There was cinema before the French New Wave, and there was cinema after. The explosion of creative innovation that emanated from France in the late 1950s and early ’60s forever altered the course of film history by opening up new avenues of stylistic experimentation and trumpeting the concept of the “auteur” director, whose aesthetic vision and thematic obsessions took center stage. Led by a coterie of passionate film critics and cinephiles who took up cameras—including the radical Jean-Luc Godard (BREATHLESS, PIERROT LE FOU), the romantic François Truffaut (THE 400 BLOWS, JULES AND JIM), the restless Agnès Varda (CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7, LE BONHEUR), the experimental Jacques Rivette (PARIS BELONGS TO US, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING), the modernist Alain Resnais (HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR), and the classicist Eric Rohmer (MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S, CLAIRE’S KNEE)—the French New Wave inspired filmmakers around the world by liberating cinema from commercial demands and reclaiming it in the name of unfettered personal expression.
Directed by Jacques Demy • 1964 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo
The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a h...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer
Though married to the good-natured, beautiful Thérèse (Claire Drouot), young husband and father François (Jean-Claude Drouot) finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attrac...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1966 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Eva Dahlbeck
One of Agnès Varda least-seen films is also one of her most fascinating: an eccentrically imaginative science-fiction fantasia that touches on human nature, free will, and the creative process. Worki...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1966 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert
With MASCULIN FÉMININ (“Masculine Feminine”), ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engag...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne
This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while...
Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1967 • France
Starring Haydée Politoff, Patrick Bauchau, Daniel Pommereulle
A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohe...
Directed by Jacques Demy • 1967 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac
Jacques Demy followed up THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG with another musical about missed connections and second chances, this one a more effervescent confection. Twins Delphine and Solange, a dance instructor and...
Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1969 • France
In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer's Moral Tales series, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early thirties, he lives by a strict moral code in ...
Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1970 • France
"Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?" says Jerôme, even as he plans on marrying a diplomat's daughter by summer's end. Before then, Jerôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old L...
Directed by Jacques Demy • 1970 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Marais, Delphine Seyrig
In this lovingly crafted, wildly eccentric adaptation of a classic French fairy tale, Jacques Demy casts Catherine Deneuve as a princess who must go into hiding as a scullery maid in order to fend o...
Directed by Louis Malle • 1971 • France, Italy, West Germany
Starring Benoît Ferreux, Lea Massari, Daniel Gélin
Louis Malle’s critically acclaimed MURMUR OF THE HEART gracefully combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy’s sexual mat...
Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1972 • France
Though happily married to his adoring wife Hélène, with whom he is expecting a second child, the thoroughly bourgeois business executive Frédéric cannot banish from his mind the multitude of attractive Parisian women who pass him by every day. His flirtati...
Directed by Jacques Rivette • 1974 • France
Starring Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier
Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cin...
Directed by Louis Malle • 1974 • France, Italy, West Germany
Starring Pierre Blaise, Aurore Clément, Holger Löwenadler
One of the first French films to address the issue of collaboration during the German occupation, Louis Malle’s brave and controversial LACOMBE, LUCIEN traces a young peasant’s ...
Directed by Louis Malle • 1975 • France, Germany
Starring Cathryn Harrison, Joe Dallesandro, Thérèse Ghiese
Louis Malle meets Lewis Carroll in this bizarre and bewitching trip down the rabbit hole. After skirting the horrors of a mysterious war being waged in the countryside, beautiful young Lil...
Directed by Alain Resnais • 1980 • France
Starring Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia, Roger Pierre
MY AMERICAN UNCLE (a.k.a. MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE) is unique in cinema—one of the oddest movies ever to emerge from the hand of director Alain Resnais, and also perhaps his most popular, steeped in elem...
Directed by François Truffaut • 1980 • France
Starring Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Jean Poiret
Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping, humanist character st...
