While other important directors such as M. Deville, A. Cavalier (rediscovered only after the success of his film Thérèse, 1986) and above all R. Ruiz (a Chilean who moved to France who is responsible for very personal works such as L’hypothèse du tableau volé, 1977, and La ville des pirates, La città dei pirati, 1983) continue with excellent results a career that began in the seventies, new young authors emerge. Among them A. Mnouchkine, from the theater, who in 1974 signed 1789, an adaptation of the play of the same name, and in 1978 a fervent Molière. Also B. Tavernier, considered an author of the restoration, anti Nouvelle Vague, dedicated to a classicist, elegant, academic and glossy cinema, made his debut in 1974 with a detective story based on G. Simenon, L’horloger de Saint-Paul (The watchmaker of Saint-Paul), achieving international success with La mort en direct (Death in direct, 1980), Une dimanche à la campaign (A Sunday in the countryside, 1984) and Round Midnight (Round Midnight – A midnight circa, 1986), followed by La passion Beatrice (Fourth commandment, 1987), La vie et rien d’autre (Life and nothing else, 1989), Daddy nostalgie (1990).
Epigones, followers or critical and uninhibited heirs of the Nouvelle Vague spirit appear instead A. Téchiné, P. Kané, J.-C. Biette, who come from the Cahiers du Cinéma, P. Zucca, J. Doillon and B. Jacquot, all characterized from a lively linguistic research. However, the seventies are marked by the triad Pialat-Eustache-Duras, exponents of a poor, difficult and experimental cinema.
Pialat made his first feature film in 1969, L’enfance nue, which takes up a theme, that of adolescence, particularly dear to the French tradition. With La gueule ouverte (1974) he tells a story of cancer showing his predilection, confirmed by the following titles, for lonely, marginalized, sick characters. Through a raw language, without patinations and elegance of manner, Pialat minimizes narrative structures by exhibiting the violence of emotions, the physicality of experiences, obsessions, psychological wounds. In the Eighties he achieved some success with Loulou (1980), A nos amours (Ai nostra amori, 1983) and Police (1985) in which he makes use of actors such as S. Bonnaire and G. Depardieu. In 1987 he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with the controversial Sous le soleil de Satan, based on the novel of the same name by G. Bernanos, followed by Van Gogh (1991).
Eustache, who made his debut in the 1960s with his works on the cinéma-vérité line, signed La maman et la putain in 1973, Mes petites amoureuses in 1974 and Une sale histoire in 1977, appearing as one of the most original and solitary authors of the decade, linked to a ” behavioral ” cinema that adheres to the body and at the same time works on words, on the voice and on its excesses. He kills himself in 1981.
Research on words, writing and text is also at the center of the work of M. Duras, who through the dissociation between sound and image and the obsession with the off-screen voice (especially in India song, 1974, Le Camion, 1977), radically theorizes “the impossibility of shooting the film” by displaying the text as a “residue” of the cinematographic operation.
According to pharmacylib, the poverty of means typical of this cinema manages to transform itself into an aesthetic choice that characterizes a large part of the auteur production of the seventies and eighties. On this line moves P. Vecchiali, a director capable of interesting linguistic proposals and an original reinterpretation of the cinema of the Thirties and Forties. On the other hand, the low-cost author’s product constitutes the model of a film financed by the state with the Avance sur recette system. which establishes an advance on receipts that will not be returned if the subsidized film proves to be a commercial disaster. Thus directors such as P. Kast, Bresson, Rivette and others can continue to work only thanks to this governmental protection that favors intellectual, literary, reflective cinema. The same orientation is followed by television, increasingly present in co-productions and supporting on its own, especially through the INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), of author projects involving directors such as Ruiz, Téchiné, Jacquot, Zucca, Kané.
With the eighties new figures of authors come to feed an already very varied panorama.
