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eBook Category: Sports/Entertainment/Sports/Entertainment
eBook Description: This Guide reviews and analyses all of the major films in the movement and offers profiles of its principal stars, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina and Brigitte Bardot. There is also an introductory essay, Making Waves, which examines the social context of the movement in France as well as the directors' considerable influence on later generations of film-makers across the globe. A handy multi-media reference guide at the end of the book points the way towards further New Wave resources.

eBook Publisher: Pocket Essentials/Pocket Essentials
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2006

Beautiful women. Suave leading men. Existential angst. Black and white figures in Parisian cafés. Cigarette smoke. Lots of it. The world of French cinema conjures up a hundred often-parodied clichés for today?s viewer and the films of the New Wave era supply their own set of distinctive images. Jean Seberg walking down the Champs Elysées selling the New York Herald Tribune. The young Jean- Pierre Léaud running through the streets of Paris with a stolen typewriter. Charles Aznavour playing honkytonk piano in a run-down café.Anna Karina and Jean- Claude Brialy brushing off their feet before going to sleep. Eddie Constantine, decked out in gumshoe hat and mac, arriving at the sinister town of Alphaville. Jean-Paul Belmondo wrapping dynamite around his painted face. Brigitte Bardot lying naked in a bedroom asking Michel Piccoli what he thinks of her rear. Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre cycling through the countryside.The list is endless. These images are some of the things that the New Wave means to me, yet decades after the term was coined in L?Express magazine, critics continue to argue over its precise meaning. Some confine the New Wave to a certain period of time, others to particular directors. Many believe that the film-makers who wrote for the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma are the only ones we can truly describe as belonging to the New Wave. Among the directors believed at one time or another to be related to the movement are: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Rouch, Jacques Rozier, Jean Douchet, Alexandre Astruc, Pierre Kast, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Jean Eustache. Phew! This book doesn't set out to cover every film made by every film-maker connected with the movement. Space restrictions make such a task impossible. Instead, this guide looks at the early years of the movement named the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). It examines the first works of some truly iconoclastic and innovative directors, and follows roughly a decade of film-making, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. This was a time when the New Wave had a certain sense of cohesion, if not in real life then often thematically and stylistically on the screen. In choosing the films to be covered, I have primarily given space to those works that made their directors? reputations during these years. As the temporal bias would have led to the exclusion of certain directors? key critical and commercial successes, such as Truffaut?s Le Dernier Métro, Chabrol?s Le Boucher and Rivette?s La Belle Noiseuse, I have included a check list of other New Wave-related films at the end of the book. For these and the principal pictures discussed during the book, you'll find a short note about that film?s availability on DVD or video.