La République En Film!

After the soixante-huitards come the quatre-vingt-dix-septards. Rachel Kushner thus anoints an imagined community of moviegoers who, like herself, discovered Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore at New York’s Film Forum in 1997 [“French Lessons,” Easy Chair, June]. It’s a nostalgic gesture in a column permeated with nostalgia for an era when filmmakers acted as “seismographers,” as Serge Daney would put it, archivists documenting history for future viewers.

Each film Kushner revisits imparts its own “French lesson.” In 1969, Marcel Ophuls recovered the memory of a deeply divided France under occupation. Decades later,…