A New Book on French Cinema by Australian Film Critics - FAR FROM THE MASTERS: EXPERIMENTATIONS IN POST-NEW WAVE FRENCH CINEMA

 Cinema Reborn stalwart supporter Philippa Hawker is a contributor, along with seven other Australian film critics, including another stalwart supporter Jake Wilson, to a new book on French Cinema published by Melbourne-based Index Press.

 

FAR FROM THE MASTERS: EXPERIMENTATIONS IN POST-NEW WAVE FRENCH CINEMA Edited by  Conall Cash and  Corey P. Cribb. 

 

Philippa has sent through some early critical reactions to the book.

 

Jacques Rivette

“From the metaphysics of Le Pont du Nord and the relation of Racine to L’Amour fou to the rich diversity of Marc’o’s career, not to mention the challenges of Jeanne Dielman, this is a compact illustration of the unrecognised brilliance and sheer liveliness of the best Australian film criticism.” 

— Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic at the Chicago Reader 1987–2008

Agnes Varda

“French filmmakers who emerged in the ’50s and ’60s (including Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda) collectively proclaimed in 1967 that they were, in every sense, “far from Vietnam.” In Australia today, a like-minded group of film scholars and critics declare that they are geographically far from France, and especially far in time from its glorious Nouvelle Vague. So, their curiosity and intellectual inventiveness fastens, by identification, on the intriguingly “belated” phenomenon of post-New Wave French cinema: that loosely bundled generation including Chantal Akerman, Marc’o, Maurice Pialat, and Patrick Deval—without forgetting the post-68 experiments of Varda, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut—who forcefully questioned the limits of cinema and opened new ways of thinking and feeling. Far from the Masters is an indispensable assemblage of superbly written, inquisitive, and trail-blazing essays.”

— Adrian Martin, Australian film critic far from Australia

 

Maurice Pialat

“What does it mean to come “after”? Far from the Masters is a book marked by two belated arrivals: first, the generation of French filmmakers who emerged in the wake of the nouvelle vague, figures like Maurice Pialat, who extended and contested the work of his still better-known precursors; and second, a group of Australian critics who, two decades into the twenty-first century, took a collective look back at that earlier moment. Out of this temporal décalage, new perspectives open—not only on some of the most important French filmmakers of the era, but equally on a present moment of cinephilic community.”

— Erika Balsom, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College, London

 

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