The period roughly from 1958 (the year of Godard's Breathless and the full emergence of the French New Wave) to 1980 (by which point the New Hollywood had been absorbed back into the studio system) was the era in which cinema most consistently operated as an intellectual and political art form — when filmmakers and critics treated it with the same seriousness as literature, philosophy, or painting, and when the most ambitious directors assumed that audiences would follow them. The movements were distinct — the French New Wave, New Hollywood, New German Cinema, Third Cinema, the personal cinemas of Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Pasolini — but they shared a set of conditions: the collapse or weakening of old studio systems, the availability of lighter and cheaper equipment, the influence of Italian neorealism and the Cahiers du Cinéma critical tradition, and a political and cultural moment (decolonization, the New Left, the counterculture, Vietnam) that demanded new forms.
By the early 1980s the window had largely closed. In Hollywood, Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) demonstrated the profitability of the blockbuster model, and the studios reasserted control. In Europe and the developing world, the economics of art cinema became steadily more difficult. The films from this period remain, for many viewers and critics, the high-water mark of cinema as a serious art.
Annotated bibliography
The French New Wave
The New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) originated in the criticism of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and became a filmmaking movement when the critics picked up cameras. The key insight — the politique des auteurs, or auteur theory — was that the director, not the screenwriter or the studio, was the author of a film, and that a director's body of work could be read as a personal vision in the way a novelist's could.
Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless (1960), Contempt (1963), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Weekend (1967) — Godard began as the most exhilarating of the New Wave directors and became the most politically radical, moving from genre reinvention to Maoist agitprop by the late 1960s. No filmmaker has been more influential or more difficult to follow.
François Truffaut, The 400 Blows (1959), Jules and Jim (1962), Day for Night (1973) — Truffaut was the New Wave's most accessible figure; his films are warmer and more narrative-driven than Godard's, and his love of cinema itself is their constant subject.
Agnès Varda, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000) — Varda preceded the New Wave (La Pointe Courte, 1955) and outlasted it. Her work combines documentary and fiction, personal and political, with a lightness that disguises its formal inventiveness.
Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961) — Resnais brought modernist literary structure (the screenplay for Hiroshima is by Marguerite Duras, Marienbad by Alain Robbe-Grillet) to cinema. Memory, trauma, and the unreliability of narrative are his subjects.
Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2nd ed., 2007) — the best scholarly overview.
New Hollywood
The American studio system that had dominated filmmaking since the 1920s was in crisis by the mid-1960s: audiences were shrinking, the old moguls were dying or retiring, and the Production Code had been replaced by the ratings system (1968). For roughly a decade, studios gave unusual latitude to a generation of young, film-school-educated directors who had grown up on the New Wave and wanted to make American films with European ambitions.
Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) — Scorsese brought Italian neorealism, the New Wave, and the experience of growing up Italian-American in Little Italy into a body of work that redefined American cinema. Taxi Driver is the period's most concentrated study of American violence and alienation.
Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979) — Coppola's ambition was operatic: The Godfather reimagined the gangster film as American epic, and Apocalypse Now — an adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam — nearly destroyed him.
Robert Altman, M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Nashville (1975), The Long Goodbye (1973) — Altman's overlapping dialogue, roving camera, and ensemble structures were the formal equivalent of his democratic skepticism. Nashville remains the best film about American political culture.
John Cassavetes, Faces (1968), Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) — Cassavetes financed his films independently and worked with nonprofessional or semi-professional actors to achieve an emotional rawness that studio filmmaking could not produce. His influence on American independent cinema is pervasive.
Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — the film usually cited as the beginning of New Hollywood; its combination of New Wave style, graphic violence, and counterculture sympathy signaled the end of the old Production Code sensibility.
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998) — the entertaining, gossipy, and largely reliable oral history of the New Hollywood era. Good on the personalities; thin on the aesthetics.
New German Cinema
The young German directors of the 1960s and 1970s were working in a country that had to rebuild its cultural identity after Nazism — and in a film industry that had produced almost nothing of value since 1945. The Oberhausen Manifesto (1962), signed by twenty-six young filmmakers, declared that "the old film is dead" and called for a new cinema. The movement that followed was more varied than the New Wave but shared its seriousness and its willingness to make demands on the audience.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) — Fassbinder made more than forty films before his death at thirty-seven. His subject was the ways that power, money, and social convention distort personal relationships — and, in the later films, how postwar Germany's economic miracle was built on repression and forgetting. Influenced by Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodramas, which he took seriously as social criticism.
Werner Herzog, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Fitzcarraldo (1982) — Herzog's films are about obsession, extremity, and the collision between human will and indifferent nature. His methods (dragging a real steamship over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo) are inseparable from his themes.
Wim Wenders, Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), Paris, Texas (1984) — Wenders's road movies are meditations on displacement, American cultural influence on postwar Germany, and the search for a usable past. Paris, Texas, written by Sam Shepard, is the most emotionally direct.
Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (1989) — the standard scholarly account.
Third Cinema and decolonization
"Third Cinema" — a term coined by the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema" (1969) — designated a cinema that was neither Hollywood ("First Cinema") nor European art cinema ("Second Cinema") but a revolutionary cinema of the colonized and formerly colonized world. The films were made on minimal budgets, often with nonprofessional actors, and were intended as tools of political education and resistance.
Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl (1966), Xala (1975), Moolaadé (2004) — Sembène, a Senegalese novelist who turned to film because he wanted to reach audiences who could not read, is the foundational figure of African cinema. His films are spare, morally precise, and politically engaged without being didactic.
Satyajit Ray, The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), Charulata (1964), The Chess Players (1977) — Ray's earlier work precedes this period, but his continued output through the 1960s and 1970s — humanist, formally controlled, rooted in Bengali culture — provided a model of non-Western art cinema that was neither imitative of Europe nor programmatically political.
Fernando Solanas, The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) — the four-hour documentary-essay-manifesto that defined Third Cinema in practice. Designed to be shown in segments with discussion breaks; a film that treats the audience as participants, not spectators.
Glauber Rocha, Black God, White Devil (1964), Antonio das Mortes (1969) — Rocha was the central figure of Brazil's Cinema Novo; his manifesto "An Aesthetic of Hunger" (1965) argued that Third World cinema should not smooth over poverty and violence but confront the audience with them.
Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (2001) — a useful theoretical overview of Third Cinema as a movement and a concept.
The personal and spiritual cinema
Not all the important filmmakers of this period belonged to movements. Several of the most significant worked in relative isolation, making films that were closer to philosophical or spiritual inquiry than to political cinema.
Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Fanny and Alexander (1982) — Bergman's films of this period moved from the theological questioning of the earlier work (The Seventh Seal, Winter Light) to an unflinching examination of intimate relationships, psychological disintegration, and the limits of communication. Persona remains one of the most formally radical films in the canon.
Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979) — Tarkovsky worked under Soviet censorship (several of his films were shelved or delayed) and made only seven features, but each is a sustained meditation on memory, faith, and the relationship between art and spiritual experience. His long takes and attention to the textures of the natural world create a pace that is unlike anything else in cinema.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), Teorema (1968), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) — Pasolini was a Marxist, a Catholic, a poet, and a homosexual in a society hostile to all four, and his films reflect those tensions without resolving them. The Gospel According to St. Matthew — shot with nonprofessional actors in the landscape of southern Italy — is the most convincing film about Jesus ever made. Salò is among the most disturbing.
Robert Bresson, Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), A Man Escaped (1956) — Bresson's austere style (nonprofessional actors he called "models," minimal dialogue, flat delivery, attention to hands and objects) produces an effect closer to prayer than to entertainment. Sontag's essay "Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson" (1964) is the essential critical text.
The critical tradition
The period's filmmaking was accompanied by an unusually rich body of film criticism and theory — partly because several of the major directors (Godard, Truffaut, Pasolini, Fassbinder) were also critics, and partly because cinema became a central object of attention for literary and cultural theory.
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (1968) — Sarris brought the Cahiers auteur theory to American criticism and ranked American directors in a hierarchy that provoked argument for decades.
Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Deeper into Movies (1973) — Kael was Sarris's great antagonist: skeptical of the auteur theory, committed to the idea that movies should give pleasure, and the most vivid prose stylist in the history of American film criticism. Her review of Bonnie and Clyde helped make the film a hit and the New Hollywood a movement.
Susan Sontag, "On Godard's Vivre Sa Vie" (1964), "Bergman's Persona" (1967), "The Decay of Cinema" (1996) — Sontag treated cinema with the same intellectual seriousness she brought to literature and philosophy. "The Decay of Cinema" is a melancholy late essay on what was lost when the theatrical experience of moviegoing declined.
Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning" (1970) — Barthes's analysis of film stills from Eisenstein, arguing that the still image captures something (the "obtuse meaning") that the moving image does not. A short, dense, influential essay.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (1st ed. 1979, now in its 12th edition) — the standard textbook for film studies; systematic, lucid, and comprehensive on formal analysis.