La Nouvelle Vague

Emerging in late-1950s France, the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave was less a unified movement than a shared spirit of rebellion against the Tradition de la qualité or “Quality Tradition” prevalent in French cinema, with its literary adaptations, studio-bound productions, and overly polished style. The New Wave filmmakers – many of whom were former film critics for the influential 'Cahiers du cinéma' – rejected this model in favour of a cinema grounded in a rough-and-tumble immediacy that feels intensely personal, which in turn launched the idea of directors as the auteurs of their films.

Jump Cut Rebels

Foundational films like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (both 1959) announced this shift with startling force: handheld camerawork, natural light, location shoots, jump cuts, and narratives that are open-ended and alive. Beyond Truffaut and Godard’s New Wave “blockbusters,” which also include Jules and Jim and Contempt, there is also room for less frequently screened but equally important works such as Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us; Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge; Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine, all exploring how passionate youngsters try to navigate a complex postwar society. Together, they demonstrate the New Wave ethos as emotionally immediate, formally free and intellectually rigorous.

A ciné-conférence and several introductions will help the audience further contextualise the ideas and vision of these young filmmakers breaking all the rules. A programme of shorts, featuring early works by Truffaut, Rozier and Varda, challenges the Paris-centric notion of the New Wave by showcasing films shot in the South of France. Taken together, these films reveal the Nouvelle Vague not simply as a historical moment, but as a reminder that cinema can always be questioned and subsequently reinvented.

All films in this retrospective are subtitled in English