Nouvelles Vagues

At the very end of the 1950s in France, a series of new films burst onto cinema screens, breaking with the canons and means of production of the film industry at the time. The New Wave was a breath of fresh air, a wind of renewal that was to change the face of cinema for ever. But it also spread the embers of a cultural revolution (not Mao's) that was to spread beyond the French borders of the Iron Curtain and across the continents to all cinematographies. And so it was that in the 1960s, all over the world, new waves were born, or, as they were called at the time, New Cinemas, Young Cinemas.

These were cinemas full of a vigour that is still insolent today, brimming with creative energy and a freedom of tone that invented a new cinematographic language by freeing themselves from the subjects and narrative codes of classical cinema.
Here's the proof in 16 films!

Programming :

Quand passent les cigognes
(Letiat jouravli)
Mikhaïl Kalatozov

1957. URSS. 97 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

The incredible formal richness of a Soviet cinema staple. A symbol of the thaw led by Khrushchev after Stalin's death, this melodrama set against the backdrop of the Second World War was born out of the wounds of the Empire and freed itself from the ideology of socialist realism. It's a break with the past, a liberation that literally gives wings to Mikhail Kalatozov, who strikes a balance here between technical modernity and lyricism that is as magical as it is graceful. Moscow, 1941, the ravages of war and, to the sound of cannon fire, the story of a love irrevocably doomed.

> Sunday 2 February at 4pm
> Sunday 2 March at 2pm

Le Beau Serge
Claude Chabrol

1958. Fr. 97 min. N&b. DCP.

The birth of the Nouvelle Vague. A film based above all on the rejection of post-war daddy cinema, but also a film born of an inheritance that enabled Claude Chabrol to finance Beau Serge. In fact, Chabrol shot his first feature film in the village where he grew up, surrounded, of course, by friends and family. His style was, for the time, raw and original. François returns to his native village and meets up with Serge, his childhood friend. Decay, alcoholism and suicide. Gérard Blain is a magnificent Serge, and Bernadette Lafont is an absolute star.

> Friday 24 January at 6.30pm
> Sunday 9 February at 2pm

Les Quatre Cents Coups
François Truffaut

1959. Fr. 100 min. N&b. DCP.

A major Truffaut fugue! A wandering kid and Paris as a backdrop. And the Antoine Doinel saga can begin. The unique eye of a filmmaker and the tragic gaze of his actor. François Truffaut's first feature film, partly autobiographical. Somewhere between War of the Buttons and War of the Buttons. Same era, same generation. But a rural comedy on the one hand, an urban drama on the other. A truant school versus a shattered family unit. Cinema versus detention. Escape with young Antoine to the shores of a liberating cinema in the form of a hymn to youth, rebellious, spirited and invincible.

> Saturday 18 January at 4pm
> Friday 14 February at 6.30pm

À bout de souffle
Jean-Luc Godard

1960. Fr. 89 min. N&b. DCP.

New Wave, new world. At the time, an insolently modern film. ‘Disgusting. What's disgusting?’ A manifesto of the Nouvelle Vague. Jean Seberg as an American in Paris and Jean-Paul Belmondo as a hoodlum in love illuminate Jean-Luc Godard's first feature film. It was a first film that had the effect of an aesthetic bomb on French cinema. Fascinating intimate sequences and 1960s Paris filmed handheld. And Godard left the detective genre and changed the face of cinema.

> Friday 10 January at 6.30pm
> Sunday 23 February at 4pm

Contes cruels de la jeunesse
(Seishun zankoku monogatari)
Nagisa Oshima

1960. Jap. 96 min. Coul. DCP. VOSTF.

Morbid, masochistic drama or disenchanted thriller? It doesn't matter, because it is above all a cry of alarm from a hopeless youth, torn between utopian idealism and cold nihilism. This is the second film by Nagisa Oshima (barely twenty-eight years old), leader of a New Wave that broke with Japanese studio policy. The criminal wanderings of a young couple in the industrialised Japan of the 1960s. Sex, politics, taboo subjects and radical aesthetic choices. Oshima almost never films the sky and bans the colour green ‘because it soothes and dulls feelings’.

> Sunday 12 January at 2pm
> Friday 21 February at 6.30pm

Samedi soir, dimanche matin
(Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)
Karel Reisz

1960. UK. 90 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

Si les cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague anglaise parvenaient si bien à décrire un morne quotidien, ils le devaient en partie à l’excellence de leurs jeunes comédiens. Samedi soir, dimanche matin ne déroge pas à la règle. Pour son premier grand rôle, le jeunot Albert Finney en impose méchamment. Il est espiègle, fougueux et impulsif, les femmes se l’arrachent et lui, refuse de grandir. No future ! Reisz enserre alors son personnage dans une poésie charbonneuse et propose une balade dans un Nottingham industriel, avec le meilleur guide qui soit, l’imprévisible Finney.

> Saturday 8 February at 4pm

The Connection
Shirley Clarke

1961. USA. 110 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

A director making a film about a director making a film! In a Brechtian huis clos, jazz musicians and drug addicts wait for a dealer to arrive. To make a bit of money, they agree to be filmed by documentary filmmaker Jim Dunn and his cameraman J.J. Burden... An flat film for a dizzying mise en abyme. A fiction film shot like a documentary by Shirley Clarke, a major figure in New York independent cinema. A portrait of the margins of American society, with the perspective of reality turned upside down and jazz as the soundtrack.

> Sunday 2 February at 2pm

Nous étions jeunes
(A byahme mladi)
Binka Jeliazkova

1961. Bulgarie. 110 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

The activities of a modest clandestine cell in occupied Sofia during the Second World War, marked by the arrival of young Veska... A woman among men filmed by a director often censored, hindered and worried by the regime. A reflection on how to protect one's innocence and one's capacity to love in a situation where every gesture, every look can lose you. Binka Jeliazkova, Bulgaria's first female director, combines Italian neo-realist influences with those of the French New Wave in a work that is a perfect blend of film noir, melodrama and war film.

> Saturday 1 February at 2pm

L’homme n’est pas un oiseau
(Čovek nije tica)
Dušan Makavejev

1965. Yougoslavie. 81 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

In a metallurgical town in south-east Serbia, the destinies of a rough and brutal worker who mistreats his wife and a middle-aged engineer who has a brief love affair with a hairdresser cross paths. This is the first film by the turbulent Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, who has no equal when it comes to describing the current reality in his country. In Man Is Not a Bird, we get drunk, we fight, we kill and, above all, we are hypnotised from start to finish. A beautiful, disenchanted reflection on manipulation and its consequences on intimate lives.

> Saturday 18 January at 2pm

Les Poings dans les poches
(I pugni in tasca)
Marco Bellocchio

1965. It. 104 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

Family, I hate you! A first feature film that foments revolt. A first explosion that buries neo-realism. Marco Bellocchio requisitions the family home, borrows money from his brother and constructs a stifling in camera setting inhabited by the cold rage of his main character. Alessandro decimates a family, his own family, already well into decomposition. Congenital idiocy, incest, matricide, epilepsy and blindness! The staging is clinical, the subject sharp, the family shredded, religion lacerated and the bourgeoisie slashed to shreds.

> Friday 17 January at 6.30pm
> Saturday 1 March at 2pm

Les Petites Marguerites
(Sedmikrásky)
Vĕra Chytilová

1966. Tchécoslovaquie. 76 min. Coul. / N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

A burlesque philosophical tale, a Dada film... Two girls: Marie 1 and Marie 2. Friends... Sisters... Twin sisters born under the sign of chaos. The world is rotten, really rotten. So they'll be more rotten than this rotten world. So they'll make a mockery of the ridiculous in a crazy, laughing escapade. Flirting with the old and mocking the young romantics. Getting paid to eat, drink, steal and ransack. Rolling around in the delicacies of a buffet, swinging from a chandelier, destroying a nightclub as if they were the Marx Brothers between them...

> Saturday 11 January at 2pm
> Friday 28 February at 6.30pm

Le Départ
Jerzy Skolimowski

1967. Belg. 93 min. N&b. DCP.

Forty-eight hours in the life of Marc, a hairdresser boy with a passion for motor racing... A Belgian interlude that goes by at breakneck speed for Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski, who anticipated his imminent exile by shooting his first feature film outside his native country. The film will be shot in French and Skolimowski doesn't understand a word of it. No matter! The director exalts youth divinely well while wrapping it in dark romanticism. As for Jean-Pierre Léaud, he literally sparkles in his role as a hairdresser boy mad about love and motor racing.

> Friday 31 January at 6.30pm
> Saturday 22 February at 2pm

Cati
(Eltávozott nap)
Márta Mészáros

1968. Hongrie. 80 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

The first Hungarian film directed by a female director. Set in Budapest in the late 1960s, it is the rock'n'roll portrait of an independent, free-spirited young woman in search of her roots. With her bobbed hair and Jean Seberg-style dark glasses, Cati grew up in an orphanage and is now determined to reconnect with her biological mother. One lives in the city and is self-sufficient, while the other lives in the countryside and is subject to patriarchal canons. A clash of generations, but above all a rejection of traditions from another era.

> Saturday 8 February at 2pm

Les Filles
(Flickorna)
Mai Zetterling

1968. Suède. 100 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

Present and past, fiction and reality, theatre and real life. The fourth film by director, producer, actress, screenwriter and author Mai Zetterling. Three actresses, Liz, Marianne and Gunilla, go on tour to perform Lysistrata by Aristophanes. How a play written two thousand years ago finds troubling echoes in the lives of the actresses who perform it. When formal experimentation and political commitment come together, with male domination in the firing line. An ancient farce and three heroines in a bizarre mise en abîme heavily influenced by the new French and Czech waves.

> Sunday 12 January at 4pm
> Sunday 23 February at 2pm

L’amour est plus froid que la mort
(Liebe ist kälter als der Tod)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1969. RFA. 88 min. N&b. DCP. VOSTF.

It would be the Breathless of the other side of the Rhine. Gangsters with references. Femme fatale and real faux film noir. Franz, a notorious petty criminal, wants to pull off a big job that pits him against the crime syndicate. He is assigned a killer, Bruno, with whom he quickly sympathises, completely fascinated by her beauty. Like thieves in a threesome, they start shooting at each other. But Joanna, the fatal prostitute they share, ends up feeling excluded from this special gang and begins to wonder what it means to be disgusting...

> Friday 7 February at 6.30pm
> Saturday 1 March at 4pm

La Salamandre
Alain Tanner

1971. Suisse. 123 min. N&b. DCP.

A journalist and a novelist team up to write a screenplay based on a true story: a young woman accused of shooting her uncle. Her name was Rosemonde. The novelist turns to fiction and imagines what might have happened. The journalist, on the other hand, sets out to find the victim and the accused. And when he finds her, Rosemonde, all three of their lives will change... Filming the raw revolt of a young woman. Playing with the codes of cinéma-vérité (Tanner got his start in Free Cinema) to create a serious parody.

> Sunday 19 January at 2pm

All the practical information :  La Cinémathèque de Toulouse