Wave of French avant-garde film set to roll out

Francois Truffaut, the French film critic who was no slouch as a film-maker himself, wrote in The Films of My Life that "there is cinema before Godard and after Godard".

The man he was referring to, Jean-Luc Godard, ("the cinema is truth 24 times a second"), is the featured director in the Auckland Film Society's programme for 2006.

The society, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, has five of the films by the most famous figure of the French New Wave, a film-maker who was in equal measure iconoclastic, mercurial, brilliant and infuriatingly incoherent.

Included are 1959's Breathless (A bout de souffle), his revolutionary first feature which was both a ravishingly sexy valentine to Paris and a film that signalled the arrival of the jump cut as the most powerful weapon in the film-maker's arsenal.

The other titles are Pierrot Le Fou, Bande a Part, Contempt (with Brigitte Bardot at her peak) and Two or Three Things I know About Her .

The society's 30-session programme, which runs from March 14 to October 31, with a break in July for the film festival, has films by Luis Bunuel, including the erotic classic Belle de Jour, and by Michael Haneke, the provocative Austrian who was named best director at Cannes for Hidden.

Half a dozen films spanning 50 years are set in New York, and there are several German treasures and a couple of programmes of Kiwi shorts, live-action and animated.

Full memberships may be bought for $150 ($5 a movie) at society screenings which are held on Tuesdays at 6.30pm at the Rialto Cinemas in Newmarket.

There is also a three-film card for $30. Full members enjoy discounts at most cinemas and the major film festivals. Details are at the Auckland Film Society's website where there are links to the societies for Whangarei and Hamilton.