Paris vu par... (1965)

Directed by Jean Douchet, Jean Rouch, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol

As a kind of meta-cinematic calling card for one of the most varied and disjointed film movements to straddle mainstream and art cinema, Paris vu par... is appropriately fun and disorienting. Like a banal conversation chopped up by jump cuts and ending off-screen as the camera pans right for no reason, these six New Wavers turn everyday Parisians into portentous vessels of quirks, tragedy and love.

The six vignettes are named for the neighborhoods they're set in (an organizational mode recently refurbished for Paris, je t'aime) and alternate between typical, whimsical and self-referential. Jean Douchet's opening short, for instance, is pure Godard. The aftermath of a one-night stand is presented by an omniscient narrator, references to Picasso and Sartre are tossed around like stale croissants and half-smoked cigarettes, intense reds and yellows seem as important as the familiar story.

That said, Godard's own segment (filmed by Albert Maysles!) is itself a heightened version of his features, the story of a romantic young woman and intensely hypocritical older men that happens so fast it reads like a thesis proposal for his next few films. Going against that choppy New Wave style, Jean Rouch's claustrophobic apartment argument might be the film's most engaging for its immersive style. Filmed in long takes and contorted handheld movements that recall the cramped submarine of Das Boot, it walks briskly from cramped neo-realism into sidewalk philosophy without missing a beat.

In fact, eruptions of the unexpected in urban routines might be the closest thing Paris vu par... has to a unifying thread (aside from small apartments, of course). Eric Rohmer studies Parisians' walking patterns around the city's largest traffic circle as if presenting a parody of everyday ethnography, and anticipating Christopher Guest's deadpan mockumentary style. Claude Chabrol's bourgeois family farce veers into tragedy when its ignored son takes to always wearing ear plugs. Pollet's super-saturated bachelor pad short inverses familiar power dynamics between a sex worker and her John.

Throughout, snappy tirades on sexual relations and the intersection of Frenchness and Americanness – which marks the style and content of so many New Wave films – present a pleasantly varied mix of the movement's familiar fare. If these director's features are often referred to disparagingly as laborious cine-essays, Paris vu par's quick clip reads like exceptionally stylish Cliffs Notes.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.