Screen Notes:

After the Wave - Young French Cinema in the 1970s

Still from 'Je, Tu, Il, Elle'

Still from 'Je, Tu, Il, Elle'

Cinema curator Tamara Anderson takes us back to the heady days of 1970s France and tells us how the films that came after the Nouvelle Vague were influenced by the turbulent political events of May 1968 – and why these films are still so relevant today.

Introducing After the Wave

Still from 'Loulou'

Still from 'Loulou'



'The films are broadly naturalistic, often autobiographical, interested in the complexities of love and intimate relationships, and with a focus on the lives of young people'

Despite many interconnections in their personal and working lives, the filmmakers featured in our After the Wave season were never formally aligned as a movement. They are, in truth, a pretty disparate bunch of directors. But what they do all have in common is that they emerged both after the Nouvelle Vague, and after the events of May 68.

To come after the New Wave was by all accounts something of a mixed blessing. The Nouvelle Vague directors had made France the hottest of world cinema hot spots. So, not an easy act to follow, not least because its figurehead practitioners did not disappear overnight – they carried on working across the 1970s and beyond.

On the other hand, this older generation gave the newer one a leg up. Jean Eustache and Jacques Doillon found an enthusiastic champion in François Truffaut, who also produced Maurice Pialat’s first feature; one of Eustache’s early shorts was shot on film stock donated by Jean-Luc Godard, left over from Masculin Féminin (1966).

Their example was also an inspiration to the younger directors and in important ways, thematically and stylistically, their films take forward the work of the Nouvelle Vague. The films are, for instance, broadly naturalistic, often autobiographical, interested in the complexities of love and intimate relationships, and with a focus on the lives of young people.

But in important ways they are also different, because their directors had a different agenda, one inflected by the language and demands which had shaken the streets in May 68.



'May 68 [...] translated to cinema screens in the following decade with improved representation of the young, working-class, the regions, women and ethnic minorities'

For France, May 68 was much more than a political phenomenon; it was a cultural watershed. Led by students and workers – factions historically excluded and marginalised by bourgeois society and the capitalist state – a nationwide movement rose up to contest authority in all its forms, calling for a rethinking of society. May 68 stands for new ideas, new attitudes, new artistic practices.

The underlying theme of May 68 was speaking out and speaking up – giving voice to the voiceless, in French called a prise de parole. This translated to cinema screens in the following decade with improved representation of the young, working-class, the regions, women and ethnic minorities.

The directors in our season – many themselves young and from regional, working-class backgrounds – were a part of this new current. They put up on screen new interpretations of the experience of being young in France: an experience that May 68 had done so much to foreground.  

May 68 graffitis in Paris

May 68 graffitis in Paris

May 68 graffitis in Paris

May 68 graffitis in Paris

May 68 graffitis in Paris

May 68 graffitis in Paris

May 68 graffitis in Paris

May 68 graffitis in Paris

Cinematography and mise-en-scène are understated, locations modest, actors non-professionals or ‘new faces’, never stars. Their films are mostly set in the regions; the protagonists are from modest backgrounds, generally young workers trying to make ends meet with menial or insecure jobs.


Some have been caught up directly in les événéments – like the burnt-out case in Philippe Garrel’s L’enfant secret (1979). Others are dealing with the wider cultural fall-out – like Chris in Doillon’s Touched in the Head (1974), negotiating a pay dispute and the sexual revolution.

Among the new generation are three women directors: Chantal Akerman, Diane Kürys and Catherine Breillat. This is significant: one of the major legacies, if not the major legacy, of May 68 was French women’s liberation, and in cinema this translated into more women than ever before stepping behind the camera.

In their films – and those by male directors, notably Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre (1971) and Pialat’s Loulou (1980), featuring women protagonists – the articulation of female experience is properly complex. And as with feminist writing of the period, there is a new insistence on women as sexual beings – witness the frank, taboo-busting scenes in A Real Young Girl (1976) and Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974).

It was this interest in representing lives if not exactly like my own, then at least recognisable to me, that first drew me to these directors and this set of films.

Still from 'A Real Young Girl'

Still from 'A Real Young Girl'

Still from 'Loulou'

Still from 'Loulou'

Still from 'Peppermint Soda'

Still from 'Peppermint Soda'

Still from 'A Real Young Girl'

Still from 'Loulou'

Still from 'My Little Loves'

Still from 'Peppermint'

Still from 'A Real Young Girl'

Still from 'Loulou'

Still from 'My Little Loves'

Still from 'Peppermint'

Not always, but very often, French cinema presents us with lives much more moneyed and glamorous than our own. I’m thinking of Eric Rohmer’s characters with long summer holidays and holiday homes in the South of France. Or of characters who are nominally working women – think Romy Schneider’s architect in Les choses de la vie (1970) or Juliette Binoche’s artist in Let the Sunshine In (2017) – but whose working lives, so far as they are sketched in, bear very little relation to our own, and whose clothes are so, so much nicer.

It is one of the great pleasures of French cinema that it allows us to project ourselves into these fabulous lives. But it is also precisely because they are not like this that the films in After the Wave feel so fresh and relatable, nearly fifty years after they were made.

Still from 'Touched in the Head'

Still from 'Touched in the Head'

Still from 'Touched in the Head'

Still from 'Touched in the Head'

'The films in After the Wave feel so fresh and relatable, nearly fifty years after they were made'

Still from 'Salamandre'

Still from 'Salamandre'

About
After the Wave : Young French Cinema in the 1970s

After the French New Wave and the tumultuous political events of May 1968, a younger and more progressive generation of directors emerged. This season explores the work of these bold new directors.

After the Wave takes place 6 Jun–25 Jul.

Cinema Summer Special

All After the Wave screenings are part of our Cinema Summer Special: book your cinema ticket online and you can pre-order a glass of beer, house wine or soft drink for a combined price of £13 (plus 60p booking fee).