“In The Age of New Waves, James Tweedie takes discrete new wave cinemas from France to Taiwan out of the local contexts that produced them and into which they are too frequently confined, and makes a case for understanding the new wave as a global phenomenon. The result is a brilliant analysis that contributes to national as well as international cinema studies, while rethinking key aspects of both. Tweedie’s book itself represents a new wave of scholarship on national cinemas in the world.”--Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video
In The Age of New Waves, James Tweedie presents an alternative vision of global modernity as a series of transnational film movements. The book examines the origins of the concept of the “new wave” in 1950s France and the proliferation of new waves in world cinema over the past three decades, breaking with standard film industry narratives to articulate the key role of youth and cities in the development of new wave cinemas. It is one of the few books in English that explores the concept of mise-en-scène in any detail and uses it as a link between the various cinematic new waves.