The Cinema in France: After the New Wave

Forbes' book opens, for example (after a useful historical and economic contextualization of the post-1968, post-New Wave French film industry), by comparing Godard's Tout va bien (1972), a film that is well-known, partially owing to the fame of its director, to the nearly unknown but equally innovative Coup pour coup ( 1972), made by Marin Karmitz, now known primarily as a producer and distributor. The first thing that Forbes achieves through this inspired juxtaposition is to enrich the experience of Godard's film by reading it within the context of Karmitz's film; even more importantly, she unequivocally demonstrates how much the absence of Coup pour coup has impoverished our sense of French film history of the last two decades. By the last page of the book, where Forbes lists many of her own favorite films of the 1970s and 1980s-all of them, films and directors, completely unknown, to this reader at least-the disappointment is complete. [...]her final hope that her book can help to "persuade conservative viewers and, above all, distributors of the value and interest of the undeservedly unfamiliar" (261), seems naïve, especially given the fact that some of these films are nearly 20 years old.