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper)

Redesigning Women characterizes the television landscape of the post-network era as one
of diversified female characters, female-centered shows and cable channels specifically
targeting women. Lotz carefully reviews the emergence, evolution, and marketing
strategies of three cable channels: Lifetime Television, The Women’s Entertainment
Network (WE) and Oxygen as they worked to attract and retain adult female viewers.
Since Lifetime’s debut in 1984, it has held the lead in ratings and brand recognition
with a strategy of broadly appealing to women. Oxygen and WE followed roughly a
decade later, with each developing its own particular niche. In clear contrast with
Lifetime, Oxygen has more of an edge and challenges traditional female portrayals.
WE, on the other hand, has pitched itself as a ‘middle-of-the road’ network lacking
the issue-oriented programming of Lifetime and the female-empowerment program-
ming of Oxygen.
Lotz argues that despite each network’s particular angle, their existence and
competition have promoted a more complex representation of women in series such as
Lifetime’s The Division (2001–2004) and Strong Medicine (2000–2006), as well as reality-
based shows such as I’ve Got a Secret (2000–2001) and Women & the Badge (2001) on
Oxygen, and Style World (2000–2003) and Winning Women (2003) on WE. Their success