Theme: French New Wave Cinema

The New Wave (or the Nouvelle Vague) was an artistic movement that emerged in French Cinema in the late 1950s and lasted through until the 1970s (although its influence can still be felt for some years after that). There is debate as to which work was the first but the movement was solidified by the success of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).

The New Wave movement emerged out of a group of critics attached to the magazine Cahiers du Cinema who later went on to direct films – Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut – as well as other directors such as Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.

The French New Wave rejected the Hollywood model and encouraged experimentalism. Narrative became diffuse and non-linear; there are not the well-lit studio bound camera set-ups of Hollywood films but often handheld and ragged shots. New Wave films encouraged Left Wing Politics (frequently Marxist) along with a good deal of philosophical discourse, which has a tendency towards the pretentious.

In genre material, French New Wave has a fascination with time and memory and the blurring of the two (sometimes in actual Time Travel plots), while almost all of the works listed have frequent Surrealist content.