CASE STUDY: The French New Wave in the twenty-first century

Surely the filmmakers associated with the French New Wave of the early 1960s are now figures of mainly historical interest, their principal cinematic achievements firmly in the past? Far from it. With the exception of Francois Truffaut, who died in 1984 at age 52, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer and Rivette from the original ‘Cahiers du cinéma ’ gang, as well as Marker, Varda and Resnais from the so-called ‘Left Bank’ group, have all continued to make films. Now in their seventies and eighties, all have recently produced work that is as enduringly alive to the possibilities and challenges of cinema as the films of their youth. While Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer have remained faithful to traditional forms of narrative cinema, Godard, Marker and Varda have continued to be open to new ways of working. To assess them collectively, as ‘twenty-first century filmmakers’, is to take stock of a set of remarkable achievements. It is also worth noting that a new generation of British and American critics have recently begun to work on these directors, as witnessed by publications such as Catherine Lupton’s study of Chris Marker (the first career-length survey in English), Emma Wilson’s recent work on Alain Resnais and Douglas Morrey’s boo