Adrift after 1968

Abstract This chapter looks into the state of French cinema after 1968, describing the period overall as tepid. The New Wave auteurs kept making interesting films but without building another wave. Militant cinema became fatalistic, nostalgic, or extreme, although Marcel Ophüls demonstrated that television could coexist with cinema and introduce sensitive topics like French culpability in World War II. Mainstream cinema escaped into comedies, some memorably being travesties of family and gender; political thrillers often starring Yves Montand; and the so-called “mode rétro,” harking back to a pre-1945 period style. The anointed princes of the New Wave, Philippe Garrel and Jean Eustache, had no popular success but were influential among a substantial coterie of post-New Wave cinephiles and cineastes. And among these, women stand out. A single year, 1975, saw new films by Varda, Marguerite Duras, and the decade’s masterpiece, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.