Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens,
Department of Art,
University of Northern Iowa,
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A.

ballast@netins.net.

In the mid-1960s, when I was a student at a Midwestern university, no bars were allowed within a mile of the school, nor could beer or wine be sold. And of course this was long in advance of videos, cable tv or computers. One way in which students entertained themselves was to go to the on-campus screenings of foreign films (maybe twice a month), then sit up all night drinking coffee, talking about them. We saw very few non-Hollywood films in those days, and they were of such power, that I still have vivid memories of all of them, including such unforgettable works as Wild Strawberries (Bergman), La Dolce Vita (Fellini), Knife in the Water (Polanski), and so on. In those same years, we were also introduced to the work of various avant garde French filmmakers (all of whom had been born around 1930), whose efforts were commonly said to comprise a New Wave in filmmaking, among them Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. As a result, it feels nostalgic to watch this collection of interviews (enriched by brief clips from their films) with some of the movement's best-known participants, including Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, along with a handful of others, less familiar to American audiences, such as Jacques Demy, Georges Franju, Jacques Rivette, Jean Rouch and Agnes Varda. In these informal interviews (recorded originally in 1964 for French television), they touch on all the issues and problem-solving strategies that we, as undergraduate art students, talked about forty-five years ago, after having viewed their films: How to make purposeful use of mistakes. How to accept limitations (financial, technical or otherwise) as advantages, rather than being burdened by them. Having learned the right way to do something, what would happen if we did the opposite? While benefiting from experience, can we also learn from the "innocent eye" of an amateur, naïf or outsider? And so on. As I watched this documentary, it occurred to me that I would be wise to revisit the work of all these French directors (which everyone is able to do individually now through video stores), to experience their famous films in a new time frame. I would learn more about filmmaking, but I might also rediscover some truths that I learned long ago when I first witnessed them.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, Summer 2003.)