July 3 - August 22

“The greatest criminal enterprise in cinema history. . . . The New Wave was a crime: that was its beauty. It was an outrage against law, order and aesthetic decency.” – Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

One of the two most important and influential movements in postwar film – the other is Italian neorealism, to which it is closely related – the nouvelle vague or French New Wave inspired independent cinema in countries from Asia to Latin America, creating enough new waves to make an ocean. The brash young directors of the nouvelle vague (Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut) reinvented and reinvigorated not only French cinema, but the world’s in the process (and continue to do so; “new wave” remains the term of choice to name any new or rejuvenated national cinema, Romania, Mexico, and Argentina being recent examples). Having just reached its half-century mark, this key movement receives a major appraisal in this summer-long series, which features many essential classics, but also many rarities, including works by directors either little known here or considered fellow travellers or outliers of the New Wave. Fortunately, many of the central figures of the New Wave are still going strong, indeed producing some of their best work, so we have included four of their recent films to illustrate this inspiriting persistence of vision. The flanking retrospectives dedicated to Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Tati, and Otto Preminger, three figures who were greatly admired by and influential on the directors of the nouvelle vague, as well as several Italian neorealist films, fill out the picture. Both a crash course in the crucial, then, and an immersion in its implications.

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As my colleague Brad Deane, who co-programmed this series, says in his accompanying essay, the important question remains: “Qu’est-ce que la nouvelle vague?” From there it gets vexing: when exactly did the New Wave emerge? What were its first films? Which directors can be counted in the movement, and which not? As much as film history tends to agree on the impetus for its appearance – the cultural, intellectual, political turmoil of postwar France – and the importance of certain figures (Bazin, Rossellini) and