French and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa
Making Waves:
Documentary Film in Context
A scholar of twentieth-century French literature, intellectual history, and film, Ungar is the author of six books on French culture, including Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (1983), Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930 (1995), Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005; co-authored with Dudley Andrew), and Cléo de 5 à 7 (2008). Recent publications include articles on the literary figures Patrick Modiano, W.G. Sebald, and Milan Kundera.
Ungar’s current research project, entitled Making Waves: French Documentary Film 1945-1967 is a book-length study of fifteen postwar films that contributed to the emergence of the French New Wave. Chapters devoted to documentaries about Paris, anti-colonialism, and cinéma vérité analyze films by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Jean Rouch, and Georges Franju as points of entry to reconsider the social, cultural, and political histories of fourth and early Fifth Republic France.
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