Abstract

A study of formal techniques and narrative strategies in films and filmmakers associated with the Post Nouvelle Vague legacy in French and Francophone cinema. A specific and new type of cinematic lyricism, often harsh and fragmented, emerged in films of the 1980s and 1990s. The roots of this new style are traced in the early Post Nouvelle Vague work of Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat and Philippe Garrel in the 1960s. The essay follows this impulse through Chantal Akerman and Wim Wenders in their minimalist work of the 1970s, through to Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, Leos Carax, Benoît Jacquot and others subsequently. Connections are also made to predecessors and related artists in American cinema, such as John Cassavetes and Abel Ferrara.

Keywords: Montage, Narrative, Space, Time, Post Nouvelle Vague, Lyricism, Jean-Luc Godard

An Ingmar Bergman film is, if you like, one 24th of a second metamorphosed and expanded over an hour and a half. It is the world between two blinks of the eyelids, the sadness between two heart-beats, the gaiety between two handclaps […] His camera seeks only one thing: to seize the present moment at its most fugitive, and to delve deep into it so as to give it the quality of eternity.

In Les baisers de secours [Philippe Garrel, 1989], every instant plays on what is most fundamental to cinema: the movement of life, change and exchange, the very process of evolution, the making evident of a space-time […] Garrel plunges us back into the cinema of Lumière: we are in the thrall of the present moment, and the surprise of each instant. The cinema-machine is there to capture the ephemeral palpitation of life and resituate it eternally.