nostalgia for the present Jameson, Fredric’s apparently paradoxical formulation naming the attraction of the spectacle of the presence in the here and now of the past that certain films seem to provide. His key exhibit is the Lawrence Kasdan film Body Heat (1981), starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Jameson notes that although it is set in present-day Florida, it is filmed in such a way that all markers of contemporaneity are obscured, giving rise to the illusion the actual time of the film is the 1940s, the period from which its Technicolor® version of film noir mise en scène is borrowed. It is this desire for the present of previous films that is central to the concept. A more recent example of nostalgia for the present in cinema would be Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong (2005), which depicts the glamorous ‘present’ of 1930s New York. Further Reading: I. Buchanan Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006). C. Burnham The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (1995). F. Jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). nouveau roman (new novel) A style of novel that emerged in France in the 1950s. A precursor to the Nouvelle Vague (several nouveau roman authors either collaborated with film-makers or became film-makers themselves---Marguerite Duras is undoubtedly the best-known example), the nouveau roman is often referred to as ‘plotless’ because of its rejection of conventional narrative forms. Developed as an experiment in writing, the nouveau roman constantly pushed the boundaries of intelligibility by deliberately flouting the norms of realism, character, plotting, and so on. Not surprisingly, the initial critical reaction to the nouveau roman, at least in the popular press, was very far from favourable. And while the nouveau roman would be championed by critics like Barthes, Roland, it remained something that only a very small minority of readers took an interest in. The best-known proponent of the nouveau roman was Alain Robbe-Grillet, who effectively wrote its manifesto in 1963 with the publication of his collection of essays entitled, Pour un nouveau roman, translated as For a New Novel (1965). Other important nouveau roman authors include: Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Further Reading: S. Heath The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (1972). Nouvelle Vague A film movement, or moment, that was current in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Also known as the French New Wave, Nouvelle Vague was influenced by Italian neorealism and similarly rebelled against the prevailing national trend of big budget literary adaptations and costume dramas. The term Nouvelle Vague was coined by L’Express editor Françoise Giroud to describe the emergent youth culture of the period. The association with cinema grew out of the popularity of films like Et Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman, 1956), which was directed by a 28-year-old Roger Vadim. Nouvelle Vague was a highly intellectual cinematic form and many of its most important directors were film critics writing for Cahiers du cinéma who seized the opportunity the demand for a jeune cinéma (young or youthful cinema) presented (e.g. Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut). Not explicitly political, Nouvelle Vague was nonetheless highly critical of the consumer culture that was beginning to dominate French life at that time. Therefore it sought to make films which did not conform to the safe commercial formulas of the mainstream. So it did away with the establishing shot and introduced the jump cut instead. It did away with standard narrative trajectories and focused instead on the ambiguous complexities of human relationships, which in real life do not have neat beginnings, middles, or ends. Coinciding with the rise of *auteur theory, Nouvelle Vague directors held to the idea that films could be imbued with a signature style and did not have to be anonymous commodities.