Far From the Masters: Experimentations in Post-New Wave French Cinema

In his 1979 film Scénario du film Sauve qui peut (la vie), Jean-Luc Godard, sitting at his editing suite, remarks: “On est dans la cuisine, loin des maîtres – et ça c’est déjà quelque chose” (We’re in the kitchen, far from the masters—and that’s already something). As the French New Wave has gradually morphed from a transformative movement in cinematic production to a marketable piece of sixties nostalgia (a jumpcut here, an ironic meta-referential witticism muttered between cigarette puffs there), the world of French cinema that emerged in the new wave’s aftermath warrants renewed attention. Expressing alternately a growing cynicism and a deepening politicisation in the wake of the shattering of many dreams of the sixties, the post-new wave French (and Belgian) cinema of the 1970s and 80s—by filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, Maurice Pialat, and others—also frequently evokes the idea of a rebirth of cinema, a return to zero working with the most minimal of tools. This book emerges from a series of discussions among critics, scholars, students, and filmmakers, who assembled at the Melbourne Uni French Film Club from 2022-23 to watch these films and think about them as a laboratory for contemporary forms of thinking and community-building in the arts. The pieces in this book, through their readings of individual post-new wave films, seek to reawaken this world of cinematic experimentation without mastery, and to imagine the new collectives it can give rise to.

Edited by Conall Cash and Corey Cribb.

Contributors:

Conall Cash

Corey Cribb

Philippa Hawker

Michelle Huang

Jack Keenan

Scott Robinson

Miranda Stanyon

Jake Wilson