Introduction: Between The Essay Film and Social Cinema

Call it meaningful coincidence. The dossier in this issue of SubStance was well along in production when I realized that its appearance would mark the fiftieth anniversary of the article in which Richard Roud first referred to Chris Marker, Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais as Left Bank filmmakers.¹ As Roud noted in the first line of his 1962 article, classification is a kind of analogy that proves nothing unless it tells us more about what is being classified. The “something more” Roud sought to provide was a viable means of situating the work of these three filmmakers apart from that of Right Bank filmmakers François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and others associated more closely with the Cahiers du cinéma. Summarizing his geography-based analogy, Roud asserted that the Left Bank was not so much an area as a state of mind.