Content area
Full text
The French New Wave, one of the most celebrated, influential, and widely studied movements in the history of international cinema, coalesced in the mid- to late 1950s and lasted well into the next decade. Some of its leading figures-especially those who began as critics for the seminal journal Cahiers du cinéma-have been ensconced in the "pantheon" of great filmmakers and indeed have codified for us the very notion of an "auteur" cinema (e.g., François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard). However, we risk oversimplification in reducing such an important movement to just a few "star" directors. In order to grasp the full range and complexity of the New Wave, it is necessary also to consider in depth some of its other, perhaps less celebrated but equally intriguing practitioners, including Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Demy. This special issue of Post Script aims to take a few steps in that direction, at least as far as Demy is concerned.
Fortunately, it can no longer be said that the cinema of Jacques Demy (1931-1990) remains largely unknown to American audiences-as was the case not so very long ago. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Agnès Varda (not only a central figure of the New Wave's "Left Bank" group herself,1 but also Demy's widow) and her children, Rosalie Varda-Demy and Mathieu Demy, the past two decades have witnessed the preservation, restoration, and re-release of virtually all of Jacques Demy's cinematic output-from the masterpieces to the failures-and the lion's share of that material has found its way into the U.S. market.
Notably, in the mid-1990s Zeitgeist Films and Miramax reintroduced us to Demy's greatest achievements, his musical films of the mid-1960s: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), respectively. Then in 2000, the now-defunct Winstar/Wellspring mounted a limited theatrical reprise of Demy's first two features, the more pointedly New-Wave classics Lola (1961) and Bay of Angels (1963), as a way to promote their DVD releases. For the New York Film Critics Circle, those re-releases amounted to a rediscovery, and the group presented a rare "Special Award" in Demy's honor to Agnès Varda at their annual awards ceremony (White 11). A few years later, Lorber Media revived Demy's dazzling yet exceedingly strange fairy-tale, Peau d'Ane...