Retrospective 2020

French cinema after 1968 is a cinema of upheaval. It documents a profound change in French society at a time when political, social and cultural values are being questioned and renegotiated.

Above all, however, it is a cinema of the aftermath, a cinema that followed and had to deal with cinematic and political caesuras. Thus, filmmakers were confronted with two fundamental questions: What is my position vis-à-vis the works of the Nouvelle Vague? And what do the shocks of May '68 mean for my artistic work? The Nouvelle Vague is the pivotal point from which French film history is generally viewed. In the slipstream of the Cahiers du Cinéma, a generation of young filmmakers set out to storm the cinema from the late 1950s onwards. The cinéma de papa was declared to be the enemy and a conservative boredom. The films of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda or Jacques Rivette exerted an immediate and worldwide influence that remains unbroken today, almost 60 years later. The myth of the Nouvelle Vague is so strong that it overshadows much of French cinema in the years that followed.

The selection of the retrospective ›Le Deuxième Souffle - The Second Generation 1968-1983‹ concentrates on films that address the aforementioned caesurae and focuses on the generation of filmmakers who made their films immediately after the pioneers of the Nouvelle Vague. In many respects, they even surpassed the works of their famous predecessors. Some of them are often referred to as the second generation of the Nouvelle Vague. The starting point of the retrospective is the events around May '68, which left a deep mark on French society and culture.

The films of the 2020 Retrospective at a glance:

L'enfance nue - D: Maurice Pialat - FRA 1968
La fiancée du pirate - D: Nelly Kaplan - FRA 1969
L'étrangleur - D: Paul Vecchiali - FRA 1970
La maman et la putain - D: Jean Eustache - FRA 1973
Les hautes solitudes - D: Philippe Garrel - FRA 1974
Jean Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - D: Chantal Akerman - FRA 1975
Un enfant dans la foule - D: Gérard Blain - FRA 1976
Mon coeur est rouge - D: Michèle Rosier - FRA 1976
La drôlesse - D: Jacques Doillon - FRA 1979
Simone Barbès ou la vertue - D: Marie-Claude Treilhou - FRA 1980
Neige - D: Julie Berto, Jean-Henri Roger - FRA 1981
Tchao Pantin - D: Claude Berri - FRA 1983