When film made waves

At a certain point in "Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s," Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's brisk, sharp-witted primer on one of the most explosively creative periods of filmmaking, I was struck by the realization that I had spent a substantial portion of my life thinking about Catherine Deneuve.

This didn't come to me because the author pores over the French actress' glacial magnetism but simply because he makes a glancing mention of her "ability to undergo humiliation without being the least bit humiliated." This is by way of considering the psychosexual mix of fantasy and realism in Roman Polanski's 1965 film "Repulsion" before moving on to examine the same forces at work in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's 1970 film "Performance." But it was that succinct, almost offhand observation that captured an essential mesmerizing contradiction about Deneuve and stuck with me. Next, I was thinking about her paradoxical nature in many of the movies that form the spine of my film-going career -- "Belle de Jour," "The Last Metro," "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," "The Young Girls of Rochefort," "Time Regained," "8 Women."

This experience of sudden recognition triggering a chain of associations is one of the delights of Nowell-Smith's overview of 1960s filmmaking, a series of Pop Rocks explosions for the cinephilic brain. It is not, however, the only pleasure, nor is it necessary to have seen all the movies covered. "Making Waves" inspires curiosity as much as recollection, touching on such lesser-known works as "Lonely Boy," Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor's short documentary on Paul Anka, in a section on cinema verite.

The former head of publishing at the British Film Institute, Nowell-Smith also edited "The Oxford History of World Cinema," and this survey of film movements has an encyclopedic scope, organized in self-contained chapters, such as "Britain: From Kitchen Sink to Swinging London," "From Polish School to Czech New Wave and Beyond" and "Young Godard." Used here, "survey" is a somewhat deceptive term, though, suggesting an objective overview of the era. Happily, Nowell-Smith is not a neutral observer, airing a sly, sometimes biting sensibility.

Did you hear the one . . .