A “Mana Word” and the Labyrinth (about “New Waves” and Late Soviet Cinema)

In October 1957, writer Françoise Giroud called the generation of French people born during and shortly after World War II the “new wave.” The paradoxical feature of this generation, characteristic not only of young Frenchmen, but also of their peers from Great Britain and other Western countries, was the combination of its evasion of any definitions and at the same time absolute recognition. This “form without form,” called by Roland Barthes the “mana word,” was perceived by many older contemporaries as a completely special “spirit of youth,” fraught with an intergenerational gap and the establishment of a completely new cultural situation. This situation correlated with the increasingly dominant strategy of “elimination of meaning” in Western intellectual space as a life-affirming value. The subject of the proposed article is the mutual influence of the “new wave” as a social phenomenon, its contemporary intellectual orientations and those innovative trends in the cinemas of France and England in the late 1950s, which also became known as “new waves” after the concept changed its primary territory of application and moved into the realm of cinema. The article ends with reflections on late Soviet “auteur cinema.” The intentions of many of its creators are associated with the opposite strategy to “elimination of meaning,” which was brilliantly embodied, in particular, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood.” This refers to the tragic search for lost value and semantic guidelines in the labyrinthine space of cultural despair.