HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

(Alain Resnais, 1959, b/w, DVD)
“Hiroshima is a totally new film — the first modern film of sound cinema,” Eric Rohmer said. “It’s Faulkner plus Stravinski,” seconded Godard. “It’s Picasso.” Resnais had been commissioned to make a short documentary about Hiroshima (he had recently made Night and Fog about the Holocaust). He tried and failed, and then — with the help of the novelist Marguerite Duras — he made a film about the impossibility of making such a film. Hiroshima is a love story between a French woman and a Japanese man. It’s about the necessity of remembrance, the inevitability of forgetting.

THE 400 BLOWS (LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS)

(François Truffaut, 1959, b/w, DVD)
The Wild Ducks and The Little Soldiers were among the titles Truffaut considered for his first film. But it was The 400 Blows which would induct an unsuspecting Harvey Weinstein, later the founder of Miramax Pictures, into the joys of art-house cinema (he was expecting porn). The 14-year-old Jean Pierre Léaud stars as Antoine Doinel, a pensive, mischievous tearaway for whom film and literature represent the only escape from his neglectful upbringing. Truffaut went on to make four more films with Léaud as his alter-ego, but this first wonderful collaboration remains definitive.

THE GIRLS (LES BONNES FEMMES)

(Claude Chabrol, 1960 b/w DVD region 1)
Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958), Les Cousins and À Double Tour (both 1959) were all flops. So was his fourth feature come to that, but time has been kind to Les Bonnes Femmes, a portrait of four Parisian shopgirls (including Bernadette Lafont and Chabrol’s future wife, Stéphane Audran). Reviled as misanthropic on its release, it now seems painfully acute and compassionate in its dissection of desire and despair.

LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (L’ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD)

(Alain Resnais, 1961, b/w, DVD)
The ultimate puzzle picture, Resnais’ second feature is an enigma without an answer, a maze without a centre. That it retains its fascination is a credit to the film-maker’s mesmerising formal control, the film’s strangely modern Baroque chic, and the teasing conditional tense Resnais and the writer Alain Robbe-Grillet invented for the film. Did Delphine Seyrig really have an affair with Giorgio Albertazzi in Marienbad a year earlier, as he claims, or is that just a line — a story that he is making up as he goes along?

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (LES DEMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT)

(Jacques Demy, 1967, VHS or DVD amazon.fr with English subtitles)
Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac co-star in this sublime, pastel-coloured companion piece to the more melancholy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The presence of Gene Kelly and George Chakiris point up Demy’s love affair with the American musical tradition, but Demoiselles is no imitation, it exists in its own universe of amorous confusion and conceit, where fate and fête are inextricably entwined. Giddy and poetic, it’s designed to entrance and delight — and, with Michel Piccoli as Monsieur Dame, can hardly fail to do so.

MY NIGHT WITH MAUD (MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD)

(Eric Rohmer, 1969, b/w, VHS)
After a few false starts, Eric Rohmer hit upon the mode of gently ironic philosophical disquisition which became his forte. In this masterpiece from his series Six Moral Tales, Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a devout Catholic who decides that Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) will be his wife, even though he’s never actually spoken to her. An evening debating Pascal’s wager with the divorcee Maud (Françoise Fabian) will put his beliefs to the test.

CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (CÉLINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU)

(Jacques Rivette, 1974, DVD amazon.fr no English subtitles)
A very special, very odd movie from Jacques Rivette, a jeu d’esprit involving the Parisiennes Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier (a magician and a librarian respectively) and their surreal adventures in what may or may not be a haunted house. It’s a film that takes you down rabbit holes. Starting gently and, like many of Rivette’s films, stretching to more than three hours, it encompasses all genres and casts a spell that is quite unique.

SUNLESS (SANS SOLEIL)

(Chris Marker, 1983 DVD)
An inspired missive from cinema’s most stimulating and elusive essayist, Sunless travels far and wide, ranging from ethnographic observations on tribal ceremonies in Africa and the incongruous shrines you still find in high-tech Tokyo to ruminations on the San Francisco locations of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and notes for a speculative science-fiction film in Iceland. Evocative of W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, it’s tied together by Marker’s perennial obsession with time, memory and image culture.

VAGABOND (SANS TOIT NI LOI)

(Agnès Varda, 1985 VHS or DVD region 1)
The photographer Agnès Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte (1956), anticipated the ways and means of the Nouvelle Vague. Made 30 years later, Vagabond is her masterpiece. It begins with the discovery of the frozen body of a female drifter, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), then proceeds to recount the last few weeks of her life. Mona herself remains an enigmatic cipher; a figure in which the various peasants, labourers, drop-outs, and bourgeois whom she encounters on her travels find reflections of their own lusts, prejudices, guilt, and the limits of their charity.