Far From the Masters: Experimentations in Post-New Wave French Cinema

The New Wave of the 1950s and ’60s opened two potential paths for French cinema to follow. The first would turn its youthful exuberance into a reproducible style; while the other would take up its principles of experimentation and self-reflexivity in new directions, through an increasingly political and ethical interrogation of the image. This book explores the potentialities of that second path, with eight essays on films of the post-New Wave moment, focussed upon the principle of critical experimentation in particular—critique through experimentation, and experimentation through critique—that these films put at stake, through their difficult inheritance of the New Wave and the history of the image.

“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 unrecognized brilliance and sheer liveliness of the best Australian film criticism.” 

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

“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 the Australia of 2025, 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

“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