The Nouveau Roman and Cinema:

The Problem of Representation

Abstract

This paper reexamines the potential of the film medium to depict what cannot be seen or
represented by established visual and narrative conventions by analysing the relationship
between the French Nouveau Roman and the emergence of innovative cinematic strategies in
French cinema during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It argues that both collective and
individual trauma serve as sites from which the world can be reimagined and reconstructed
according to new aesthetic and epistemological rules. The Nouveau Roman is marked by a
symptomatic interrogation of realistic – or illusionistic – conventions, which it redefines
through denarrativization, dedramatization, and depsychologization. The paper contends that
members of the informal group of Left Bank writers and filmmakers, including Nouveau Roman
authors, developed some of the most radical formal solutions for representing postwar reality—
one shaped by the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Their works depart
from conventional realism and engage reflexively with the act of representation itself, revealing
its fundamentally illusionistic nature. Special attention is given to the first two feature films by
Alain Resnais: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, and
Last Year at Marienbad (1961), written by Alain Robbe–Grillet – both key figures of the
Nouveau Roman. These films reflect the mid–twentieth–century intellectual shift in the
humanities and sciences, which increasingly viewed reality as a subjective construct. Through
their formal experimentation, they systematically deconstruct the codes of realism in
representing the present and the past, as well as internal and external experiences of reality.