Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 | Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 was shot in (more or less) real time in June 1961 in Paris, with the main character Cléo (Corinne Marchand) as a young pop singer who fears that she has cancer, and she has to attend hospital in two hours to find out the results of her medical. Cléo is superstitious and the essentially black and white film begins in colour when she's having a tarot card reading; later she's frightened of a hat being put on a bed and mirrors breaking: mirrors are all over, and Cléo looks at herself, as if wondering what she is, or how long she will be. Added to this are such shots of a funeral parlour and several clocks remind of the passing of time, the death that awaits her.

Cléo's journey through Paris begins by her taking a taxi with her friend and housekeeper from Rue Rivoli over the Seine. At the Dôme on Boulevard Raspail she puts a loud record of hers on the juke box, isn't recognised (as if she's already dead?) and drinks a swift cognac. At her studio-cum-apartment she is briefly joined by her lover, then by her songwriters (one being Michel Legrand), although she leaves and sees a friend, then takes a taxi which takes her beyond the steps on the Rue des Artistes near what is now Allée Samuel Beckett (even though it's not an allée) and lands in Parc Montsouris. In the park she meets Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), to whom she tells her story, and as a soldier in the Algerian war he hasn't chosen to fight in, he is only too aware of possible impending death.

Above all this is an experimental film, not just with the real time business but there's a film within a film within a film, a silent movie with exaggerated movements starring Jean-Luc Godard and his wife Anna Karina, in which death is prominent but ends happily: Varda didn't like Godard's dark glasses, and in the silent movie the glasses are seen as giving him a black vision of life. Antoine has given her a more optimistic way of looking at things, but he has to return to fight, as must Cléo. Nouvelle vague this cetainly is, and I'm still uncertain if Varda and her husband Demy aren't the main figures in it.

François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents coups | The 400 blows (1960)

In the vanguard of the nouvelle vague cinema mentioned below in Godard's film À bout de souffle, Les Quatre Cents coups was the first of the films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud in François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel saga, which was followed by the twenty-minute short Antoine et Colette (1962), and then the feature length films Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugal (1970) and L'Amour en fuite (1979).

In large part autobiographical, Les Quatre Cents coups (in spite of its very weird English translation) is a reference to leading a wild life: Antoine is brought up in a rather run-down flat with dysfunctional parents (his mother is far from motherly and is having an affair), his school is run on painfully traditional lines where learning by rote is the order of the day, and the main person he relates to is Rémy, his schoolmate who lives in rather more fortunate circumstances, but has a rebellious nature that chimes with Antoine's.

Antoine plays truant, indulges in petty theft, has a healthy disrespect for authority, sleeps out in Paris one day, lies to his French teacher that his mother has died, visits the cinema as much as he can, tells the truth when he says he's learned a Balzac passage by heart but is disbelieved by his French teacher. And finally he steals a typewriter but is discovered in the act of returning it and is denounced by his father. His punishment: ending up, at thirteen years of age, in a military-style youth centre, from which he escapes, runs, runs, until he reaches the sea and...what next? To be continued.

Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle | Breathless (1960)

Is 'Breathless' the best translation of 'À bout de souffle'? I prefer 'Out of Breath', but there we have it. Whatever the title, this is Jean-Luc Godard's first film, and quite rightly seen as immensely important as an innovation not only in the history of French cinema but the history of cinema tout court. But why?

OK, jump shots, hand-held cameras, lack of studio, often lack of polish or editing, experimentation, etc, but there's more than that here: there's also a question of content. 

This is 1960 and the USA is still living in puritanism. Now, the nouvelle vague directors were influenced by American cinema: a relatively new country culturally versus an old continent: but that new (half-)continent was in part hidebound by minorities who had escaped from persecutions by the old world, so conflict was inevitable. However new and exciting it was, wasn't Hollywood and all that came from it restrained in so many ways? European (especially French) cinema had learned so much from American cinema, but French cinema was opening up a new world to America. He looks in the mirror and sees himself as a kind of Humphrey Bogart, but the film gave birth not just to the obvious Bonnie and Clyde, but to many other American actors such as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson, etc. Thelma and Louise?

 À bout de souffle was, contrary to what title anyone chooses for translation, a breath of life into cinema. Here we have the main character Michel Poiccard (a young Jean-Paul Belmondo), an amoral gangster, almost a psychopath, someone only out for his own end (financially or sexually), a twenty-something who is on the run from something (maybe himself), who casually steals a car (as he casually steals more cars and money too), dreams of escaping to Italy but must first leave Marseilles and get money that Antonio owes him (although we don't know why: who cares?) 

So he takes off for Paris, driving dangerously and is chased by the police, kills one of them, makes it to Paris, robs one of his girlfriends and hides out in the cramped flat another one's living in: Patricia (Jean Seberg), who may be pregnant by him and isn't sure she's in love with him. But it's evident that she's fascinated by him, thrilled by his gangster reality, and she's in effect just as amoral as him. The sketch of Michel meeting her again on the Champs-Élysées, where she's selling the New York Herald Tribune while waiting to go to the Sorbonne, is one of the classic moments of movie history.

But as he waits for the money he's owed to come in, they hide from the police as they move in closer and closer, until Patricia denounces him because she's decided she doesn't love him, or does she? In the street scene as she hears his dying words, with the faux-naïf voice she's used several times previously, she (rather unconvincingly) asks the cops standing over the body what dégueulasse means.

À bout de souffle celebrates its 60th anniversary next year, and apart from the clothing and the cars still look as fresh as when it was first made. It features Jean-Luc Godard himself as the grass, Truffaut was co-scriptwriter, Chabrol was on the technical team, and Jean-Pierre Melville appears in a cameo. Unforgettable, and this film can be watched endlessly.

Éric Fottorino: Baisers de cinéma (2007)

On the first page of Éric Fottorino's Baisers de cinéma ('Cinema Kisses') there is a mention of the fire that occurs at the end, and fire is a prefigurative image in a number of various guises: for instance, Gilles Hector remembers, as a child, his father Jean playfully saying 'You're red hot!' ('Tu brûles!') when he was very close to objects he'd hidden; and the narrator Gilles admits that he's playing with fire by becoming the love slave of the capricious Mayliss de Carlo. But there's twist at the end.

Baisers de cinéma is an unconventional love story, but also a detective story reminiscent of Patrick Modiano's work, where the narrator liberally punctuates the novel with references to locations in central Paris. Gilles owes his existence to a 'cinema kiss' between his cinema photographer father and his unknown mother and tries to cast light on who she was, watching numerous movies as part of this search – the nouvelle vague cinema plays an important part in the narrative. It's during one such movie visit that he meets the married Mayliss, and they become lovers, consumed by a very powerful passion.

And guess what? Yes, there are no English translations of Éric Fottorino's novels.