By Sophie Nellis
Belmondo and Seberg
The French New Wave – known as la nouvelle vague– was a celebration of youth, Paris and, above all, cinema. Many people don’t know that the term nouvelle vague was first used in 1957 to describe the new generation of French youth, emancipated 18 to 30 year olds who were free-thinking and keen to throw off the legacy of the Second World War. It was only following the success of François Truffaut’s Les...
Wednesday, May 7-------This May marks a milestone in recent world history. It is the 40th anniversary of the “events of 1968”, a series of revolutionary protests that spanned the globe and created social and political turmoil, particularly in the United States, England and France. While the protests centered on the escalating war in Vietnam, the main engine was a discontent with politics as usual. In France, in particular, art mixed with politics, as leading filmmakers, artists and philoso...
Thursday, March 27--------No one quite mastered the sneer as did actor Richard Widmark, who died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut at the age of 93. That sneer and a high-pitched giggling laugh is what shot him the stardom in 1947, when he played the psychopathic killer Tommy Udo in the gangster film KISS OF DEATH. Nothing in the movies before or since can compare with the scene in that film when Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved he...
Friday, July 13-----To celebrate Bastille Day (and the general love of all things French), the Jacob Burns Film Center, the prominent arthouse complex north of New York City, is hosting The French New Wave film series, reminding us all what it was about the French that we fell in love with in the first place. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the French "Nouvelle Vague" (New Wave) was the most dynamic cinema on the planet. It literally exploded when a group of young Cahiers du Cinema ...
The 55th San Sebastian International Film Festival, to take place from 20-29 September, will present a retrospective of work by the French director, Philippe Garrel. One of the most independent figures on the French movie scene, direct descendent of the nouvelle vague, but also of Robert Bresson and Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel has woven a career started in 1964 ranging from isolationist cinema to portraying important fragments of recent history, while reflecting on couples, drugs and the maki...
Friday, June 16--------The BamCinematek, the repertory arm of the BAM Rose Cinemas at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is presenting a newly restored film print of a true classic from iconic director Jean-Luc Godard for a limited run starting this evening. PIERROT LE FOU, a 1965 milestone from the most innovative director of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, will have a special 10 day revival, reminding audiences of the audacity, sexiness and visual splendor of this iconic director&...
