Zinaida Pronchenko: The New Wave

La Nouvelle Vague — the most important event in the history of French cinema, and perhaps world cinema, judging by the countless references to the manifestos of Godard, Truffaut, and their peers in the work of directors from Scorsese to Marlen Khutsiev. Or was it just a fleeting “foam of the days,” another generational revolt in the second postwar decade?

Did the cultural revolution of the 1960s have more precursors or followers? Who should be called the “godfathers” of the young, daring critics turned filmmakers: Jean-Pierre Melville, André Bazin, Henri Langlois? Or would the Nouvelle Vague never have emerged without Brigitte Bardot, who set its rhythm in And God Created Woman?

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo strolling down the Champs-Élysées in Breathless, Jean-Pierre Léaud trying to escape his perpetually dissatisfied parents in The 400 Blows — immortal images of a vanished era that still inspire debut filmmakers, secretly hoping to replicate the success of the “young Turks” who forever changed “the most important of the arts.”

Although, it seems, cinema matters to almost no one anymore — except cinephiles like Richard Linklater, who reconstructed that glorious decade in his homage film The New Wave.