Providing a modern introduction to French cinema, this book describes the French passion for histories in images that gave birth to the 'Nouvelle Vague' and which is still felt today. The post-war period is the first time French directors think consciously of the idea of cinema in the first person, offering a personal vision and embodying a personal style. Yet this personal vision is also the filter through which films focus on public history, mass events and massive trauma.

Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at Corpus Christi College, UK. She is the author of Sexuality and the Reading Encounter (1996), French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories (1999), Memory and Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (2000), Cinema's Missing Children (2003), Alain Resnais (2006), Atom Egoyan (2009) and, most recently, Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (2012).