This is a very vague title, but I'm not really sure how else to put it. I've watched some European films from the 50-70s recently, and really enjoyed them. I'd love to watch more, if anyone has any recommendations. There is just SO MUCH of it
I've seen
Fellini - I vitelloni, La Strada, and 8 1/2
Jacques Deray - La Piscine
Eric Rohmer - All 6 of the moral tales and the Green Rey
Krzysztof Kieślowski - The Double Life of Véronique and A Short Film About Love
Three Colours is on my list to watch soon, and Irma Vep looks interesting too. I said 50s-70s, but I don't know that much about European cinema so it was more a vague time frame
I was kinda groomed to be a film critic in one of my past iterations, but in typical me style turned my back on sth I was actually talented at in order to SABOTAGE MY LIFE (plus my 'Western Saviour' complex was too strong in those days, alas, so I was never gonna stay put and make it work). I haven't really engaged with cinema for some 15 years now, but it was the great passion of my adolescence and I would love to assist you on this journey if I can!
I think the three major filmmaking nations during the specified time period are France, Italy, and West Germany.
With France, the Nouvelle Vague obv hoovers up much of the attention in that era, but it's a pretty broad umbrella term that encompasses some pretty diverse auteurial styles. Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette are probably the leading figures here (primarily because they worked together at legendary film magazine Cahiers du cinéma). I'm not really a fan of the latter four, but Godard is one of my top ten filmmakers ever. Please check out: Le Mépris (one of my top ten films ever), Pierrot le Fou, and Vivre sa vie for further entrypoints into his oeuvre. If you're feeling really political after that then head to Masculin Féminin and Week End (his second masterpiece imo). Breathless is a great manifesto of what the French New Wave is all about (cinema verité homages and existential crises abound) but it's not remotely close to his best work.
With Truffaut, Jules et Jim is essential. His whole filmography is a lot more accessible than his contemporaries imo, so if you find you enjoy that then head to stuff like Stolen Kisses and Day for Night as well. Rohmer you've already covered and I don't think there's anything to add. Chabrol's best work probably comes with Isabelle Huppert in the 80s and 90s, but Les Biches and Le Boucher are lots of fun. Many of my cinephile friends back in the day revered Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating as one of the best films ever made. I'm not so sure myself but it's certainly worth a punt if you have a few hours to spare.
Godard aside, the best French filmmakers of this era come from outside the Cahiers group imo. Alain Resnais is a must: Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year in Marienbad are phenomenal works of art. Queen Agnès Varda was one of the few prominent female directors of the time and Cléo from 5 to 7 is a key feminist text regardless of medium. If you're willing to go a bit more nominally-classicist, my beloved Max Ophüls went on a tear in the early 50s with: La Ronde,Le Plaisir,Madame de... (in my all-time top five), and Lola Montès. The last title might be for diehards only, but the first three display why he was the greatest cinematic stylist in history imo. No other filmmaker's restlessly-roving camera has ever deconstructed societal artifice so ravishingly. A true master of the form.
Italian cinema goes through a fun phase of post-neorealist ennui in this period, with Visconti (a neorealist himself), Antonioni, and Fellini its key exponents. I'd probably rank them in that order. Visconti went on a tear of his own with the Dostoyevsky adaptation Le Notti Bianche, Rocco and His Brothers, and his probable masterpiece The Leopard (itself an adaptation of a literary masterpiece). Antonioni's 'trilogy' is emblematic of the era: L'Avventura - La Notte - L'Eclisse. Watch all three. Cinema isn't as we know it without L'Avventura. My two favourite Fellinis are La Dolce Vita (at one stage I figured this was my life story) and Nights of Cabiria (also at one stage my life story), tho Juliet of the Spirits is his most artistically daring success of the time period imo.
New German Cinema comes into its own in the 70s with Wim Wenders (Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road), Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God + his great adaptation of Nosferatu that I preferred to Murnau's original), and ofc Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Iconoclast. Brat. Genius. He's my fave filmmaker ever and probably needs his own thread. Berlin Alexanderplatz, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and In a Year of 13 Moons form something of a cinematic holy trinity for me. The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant probably make for more accessible pathways into what he's about.
Aside from the above, there's another more overtly 'spiritual' strain of cinema that flowers during this period with Ingmar Bergman (along with Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, he's one of the few arthouse names that broke through into the Anglosphere and is often referenced in Hollywood films of the 70s). He was my icon when I was about 15, but I've long since gone off his stuff (overly portentous, and I don't give a fuck about crises of faith nowadays). He was a tremendous director of actors though, and frequently elicits monumental performances from his cast. Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona, and Cries and Whispers are his key works from these decades. But frankly, if you're feeling spiritual, I say check out Andrei Tarkovsky instead (Stalker, Solaris, Andrei Rublev). He navigated similarly weighty themes with far greater visual flair imo.
There's also really interesting stuff that happens in eastern European cinema of this era (Czechoslovakia, Poland). And I haven't even mentioned Luis Buñuel who's greater than most of the names listed above, gah! But I've waffled way too much already.
Anyway, hope this wall of text helps somewhat! Please keep us updated with your thoughts so I can relive my youth vicariously through you!
ETA: I fucking love À nos amours. I failed to mention Pialat only because you said 50s-70s!
Emir Kusturica - Time of the gypsies
Emir Kusturica - Underground
Nanni Moretti - Caro diario
Pedro Almodovar - Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown
Pedro Almodovar - High heels
Pedro Almodovar - Kika
Lars Von Trier - Breaking the waves
Neil Jordan - The crying game
Mike Leigh - Secrets and lies
Danny Boyle - Shallow grave
Roman Polanski - Knife in water
Jean Luc Goddard - Breathless
Tom Tykwer - Run Lola run
Krzysztof Kieślowski - Blue
Krzysztof Kieślowski - Red
I was kinda groomed to be a film critic in one of my past iterations, but in typical me style turned my back on sth I was actually talented at in order to SABOTAGE MY LIFE (plus my 'Western Saviour' complex was too strong in those days, alas, so I was never gonna stay put and make it work). I haven't really engaged with cinema for some 15 years now, but it was the great passion of my adolescence and I would love to assist you on this journey if I can!
I think the three major filmmaking nations during the specified time period are France, Italy, and West Germany.
With France, the Nouvelle Vague obv hoovers up much of the attention in that era, but it's a pretty broad umbrella term that encompasses some pretty diverse auteurial styles. Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette are probably the leading figures here (primarily because they worked together at legendary film magazine Cahiers du cinéma). I'm not really a fan of the latter four, but Godard is one of my top ten filmmakers ever. Please check out: Le Mépris (one of my top ten films ever), Pierrot le Fou, and Vivre sa vie for further entrypoints into his oeuvre. If you're feeling really political after that then head to Masculin Féminin and Week End (his second masterpiece imo). Breathless is a great manifesto of what the French New Wave is all about (cinema verité homages and existential crises abound) but it's not remotely close to his best work.
With Truffaut, Jules et Jim is essential. His whole filmography is a lot more accessible than his contemporaries imo, so if you find you enjoy that then head to stuff like Stolen Kisses and Day for Night as well. Rohmer you've already covered and I don't think there's anything to add. Chabrol's best work probably comes with Isabelle Huppert in the 80s and 90s, but Les Biches and Le Boucher are lots of fun. Many of my cinephile friends back in the day revered Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating as one of the best films ever made. I'm not so sure myself but it's certainly worth a punt if you have a few hours to spare.
Godard aside, the best French filmmakers of this era come from outside the Cahiers group imo. Alain Resnais is a must: Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year in Marienbad are phenomenal works of art. Queen Agnès Varda was one of the few prominent female directors of the time and Cléo from 5 to 7 is a key feminist text regardless of medium. If you're willing to go a bit more nominally-classicist, my beloved Max Ophüls went on a tear in the early 50s with: La Ronde,Le Plaisir,Madame de... (in my all-time top five), and Lola Montès. The last title might be for diehards only, but the first three display why he was the greatest cinematic stylist in history imo. No other filmmaker's restlessly-roving camera has ever deconstructed societal artifice so ravishingly. A true master of the form.
Italian cinema goes through a fun phase of post-neorealist ennui in this period, with Visconti (a neorealist himself), Antonioni, and Fellini its key exponents. I'd probably rank them in that order. Visconti went on a tear of his own with the Dostoyevsky adaptation Le Notti Bianche, Rocco and His Brothers, and his probable masterpiece The Leopard (itself an adaptation of a literary masterpiece). Antonioni's 'trilogy' is emblematic of the era: L'Avventura - La Notte - L'Eclisse. Watch all three. Cinema isn't as we know it without L'Avventura. My two favourite Fellinis are La Dolce Vita (at one stage I figured this was my life story) and Nights of Cabiria (also at one stage my life story), tho Juliet of the Spirits is his most artistically daring success of the time period imo.
New German Cinema comes into its own in the 70s with Wim Wenders (Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road), Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God + his great adaptation of Nosferatu that I preferred to Murnau's original), and ofc Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Iconoclast. Brat. Genius. He's my fave filmmaker ever and probably needs his own thread. Berlin Alexanderplatz, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and In a Year of 13 Moons form something of a cinematic holy trinity for me. The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant probably make for more accessible pathways into what he's about.
Aside from the above, there's another more overtly 'spiritual' strain of cinema that flowers during this period with Ingmar Bergman (along with Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, he's one of the few arthouse names that broke through into the Anglosphere and is often referenced in Hollywood films of the 70s). He was my icon when I was about 15, but I've long since gone off his stuff (overly portentous, and I don't give a fuck about crises of faith nowadays). He was a tremendous director of actors though, and frequently elicits monumental performances from his cast. Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona, and Cries and Whispers are his key works from these decades. But frankly, if you're feeling spiritual, I say check out Andrei Tarkovsky instead (Stalker, Solaris, Andrei Rublev). He navigated similarly weighty themes with far greater visual flair imo.
There's also really interesting stuff that happens in eastern European cinema of this era (Czechoslovakia, Poland). And I haven't even mentioned Luis Buñuel who's greater than most of the names listed above, gah! But I've waffled way too much already.
Anyway, hope this wall of text helps somewhat! Please keep us updated with your thoughts so I can relive my youth vicariously through you!
ETA: I fucking love À nos amours. I failed to mention Pialat only because you said 50s-70s!
This is the most post I’ve ever read. I have about 30 movies to watch now. And you’ve made them all sound so so interesting. Thank you, I will definitely follow up with the ones I’ve watched.
@old spice i didn’t mention Akira Kurosawa in the original post, for obvious reasons, but I watched Rashomon a few months ago and I’d 100% be interested in more from him
@old spice I just watched Vivre sa vie. I think I preferred it to Breathless. I feel like I need to watch the last 20 minutes again, since a lot of the dialogue went over my head. The ending was intense and pretty heartbreaking.
I'm so glad you enjoyed Vivre sa vie, @RJN ! It's been a heck of a long time since I saw it and my memory is shoddy af (the reason why I started writing about film was because I wanted to record my feelings as I knew there'd be no way for me to remember them). I think Tableaux 12 features the Poe short story and then
Nana's death
, oui? The Oval Portrait is about how man's obsession with art and image results in the confinement and decline of women, and how our fixation with surface can blind us to substance (in this case, love). There's a clear parallel here between both Nana's diegetic journey and Anna Karina's role as the film's star (she was married to Godard at the time iirc, or at least very much in a relationship with him). In another director's hands I think using the Poe in that manner would be on-the-nose to the point of detracting from the text, but with Godard it feels like yet another act of formal daring: a sudden barrage of obvious foreshadowing in a film that generally refuses exposition and defies narrative logic. This is why I respond to Godard far more than the other Nouvelle Vague directors, tbh. He was the real revolutionary of the gang - the one who launched consistent, often brilliant assaults on our understanding of what cinema could be, who recognised Hollywood as the bullshit capitalist enterprise that it is, responsible for the wholesale conditioning of audiences as passive receptacles of mindless entertainment, and who weaponised that conditioning against us. To watch Godard is to have one's eyes truly open, imo. (Sadly, the quality of his art declines the more militantly Marxist he becomes which is really the opposite of what I would have hoped for, but early Jean-Luc from 1960-67 really is everything!)
When I left the UK I actually took a gigantic storage book of all my fave films (DVDs) with me. Which means I must have Vivre sa vie sitting around here somewhere. But I haven't owned a DVD player since 2010, lol (do people even use them nowadays?). I suspect if I were to watch Vivre sa vie in my current old state, it'd probably break me. A protagonist who fetishises freedom, travels to its faultlines, and ends up destroyed by it? Yeah nah. I remember
Nana's death being treated almost like a parody, and being embedded within a wider narrative of national disregard for such individual stories. Which compounds the tragedy imo.
The other lasting image for me is when she's watching The Passion of Joan of Arc in the cinema (more foreshadowing, eh!). The tears!! It still gets me. Btw, that's another film that you really need to get to if you're intent on becoming a cinephile. Carl Theodor Dreyer was everything Ingmar Bergman wished he could be. Another interesting companion piece for Vivre sa vie might be Buñuel's Belle de jour which looks at prostitution and gender/societal roles from a very different lens (Buñuel is cinema's great surrealist; satire and irony are integral to his perspective).
I'm not a Kurosawa fan at all. There are others likely better placed to make recommendations there. Besides Rashomon the key films of his are: Seven Samurai (lauded by the likes of Spielberg and Lucas as one of the greatest films ever made which tells you all you need to know, shade intended), Ikiru (tremendous performance from Takashi Shimura, pair it with Bergman's Wild Strawberries), Yojimbo (pretty sure Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston watch this in The Bodyguard because of its English title, which is sth that I still find very LOL), and High and Low. They're all good. But his best films are actually his Shakespeare adaptations imo: Throne of Blood which takes on Macbeth, and Ran which retells King Lear. Ran in particular is sensational - a visual feast that's amplifies the play to justly-gargantuan scale whilst remaining totally attuned to the ageless tragedy at its heart. I'll say this about Kurosawa: he became a more interesting filmmaker later in his career, and Ran is very much testament to that.
Kenji Mizoguchi is the true genius of Japanese cinema tho! Just putting that out there. :P
Re: other Pialats - I've seen L'enfance nue, Loulou, Under the Sun of Satan and Van Gogh. I like them all to varying extents, but I always felt À nos amours was head and shoulders above the others. I guess either his debut or Satan would be where I'd head next?
Don't leave me hangin' out here, yo! I very much look forward to reading more of your film-related contributions. And very nice timing, too - I recently entered a cinema for only the second time in the last 15 years (if you ever have four hungover hours to spare then might I recommend the surprisingly-engrossing Trenque Lauquen!) and promptly found myself devoured by members of this city's 'Classic Cinema Club', which I had no idea even existed tbh! I've agreed to let them use my local drawing power in exchange for my having (some degree of) control over their screening schedule. (Yeah, they seem really fucking desperate, the poor things.) Anyway, I finally graced them with my presence last weekend after they put on The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser during Werner Herzog month per my request. So I guess the point is that I may be dipping my toes back into cinema a bit more frequently in future! And hopefully that'll allow me to be a bit more conversant about some of the things you're watching cos relying on my memory is pure disaster tbh.
Also, I will not be so cruelly sidelined when you breathe Rainer Werner's name, Mr. RJN. I strongly suspect that I was hollering the Gospel According to St. Fassbinder from the rooftops while you were still in diapers! Young spice had a YouTube channel spotlighting his work way back when, and has had his own Fassbinder appraisals translated by film schools from Brazil to Beijing! I may be a withered amnesiac nowadays, but put some respect on this OG Fassbinder stan's name please. Bro was legit my HERO c. 2009 y'all don't even know.
yesterday I watched The Worst Person in the World and wouldn't be against something in that vain, but maybe French. I don't want anything too disturbing though. something straightforward (90s/00s) that might make me cry would be good.
great shout but I was hoping for maybe someone lesser known than Ozon whose work I also might not know. I love the mood of the Three Colors Red trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique, and quite fancy something like that...
post I’ve ever read. I have about 30 movies to watch now. And you’ve made them all sound so so interesting. Thank you, I will definitely follow up with the ones I’ve watched.
