Une vague nouvelle

Almost no footage from actual French New Wave films here; instead, the films that inspired them. Beginning backwards; it ends with Godard's ruminative homage to Jean Langlois, founder of the cinémathèque where the directors of the Nouvelle Vague encountered formative and obscure films; the cinema Godard describes here, he says, is the unknown one, the unseen one, the films only known by legend rather than actually watched; an alternative current (bodies emerging into or falling out of rivers; a recurrent visual rhyme throughout these late episodes). Of course, I knew all these people, he ends--Truffaut, Demy, Duras--as their faces flash past, elements of hero-worshipping or name-dropping, of cinematic nostalgia (Godard himself once more at the centre) overpowered by a sense of mourning something lost.