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.
Višnja PENTIĆ (Tue,) studied this question.