New Wave Cinema: Paris-Hollywood

(Lecture). The term “new wave” was coined by a journalist to refer to an “outburst” of filmmaking that took place in France beginning in 1959. Although never a movement, and shortlived in terms of whatever aesthetic uniformity it may have had, its effects spread out across various European cinemas and it became the emblem for various American filmmakers well into the 1970s. The class will analyze a (somewhat random) series of such cineastes in an attempt to understand what now perhaps appears, from the current perspective, as one of the last gasps of high cultural production coming up against the reality of corporate necessity. Filmmakers will include Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Chirs Marker, Louis Malle, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick.