Labarthe was very much in the orbit of the French New Wave—he appears as an actor in Godard’s My Life to Live—and his collaborator, Janine Bazin, was the widow of film theorist and Cahiers du cinéma co-founder André Bazin. Yet by 1964, five years after the explosion of the movement onto French and international screens, doubts about the true impact of the New Wave had emerged. ...