To begin, a guessing game. The February 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma includes a “Dictionary of New French Cinema” comprising capsule commentaries on 157 directors. One of these offers the following superlative assessment: “She remains (now alongside Marguerite Duras) the greatest female auteur of our cinema.”

Naming the recipient of this praise shouldn’t be difficult, given the exceedingly few women active as directors in 1960s France. The New Wave was populated by rebellious sons casting off the cinéma de papa with oedipal gusto; it was a movement conjugated, to borrow Geneviève Sellier’s memorable formulation, in the “masculine singular.” So who could belong in the company of the grande dame Duras? Most will likely put their chips on Agnès Varda, who had made her debut feature La Pointe Courte ahead of the curve in 1954, earning her the dubious epithet of the “mother” of the New Wave—or even sometimes, in a generational stretch that likely owes much to the filmmaker’s carefully crafted later-life persona, its “grandmother.” But the answer is someone relatively few would recognize, a woman to whom film history has not been kind: Paula Delsol.

When Cahiers published its “Dictionary,” Delsol had written and directed only a single feature: La Dérive (1964), a fresh and dark story of an errant girl who drifts, as the title has it, from man to man. “Peppered with bold strokes halfway between recklessness and genius, the film baffled almost everyone at the time,” wrote the Cahiers editors. “Yet today, it is a work that makes one forget whatever else might have been attempted on the same subject.” This belated acclaim didn’t stick; La Dérive was largely omitted from the many stories subsequently told about one of the most combed-over quarters of world cinema. Even in Sellier’s Masculine Singular, a feminist book that sees the “central problematic” of the New Wave as “the relations between men and women and, more generally, the construction of sexual identities,” the film is consigned to a footnote, where it is deemed both “astonishing” and “invisible.” This June, when La Dérive screened to a full house at Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival devoted to archival programming, the man introducing it asked for a show of hands from audience members who had seen it before, seemingly confident that the numbers would be low, even in such a cinephile crowd. As he had predicted, only a scattering of the hundreds of attendees were repeat viewers.

Forgotten, invisible: these adjectives have reliably accompanied La Dérive into the twenty-first century. But it seems that Delsol, who passed away in 2015, is finally getting her due. After a sprinkling of screenings in recent years and a trickle of scholarly attention, the Cinémathèque Française recently undertook a new 4k restoration of the film, which roughly coincided with the publication of a short monograph about it in French by the academic Aurore Renaut.^* The restoration will show at this year’s London Film Festival and have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. Further circulation will follow: it has been acquired by Janus Films, the preeminent distributor of classic cinema, which shares an owner with the Criterion Collection. The institutional stamps of approval, in short, are piling up.

The reemergence of La Dérive is part of one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary film culture: an archive fever running high enough to inspire delirium. What has been called the post-Covid “repertory boom” in fact has little resemblance to the predigital practice of repertory programming, which amounted to the repeated exhibition of a set of tried-and-true classics. Driven by a desire to contest the false objectivity of the canon and a fatigue with the state of contemporary media, programmers and cinephiles are making increasingly deep forays into the cinema’s many histories. The age of revivalism has arrived, playing out in restoration-focused festivals, theatrical runs, specialized disc labels, little magazines like Narrow Margin, and online communities like Letterboxd. The editors of n+1 could have been writing about film when they recently proclaimed, “If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past.” When so much of contemporary culture feels familiar even before it is encountered, and when bloated tentpoles try to pass themselves off as the height of cinematic artistry by insisting on a 70mm release, bright shines the nugget that had previously fallen through the sieve.

Bringing underseen works into greater visibility can be not only politically important but flat-out thrilling—as the soaring attendance at recent editions of Cinema Ritrovato attests. And yet the restoration and circulation of historical films is part of an economy of money and attention, in which the assertion that a film is “forgotten” can feel less like the recognition of an injustice and more like a marketing tag. Many films simply aren’t as forgotten as they’re made out to be, while others came and went in their own time because they were, in a word, forgettable. The ratio between hype and quality is sometimes askew. But then there are rediscoveries like La Dérive, which fully justify the fanfare. Now what baffles is not the film itself, but how something so accomplished and so proximate to the French New Wave could remain so little known for so long.  

Paula Delsol was born in 1923 in Montagnac, a town about an hour’s drive from Montpellier in southern France. Her given name—which appears in the credits of La Dérive—was Paule, but many called her Paula and she came to prefer the mistake. Like Duras, Delsol grew up in what was then French Indochina (now Vietnam), where members of her family had lived since the nineteenth century. She returned to France in 1946 and married a year later, only for the partnership to rapidly deteriorate. A single mother in need of work, she opened a beauty school in Montpellier in 1951 but by the middle of the decade was increasingly devoting herself to creative pursuits. In 1955 she published her first novel, Adieu et merci, a semi-autobiographical story of a young French colonial who returns to the metropole after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

Delsol had long been fascinated by cinema and had experimented with her father’s 8mm camera. In 1954 she worked as a volunteer assistant director on Denys Colomb de Daunant’s Glamador, where she met the cinematographer Jean Malige. That same year, with financial assistance from Delsol’s father the pair founded a film production facility, the Studio Auditorium du Languedoc, which came to be used by Parisian directors shooting in the region and led to Delsol working as a “script-girl” on François Truffaut’s Les Mistons (1958). She began to make short films with Malige, who became her second husband in 1958 and who would go on to shoot La Dérive. In a moment when French cinema was being transformed by pathbreaking debuts—not just Truffaut but Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer all released their first features around the turn of the decade—Delsol, nearly ten years older than many of the New Wave luminaries, set out to take her place among them. Helped once more by an inheritance from her father as well as counsel from Truffaut, she embarked upon her first feature with limited resources and complete creative freedom, acting as her own producer. By early 1960 the script was finished and a casting call went out.

La Dérive has all the elliptical brio one would expect from the nouvelle vague—its editor, Agnès Guillemot, worked extensively with Godard—but is colored by desperation and attuned to the brutal, interlocking regimes of gender and class. “I wanted to make a portrait…of a young girl who wanted to escape from her environment,” said Delsol in a 1963 interview. “I wanted to show that women were looking to be the equal of men in terms of their sexual freedom, and that in playing that game they would always be beaten.” Her blonde protagonist, Jacquie (played by Jacqueline Vandal)—a character inspired by the working-class girls Delsol encountered at the beauty school—is a gorgeous dropout who has abandoned her hometown of Palavas-les-Flots, a fishing village south of Montpellier, with her musician boyfriend, Pierre. As La Dérive begins, they have been away for two years and Jacquie is hungry. Calling himself an “alley cat,” Pierre explains that he cannot give her what all girls desire, to be safe and warm, and suggests that if she wants to eat three times a day she should return home. “I’d rather die!” she exclaims. But soon Pierre slips away while Jacquie is napping on a train, and she has no choice but to set out on her own toward Palavas.

Life after Pierre involves meeting men in a noxious swirl of adventure and threat, with the whiff of money never far away. Jacquie accumulates sexual encounters, the particulars of which the film mostly elides with striking interludes of black. First there is a one-night stand with a medical intern who calls himself Jack the Ripper sooner than reveal his real identity; next a truck driver whom Jacquie, while hitchhiking, must burn with a cigarette to escape his unwanted advances. Then a wealthy nephew and uncle buy her favor, at least for a time. Finally, an artist in the dunes promises her love today but no guarantee of tomorrow. Returning to Palavas also means reencountering a former suitor, the kind fisherman Jean, who has chosen a simple life after his service in Algeria and who proposes marriage; her only real friend, he is the one prospect with whom she does not go to bed. Once again, she’d rather die.

Shooting on location, notably during the 1961 Feria de  Pentecôte in Nîmes, Delsol filled her film with the faces of nonprofessionals and the documentary energies of place, mixing a realist impulse with the sharp edges of modernist fragmentation. In some scenes a hidden camera was used to capture life uninhibited. Like Varda’s La Pointe Courte—coincidentally or not, another work set in the south of France and funded at least in part by a family inheritance—La Dérive is distinctly a film of the Midi and, as such, a geographical outsider in a New Wave largely defined by Parisian urbanity. It is filled with open-air scenes and local color: sand dunes and village dances, fishing nets and bulls. Reentering this world, Jacquie—whom the town gossips mock for acting like a “dolled-up Parisian”—brings with her a shock of the modern, one that seems to ripple out from her person into the film’s form, corroding its naturalism. The opening sequence, in which credits repeatedly cut into a conversation between Jacquie and Pierre, establishes Delsol’s jagged style: she gives us a woman’s life in shard-like glimpses, a fitting treatment for a character who breaks with tradition and abandons herself to the present.  

By 1963 it was time for Delsol to submit the completed film to the censors and obtain the certificate necessary for release. Here trouble began. “Owing to the profoundly immoral comportment of certain characters of the film,” La Dérive was restricted to audiences over eighteen. The decision had a disastrous impact on its commercial prospects: Gaumont withdrew its interest in distribution. “It’s incredible,” Delsol told a journalist from L’Express that same year, “if someone plots the death of another man throughout a whole film, that isn’t immoral, whereas a girl who does what she wants with her own body is shameful.” Ultimately, the film received a limited release from a small company in the dog days of August 1964, when most Parisians would be on holiday. Delsol called it “a failure”; it was not until 1977 that she succeeded in making her second feature film.

According to Renaut’s monograph, Delsol believed that two specific passages were responsible for the rating, both of which she refused to cut. The first pertains to a crucial detail of Jacquie’s backstory: she is infertile, a fact that both enables her sexual freedom in a pre-pill France and complicates her relation to normative femininity, which is to say motherhood. After a first casual mention to the intern, this information resurfaces in conversation with her friend Agathe. “I had a difficult pregnancy and so they operated on me,” Jacquie says, referring to her time with Pierre. “A difficult pregnancy” can mean many things, but one possibility was an abortion, which was illegal in France until 1975. (Delsol later said Jacquie was inspired by a woman who had undergone the procedure many times.) 

The second offending scene occurs late in the film, after the wealthy uncle, Maurice, installs Jacquie in his seaside villa, where her mother comes to visit. The older woman is both impressed and concerned: “If I weren’t ashamed, I’d say you’re lucky,” she says to her daughter, before turning to practical matters. “Nothing here belongs to you, and yet you’re giving him your entire youth.” She advises Jacquie to make some kind of arrangement—presumably trading sex and companionship for money or property—to secure her future. A cynical, scheming mother: beyond the pale in the censors’ eyes. Jacquie, for her part, seems unconcerned. Before long she leaves Maurice to run along the seashore toward a new lover, replaying the ending of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) with a gendered twist.

Along with “invisible” and “forgotten,” there is a third adjective often appended to La Dérive, one that begins to explain why it fell into oblivion and why it is being resuscitated with enthusiasm today: feminist. Delsol distanced herself from the label. “If I wanted to serve the feminist movement, I would have participated in demonstrations,” she said in 1977, stating that she sought instead to make films about “women’s revolt.” But already in 1963, a critic writing for the leftist newspaper Combat proposed that the “essential quality” of La Dérive was “that it is the first deliberately ‘feminist’ film.” While “firsts” should be met with as much skepticism as declarations that a film was “forgotten,” there is no disputing that Delsol staked out new ground with her unjudgmental depiction of a promiscuous woman who rejects marriage, family, and employment alike.

This is not to suggest that La Dérive is a tale of empowerment. Jacquie moves through the film with fatalistic resignation, drifting from one episode to the next, seemingly open to anything that helps her forget Pierre and avoid what she is sure she does not want: a life like her poor, dowdy sister’s, the life she has been born into. While the intern’s assumed name raises the specter of sex work early in the film, it is Maurice who is most explicit about the transactional nature of their affair: “You’ll see how, for a woman, it’s nice to be bought. Since the world has existed, there have always been women who sell themselves and men to buy them.” When the alternative is to do worse and to do it for free, his proposal doesn’t seem so bad.

Through it all, however, Jacquie somehow never gives up on falling in love. When Agathe, a model for nude magazines, visits her in the château owned by Maurice’s playboy nephew, Régis, her canniness stands in stark contrast to Jacquie’s sentimentality. Jacquie may be a figure of defiance, but she also lacks education and opportunity, and readily buys into to the kinds of scenarios sold in cheap paperbacks and watched through tears at three-hanky matinées. Régis says she is “a bit dimwitted” and Maurice deems her part of a generation of “decadent romantics”; at the time of the film’s release, a male critic wrote in L’Aurore that she is “a brainless little twit who deserves a slap more than she does compassion.” And yet La Dérive never mocks her, never punishes her. It stays with her, pays attention to her—and attention is, as Simone Weil knew, “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Jacquie’s picaresque offers no arc of liberation, no coming to self-knowledge, no celebration of a woman’s “agency.” If anything, the film’s ending—in which Jacquie opts for a bohemian lover with no regard for the future—is a loop back to the start, an affirmation of the fleeting pleasures of a life lived in the present that also feels like a tightening of the noose. La Dérive has, in other words, few of the qualities often trotted out to laud a film as certifiably feminist. But Jacquie’s difficult return to village life, during which she never makes peace with the social role assigned to her, shows what happens when a young woman refuses to be bored, refuses to give in. Without shame, the film suggests how dead-ends, failures, and acts of self-sabotage are woven into the texture of a woman’s experience, and how a stubborn attachment to the dream of a different life can persist despite them all.

In her BFI Classics monograph on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970)—another work of women’s cinema belatedly heralded as a gem—the scholar Elena Gorfinkel describes Loden’s protagonist as “neither an affirmative nor a redemptive heroine,” arguing that “she represented a nascent feminist articulation of the problems, if not the solutions.” This holds true for Jacquie, as well. She figures as a sister not just to Wanda but also to Mona in Varda’s Vagabond (1985) and Firdaus in Nina Menkes’s Queen of Diamonds (1991): across decades, they form a sorority of women who refuse the safety of the home and choose an impossible revolt, one no less profound for at times being indistinguishable from self-destruction.These are films that brim with ambivalence and dare to stray, and whose characters show no hint of the imperative of self-optimization ubiquitous today. This is surely why, more than in their own time, they have proven especially attractive of late, when so many promises of feminist empowerment have soured, been coopted, or simply come to naught, but so many problems remain.

It should come as no surprise that women’s filmmaking, long marginalized and devalued, has been a signal part of the recent mania for peering into the dimmer corners of film history. For forty years there were no books on Wanda and now there are three; one can happily assume that discussion of La Dérive is about to surge. Restoration is an important step in generating this kind of interest, which in turn transforms a film’s position in history. Unlike an out-of-print book, which can be purchased online or accessed in a library, a 35mm film print sitting on a shelf will remain invisible to the public unless a professional takes the initiative to project it or digitize it. Without the archivists, restorationists, and curators who labor to bring lesser-known titles to audiences—first at festivals and eventually via home-viewing—vast swaths of film history will go unseen and the exclusions that have prevailed for so long will persist. But as the old is made new again, it is only more pressing to trace the shape of disappearance, to jolt the notion of the “forgotten film” out of the passive voice. In some instances, the same institutions and publications today so concerned with revival are the ones that had previously consigned those works to oblivion, however unwittingly. Papering over these acts of negligence has the effect of obscuring historical conditions of circulation and reception, depriving us of a chance to understand how the dominant picture of twentieth-century cinema that we have today first came into focus.

La Dérive was forgotten. Why? According to the Cinémathèque Française, it was the censors’ rating that “prematurely sealed the cinematic fate of its creator.” But misogyny undoubtedly played a part; in a 1964 Cahiers review, Louis Marcorelles noted that the film “speaks of love with such frankness that a good number of men are angered by it.” La Dérive also is an ill-fit with two major canon-building paradigms, the first of which is auteurism. The film was not Delsol’s sole outing; she went on to make a range of shorts (including the intriguingly titled Mille et un sexes, a documentary from 1974 in which people discuss gender identity), programs for television, and eventually the feature film Ben et Bénédict (1977), starring Françoise Lebrun of The Mother and the Whore (1973), which one can only hope will be restored soon. And yet in a film culture that valorizes directors by tracing a stylistic signature across a large body of work—an approach invented by the Young Turks of the New Wave that continues strong today—Delsol remains inassimilable: she simply did not make enough features. This makes her work less likely to be programmed by cinémathèques which have long devoted significant resources to single-author retrospectives.

The film also defies some expectations of feminist film culture. Jacquie’s willingness to make herself an object of male use and Delsol’s resistance to being identified as a feminist likely lessened its chances of being embraced by writers and curators who endeavored to rewrite film history in a feminine key from the early 1970s onward. Perhaps they just didn’t know about Delsol. But the atmosphere of resignation and ensnarement that pervades La Dérive may leave a bad taste for those who prefer their films sweet with the flavor of women’s independence and self-actualization.

Delsol’s working title for La Dérive was “Sand Castles,” a nod to both its littoral setting and the fragility of Jacquie’s liaisons and dreams. For decades, this could also have been a way of describing her debut: a delicate film washed away by a wave of Truffauts, Godards, and Chabrols. But it is the title that the director ultimately chose that offers a better allegory of what La Dérive teaches: swept in on the tide after decades adrift, it comes bearing lessons about the small-minded forces that first pushed it out to sea.