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Introduction
The year 2009 was awash with fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the French New Wave, from the French consulate in Hong Kottg to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, die Ciné Lumière in London to the Vieille Charité in Marseille and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and many other places in between. Festivals, retrospectives, and conferences commemorated what has become the landmark film movement in French cinema, widely seen as "an alternative cinema that was personal, radical and independent" whose effects "are still with us today."1 As these words (culled from the Irish Film Institute program - but I could have picked any number of other sources) make clear, the dominant tone has been one of celebration. It is with this in mind that I approached the contributors to this In Focus feature. AU are recognized experts on the French New Wave and on this period of French film history through their publications, but all share the desire to challenge our vision of die movement, or at the very least to push the boundaries beyond the recognized canon of filmmakers - traditionally understood as comprising two groups, one around the Cahiers du cinéma (François Truffaut, JeanLuc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette), die other the "Left Bank" filmmakers Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker.
Not that there is not a. lot to celebrate about the French New Wave. Undoubtedly the nouvelle vague represented a break in filmmaking practice at the turn of the 1960s, introducing new ways of making films outside the mainstream industry, spreading the use of lighter technologies, ushering in an entire new generation of directors, stars, cinematographerSj producers, and composers. It also, significantly, revolutionized the way people saw films and the way they wrote about them, in particular popularizing the politique des auteurs. This familiar "legend," or "myth" in Antoine de Baecque's terms,2 whose gods are François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, surrounded by the other directors mentioned above, has been remarkably successful at perpetuating itself. This is in part due to the fact that most are still making films fifty years later (and in many cases films that still matter), as are many of the stars concerned- Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Pierre Léaud, to name but two. The...