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“... spelled out, deeply to resent his father and, just like another resentful provincial schoolboy, Henri Beyle, the future Stendhal, took shelter in mathematics, an escape-route into abstraction, where the appeal was always to reason, never to mere domestic precedence. His hostility towards his father supplies the propellant for his curious second ...”

“... day before I got married to the present editor of the LRB, the head of the French Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois, was sacked – by André Malraux, the novelist turned Gaullist minister of culture. A piece in the Guardian by their great Paris correspondent, Peter Lennon, described what happened next. There had been a demonstration outside the padlocked gates ...”

“... When I wrote film criticism,’ Jean-Luc Godard said in 1978, ‘I never saw the difference between talking about a film and making one.’ There was a serious difference, as he well knew, since at the time of most of this writing he had not made a film of his own. The claim is interesting, though, because Godard always liked to mix modes, and never really wanted to separate criticism from creation ...”

“... film with the Rothschilds’ money’, because he’d cast Stéphane, the daughter of Baron James-Henri de Rothschild.) On the last day of the shoot, Vercors’s wife returned home early and complained that the German officer had shown more respect for their house than the film crew had. ‘But Madame,’ Melville replied, ‘the German wasn’t making a ...”

“... protective about François Truffaut? No one else in the old New Wave brings out the parent in us. Godard we either hate or admire, a disturbing influence gone solitary. Rivette and Resnais remain austere masters, full of mystification. Rohmer makes beautiful reflective films behind glass. Malle and Chabrol can take care of themselves. Vadim had it coming to ...”

“... work has never been especially cool or iconic, yet more than François Truffaut’s or Jean-Luc Godard’s it divides audiences right down the middle. Those who like his films are often protective and passionate and have seen them all; those who don’t complain of boredom and pointlessness. The complaints are partly a result of the subject matter. Rohmer ...”

“... odds. War had disrupted his schooling: at the age of 14, after a bad year in the Poitiers Lycée Henri IV, he had been moved to a Jesuit college, which he detested. His father had wanted him to be a doctor: but Foucault had been intent on the École Normale Supérieure, alma mater of Sartre, Aron and Merleau-Ponty, so he had enrolled for two more years at an ...”

“... critics – fervent acolytes of Paris’s ciné-clubs and the Cinémathèque Française run by Henri Langlois – were the group of five who, once they became film-makers themselves, came to be known as the Nouvelle Vague: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Maurice Schérer, later ...”

“... of a wonderful evening at the Falstaff when the clientèle included Beckett, Sartre, Ionesco and Godard, all drinking at separate tables). Sartre in particular made Left Bank cafés famous, not only hanging out and writing in them but also writing of them as exemplary sites of Existentialist ontology – ‘The café is a fullness of being,’ he wrote in ...”

“... performance artists Allan Kaprow and Eleanor Antin, whose work he discussed in terms derived from Henri Lefebvre, the first theorist of ‘everyday life’, and Deleuze and Guattari, who celebrated ‘nomadic’ ways of being. Crary describes Kaprow as troubling ‘the differences between labour and recreation’, and Antin as an ‘autobiographer of a ...”

“... than production, circulation rather than industry. The question has literary implications as well. Godard once remarked (in Passion) that, bodily and material as they were, neither sex nor labour could really be represented. A little prestidigitation is required. The struggles of the Odyssey were set down to the ill will of a god. In The Shadow-Line, Burns in ...”

“... by LSD and hedonism. Paris’s leading artists and intellectuals praise the camp; Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film. The title of the story, ‘I Am a Young Man Alone’, expressed its author’s predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but Modiano, the son of ...”

“... category or the ‘Dufayel’ category (Dufayel being a department store which sold imitation Henri II sideboards). The latter seems to have been rather more a term of praise. ‘They want art,’ Picasso was to lament in later days. ‘One has to know how to be vulgar.’ The joyful, improvisatory side of Cubism is more evident in Picasso’s work than ...”

“... had a formative influence on the leading figures of the Nouvelle Vague such as Truffaut and Godard. In 1960, he himself conducted Chronicle of a Summer, an investigation into the ‘Parisian tribe’, along with the sociologist Edgar Morin. In one of the opening sequences Rouch on camera describes the film as an exercise in cinéma vérité. This was a ...”

“... film as the art that has taken the place of the novel as the dominant narrative form of the age, Godard might be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the great French writers of the past, producing one tour de force after another – Le Mépris, Bande à part, Une femme mariée, Pierrot le fou, Deux ou trois choses, La Chinoise, Weekend punctuating the ...”