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 new wave's rebel stance is far more complex and problematic than critics usually acknowledge. Challenging conventional views of film and literature in postwar France, Kline explores the new wave's unconscious--even oedipal--obsession with the tradition it claimed to reject. He focuses on the technique of "screening" a literary or cultural reference, at once revealing and obscuring it with fleeting images and suggestive dialogue. Constructing virtual hieroglyphs from montages of literature, painting, and popular culture, new wave directors found a revolutionary style to match their revolutionary subjects--ambivalence, fragmentation, and the unconscious.

To make his case, Kline establishes the international range of the literary and cultural texts "screened" by Truffaut, Malle, Chabrol, Rohmer, Bresson, Godard, and Resnais. Their fascination with American film is well known, but their references extend well beyond--to classical mythology, to contemporary and classical French literature, and to a variety of Russian, Norwegian, German, and English writers and philosophers. Armed with terms such as auteur and camera stylo, the new cineastes engaged directly in "film writing," even while rejecting the orderliness required by straightforward adaptation of written works.

In exploiting film's unique capacity to be "intertextual" and imitate unconscious narrative, Kline concludes, the new wave directors were skillfully, if ironically, literary.