About

In the late 1950s and 1960s, a disparate group of filmmakers in Paris reinvigorated cinema with offbeat and energetic approaches to filmmaking. A moment rather than a movement, what became known as the nouvelle vague or French New Wave brought together film enthusiasts who broke away from tired formulas and experimented with new approaches to narrative, genre, the cinematic image, montage and sound. With the advent of lightweight camera equipments, high speed film and portable location sound recording equipment, they burst out of the studio into the streets and cafes, and to explored the cinematic possibilities of the city, riffed on Hollywood genre cinema, and also responded to a volatile political context that included wars in Indochina and Algeria as well as the rise of the mass student protests of May '68. Presented with the generous support of the French Embassy in Australia, 'Breathless: French New Wave turns 50', curated by Kathryn Weir (Australian Cinémathèque), includes films by Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Jean Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Chris Marker, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda and many others. The cinema of May '68 is featured in an associated program curated by Adrian Martin (Rouge, Monash University) which brings together many rare films from before, during and after the events. In 'New Wave Paris: Paris vu par...', Gilles Rousseau (Forum des Images, Paris) showcases the strong relationship between the nouvelle vague and the streets of Paris, a primary location for so many iconic films of the period. Over the last decade in France an explosion of young filmmakers working with limited means has been dubbed the 'New New Wave'; Joe Hardwick (University of Queensland) has selected a program of powerful 'New New Wave' films from young French filmmakers who have again marked their generation.

List of Works

• NEW NEW WAVE
• Young, irreverent, energetic and groundbreaking, the enthusiasm with which new French filmmakers were greeted by critics in the early 1990s suggested both a moment of reinvigoration and a sense of deja vu: was French cinema seeing the reincarnation of the New Wave of the 1960s? Rejecting what some saw as the shallow aestheticism of the cinéma du look of the 1980s, the arrival of le jeune cinéma heralded a major turning point and a new realism in French filmmaking. The banner films such as La Haine 1995, Will It Snow for Christmas? 1996 and Western 1997 took spectators away from bourgeois inner-city Paris to document life on the periphery, offering an intimacy and honesty born of close relationship between the directors' own lives and the stories recounted. Personal, original, multifaceted and multiethnic, the 1990s brought about a New New Wave in the image of contemporary France.
• Coming to Terms with the Dead (Petits Arrangements avec les Morts) 1994 | Director: Pascale Ferran
• Bye-bye 1995 | Director: Karim Dridi
• La Haine 1995 | Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
• Return to Sarajevo (Retour a Sarajevo) 1996 | Director: Philippe Grandrieux
• Will It Snow for Christmas? (Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël?) 1996 | Director: Sandrine Veysset
• The Other Side of the Sea (L'autre Coté de la Mer) 1997 | Director: Dominique Cabrera
• The Life of Jesus (La Vie de Jésus) 1997 | Director: Bruno Dumont
• Western 1997 | Director: Manuel Poirier
• L'Humanité 1999 | Director: Bruno Dumont
• Jeanne and the Perfect Guy (Jeanne et le Garçon Formidable) 1998 | Directors: Oliver Ducastel, Jacques Martineau
• Sombre 1998 | Director: Philippe Grandrieux
• On the Run (Cavale) 2002 | Director: Lucas Belvaux
• Golden Youth (Jeunesse Dorée) 2002 | Director: ZaÏda Ghorab-Volta
• A New Life (La Vie Nouvelle) 2002 | Director: Philippe Grandrieux
• Wild Side 2004 | Director: Sébastien Lifshitz
• L'Esquive 2005 | Director: Abdel Kechiche
• The Right of the Weakest (La Raison du Plus Faible) 2006 | Director: Lucas Belvaux
• MAY 68
• The complex series of social and political incidents we today sum up as May '68 — in which students and workers seemingly united to challenge the government and combat police in the streets of Paris — marked the wholesale politicisation of French film culture. All the serious magazines (Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, Cinethique) and virtually every significant filmmaker (from Truffaut to Polanski) made a sharp 'left turn' into radicalism.
• As has often been stated, the agitations in the film sector near the start of 1968 — the campaign to retain Henri Langlois as the head of the Cinémathèque Française, the protests which brought the Cannes Film Festival to a halt — helped usher in the events of May. Of course, much of the French film scene was already politicised well before 1968. In particular, what is known as the 'Left Bank' group — including Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais and Armand Gatti — had long sought to bring the poetic and political aspects of cinema together and, in the process, they created a highly internationalised cinema spanning Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe.
• The same can be said of the Situationsists and the Lettrists. But it is fair to say that the 'Right Bank' group — the cluster of filmmakers we precisely identify as the Cahiers du Cinéma core of the Nouvelle Vague — was more conservative than radical, at least in the early 1960s. The cheekiness of Jean-Luc Godard, the philosophical games of Eric Rohmer, the genre-bending of François Truffaut and the metaphysics of Jaques Rivette all tended to be fashionable Parisian introversion, a shutting-out of the wider world.
• By 1967, however, when Godard made the prescient La Chinoise, the revolution was ripe to burst, and no one working in film could ignore it. May '68 changed the language of cinema as well as its means of production, exhibition and distribution.
• On the Passage of a Few People through a Relatively Short Period of Time (Sur Le Passage de Quelques Personnes a Travers Une Assez Courte Unite des Temps) 1959 | Director: Guy Debord
• La Chinoise 1967 | Director: Jean Luc Godard
• See You Soon (À Bientôt, J'espère) 1967–68 | Director: Chris Marker
• It's Only a Beginning — The Revolution Goes On (Ce n'est qu'un Début — la Révolution Continue) 1968 | Director: Pierre Clementi
• Cinétracts 1968 | Director: Collectif
• Archives Actualities Gaumont Mai 1968 1968 | Director: Gaumont Pathe
• The Idols (Les Idoles) 1968 | Director: Marc'O
• Power Is in the Streets (Le Pouvoir dans la Rue) 1968 | Director: Alain Tanner
• Maydays (Grand Soirs et Petit Matins) 1968–78 | Director: William Klein
• The Youth Uprising (Le Soulèvement de la Jeunesse) 1969 | Director: Maurice Lemaître
• Nouvelle Société no. 6 1969 | Director: Slon-Groupe Medvedkine
• Classe de Lutte 1969 | Director: Slon-Groupe Medvedkine
• Lettre à Mon Ami Pol Cèbe 1970 | Director: Michel Desrois
• Le Traîneau-Échelle 1970 | Director: Jean-Pierre Thiébaud
• Out 1: Noli me Tangere 1971 | Director: Jacques Rivette
• Everything is Alright (Tout va Bien) 1972 | Director: Jean-Luc Godard
• Blow for Blow (Coup par Coup) 1972 | Director: Marin Karmitz
• Society of the Spectacle (La Société de Spectacle) 1973 | Director: Guy Debord
• The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) 1973 | Director: Jean Eustache
• Grin without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est Rouge) 1977 | Director: Chris Marker
• History of May (Histoire de Mai) 1978 | Director: Pierre-André Boutang
• We Spin around the Night Consumed by the Fire (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni) 1978 | Director: Guy Debord
• New Old 1979 | Director: Pierre Clementi
• To Die at 30 (Mourir a Trente Ans) 1982 | Director: Romain Goupil
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