Despite having several films released in this country, Maurice Pialat is one of the least appreciated French masters of the last 40 years. Trained as an artist, he spent the nouvelle vague era making documentary shorts and so shocked audiences with his social-realist debut about abandoned children, L'Enfance nue (1968), that four years passed before he was able to raise the finance for a second feature. In a sop to commercial convention, Pialat cast stars Jeanne Yanne and Marlène Jobert in Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972), which he adapted from his own autobiographical novel. But few other concessions were made in this emotionally rigorous study of a couple bent on not growing old together.

Although the focus is only on the dying embers of their affair, Yanne and Jobert have been sneaking trysts in cars and hotels for six years because, even though his marriage is palpably over, the fortysomething film-maker won't leave wife Macha Méril. The lovers have furtively stolen weekends together and even contrived to turn business trips into romantic holidays. But it's clear from the resentment and recrimination of their on/off break-up that this has been a relationship that neither has enjoyed, yet neither has had the courage to live without.

With its endless round of manipulations, betrayals, apologies and excuses, this is a distressingly raw insight into an interdependency that's increasingly based on a fear of absence rather than genuine acceptance and affection. The performances are excruciatingly courageous, with Yanne's shifts from lust to frustration to abuse and violence being as chilling as Jobert's enslavement by her masochistic insecurity. But Pialat obviously pushed his leads hard, as Yanne refused to accept in person his Best Actor prize at Cannes.

Pialat continued to explore our flawed ability to care for someone while hurting them in the second part of his loosely confessional trilogy, La Gueule ouverte (1974), which uncompromisingly contrasts youth and age, family and individuality, and sexuality and mortality through a series of intense long takes that forces the viewer to examine their own attitudes to life, love and death.

Monique Mélinand comes to Paris for medical tests that confirm she is dying of cancer. Despite their bickering, she is relaxedly close to son Philippe Léotard and accepts that he finds it harder to be around her as her condition deteriorates. Ironically, Hubert Deschamps becomes increasingly doting, as he realises he is going to lose his wife, even though he cheated on her the day after their wedding and still seeks solace from mistress Jeanne Dulac, when he's not flirting with the nubile girls he never misses an opportunity to undress and paw in the clothing and haberdashery store he runs beneath their Auvergne apartment.

Like his father, Léotard is incapable of fidelity, even though his own marriage to Nathalie Baye seems superficially happy. Yet Pialat never judges, whether Léotard is skulking into a hotel with his latest conquest or grappling with fleshly nurse Corinne Derel at the hospital where Mélinand is dying. Consequently, even though this lacerating analysis of physical and psychological pain laments Léotard and Deschamps's callous chauvinism, everyone's behaviour is presented as inveterately and fallibly human.

With Nestor Almendros's camera fixing upon their every gesture, the cast exceptionally conveys the suppressed emotions that simultaneously unite and divide the family. But what makes this so poignant is Pialat's remorseless focus on a genuine sense of attachment that can never be corrupted by careless actions. People are weak and selfish and rarely even think of their nearest and dearest while seizing opportunities to make their brutish, short existence seem more bearable. But while Pialat refuses to blame anyone for their lapses in judgement, he starkly avers that each (mis)deed has its lasting consequence.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, audiences didn't want to be confronted with such harsh truths and La Gueule ouverte proved a box-office disaster. As a result, Pialat and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn had to adopt an even more austerely vérité style to shoot Passe ton bac d'abord (1979) on a shoestring in the northern town of Lens.

Resolutely shunning a linear narrative, Pialat alights upon a group of friends as they hang out at a café and wonder what to do with their lives once they've completed their Baccalaureate. Sabine Haudepin has a fractious relationship with parents Annick Alane and Michel Caron, but she finds herself growing closer to Philippe Marlaud, even though her mother regards him as marriage material. Thus, when she flirts with the wolfish Bernard Tronczak at Agnès Makowiak and Patrick Playez's wedding, sparks begin to fly that threaten to ignite a powderkeg of unspoken jealousies and frustrations.

This is primarily a treatise on self-discovery and testing one's limits. Yet it's also very much about gender and class. Wannabe stud Tronczak's rivalry with Patrick Lepcynski reeks of testosterone and it's clear that his holiday conquest of chic Parisian Frédérique Cerbonnet is as much an assertion of his latent masculinity as a satiation of his teenage lusts. Yet while he is allowed to be as predatory as he wishes, his parents prevent sister Valérie Chassigneux from accepting a modelling contract. Even though this seems a dubious enterprise, Chassigneux is denied the freedom to make her own choices and Haudepin's feud with Alane is underpinned by the same bourgeois conservatism that insists a young woman's best chance of making something of herself is to find a suitable spouse.

The roots of the unhappy liaisons in the are readily evident in this damning indictment of hypocritical conformity. Only Claude Chabrol denounced French middle-class foibles with such consistent acuity. But there's nothing of Pialat's contempt in any of Chabrol's mischievous dissections. Indeed, there's even a wisp of despairing fondness in flms like The Girl Cut in Two.

Nobody does this sort of sophisticated satirical savagery better than Chabrol. Yet this reworking of the 1906 Stanford White scandal that inspired Richard Fleischer's The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) is not as pitilessly incisive as past assaults on the narcissistic bourgeoisie. There's a grim fascination in watching rakish novelist François Berléand and indolent pharmaceutical heir Benoît Magimel competing for the affections of ingenuous weathergirl, Ludivine Sagnier. But Sagnier is too docile to possess the requisite femme fatality of a noir anti-heroine, while Berléand's literary and marital reputations never really seem imperilled by his arrogant folly.

The storytelling is impeccable, however, and Chabrol's insights into the transience of trust, the marginalisation of books in an age of electronic media and the celebrity class's craving for the deference abnegated by society's traditional powerbrokers are typically trenchant. So while this may not be a masterwork, it's still clearly the work of a master.

Chabrol was one of the leading lights of the nouvelle vague that erupted in France half a century ago. Disappointingly few minor works from this thrilling period have been issued on disc to mark the anniversary, but one welcome release is Georges Franju's La Tête contre les murs (1959).

Adapted by star Jean-Pierre Mocky from a Hervé Bazin novel with the intention of creating a Gallic Rebel Without a Cause, this was singer Charles Aznavour's first acting assignment and he steals the show as the epileptic whom the well-heeled Mocky befriends after he is committed to an asylum by lawyer father Jean Galland for irrationally vandalising his desk. Frustrated at being treated as a guinea pig by competing psychiatrists, maverick Paul Meurisse and traditionalist Pierre Brasseur, Mocky talks Aznavour into escaping to Paris, where he hopes to find sanctuary with girlfriend, Anouk Aimée.

Mocky has originally intended to direct himself, but Franju (who was venturing into features on the back of several acclaimed shorts) contributes an oppressive sense of enclosure and ennui that is decidedly missing from the melodrama. He is much assisted by cinematographic veteran Eugene Schüfftan, whose use of brooding contrasts of light and shade to convey the complexities of the psyche is, in turn, complemented by Maurice Jarre's disconcerting mix of lyrical orchestration, chiming bells and abrupt percussion.

The influence of the New Wave was slow to spread to the transatlantic mainstream, as executives struggling to keep their studios solvent opted for grotesquely inflated blockbusters rather than more personal works of potentially iconoclastic artistic expression. Curiously, this was not the case in Czechoslovakia, where the so-called Film Miracle was sustained by the likes of Milos Forman. However, he was driven into American exile as the Communist authorities began to clamp down on cinematic subversion. But he left with a resounding parting shot - The Fireman's Ball (1967), which begins as a gently mocking comedy of small-town manners, but ends as a blazing allegorical satire on the incompetence, insularity and ideological idiocy of the country's rulers.

Veteran fire chief Jan Stöckl is about to retire. So, Jan Vostrcil heads up a committee to plan a farewell party. Endless debate is required to make the simplest decision, with everyone demanding to be heard and no one really saying anything. Typically, the event is a farce, with the prizes for the raffle being pilfered at regular intervals, the contestants for a beauty contest being as unco-operative as they're unattractive and the guest of honour being mortified by the mayhem occurring in his name, especially when he suggests that the lights are extinguished to allow the thieves to return their ill-gotten gains and his own wife is caught returning an item red-handed. To cap it all off, a fire breaks out across town. But the brigade is too late to douse the flames and the victim is left with the consoling suggestion that he should move his chair closer to the fire to beat the winter cold.

While this may not be as subtle as A Blonde in Love (1965), this socialist realist parody is still a raucous treat that's so stuffed with insouciant comic detail that it's easy to forget that its real theme is the purges that characterised the brutal regime of Josef Stalin. The fun can easily be enjoyed without a profound knowledge of Czech politics. But, suffice to say, once Alexander Dubek's Prague Spring was over, this affectionately scathing swipe at incompetents in uniform was `banned forever'.

Tony Richardson and the other pioneers of Free Cinema had been a major influence on Forman. But the Yorkshireman's star was on the wane by the time he released Mademoiselle (1966) and, despite being scripted by Marguerite Duras from a story by Jean Genet, this much maligned film did little to arrest his decline.

Most critics applaud Jeanne Moreau's darkly obsessive performance as the French village schoolteacher who is prepared to jeopardise the lives of her unenlightened neighbours to pursue her passion for Italian woodcutter Ettore Manni. But few can find a good word for Richardson's symbol-heavy direction or his seemingly prurient filming of Manni's son, Keith Skinner. To many, the director of such kitchen sink classics as Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) had had his head turned by the Oscar success of Joseph Andrews (1963) and was desperate to find his way back into the social realist fold after the spectacular misfire of his Evelyn Waugh-inspired Hollywood lampoon, The Loved One (1965).

Yet, for all its faults, this is a hugely cinematic study of destructive obsession, emotional manipulation and provincial xenophobia that is strewn with references to Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946), Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), Marcel Pagnol's Manon des Sources (1953) and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959). Moreover, Richardson follows the lead of Michelangelo Antonioni in using David Watkin's glowering monochrome photography to contrast Moreau's psychological state with her environment. Were Michael Haneke to remake this with Isabelle Huppert, it would be commended for its audacious attitude to bestial lusts. So, even though the out-of-vogue Richardson is easy to dismiss, this disconcerting drama is long overdue reappraisal.

In 1976, Ingmar Bergman also fell foul of the state when he was accused of tax evastion. He was bitterly hurt by his hounding by both the authorities and the press, especially as it was clear that he was not personally responsible for the irregularities. Feeling betrayed and deeply ashamed by his public humiliation, he came close to a nervous breakdown and decided to quit Sweden for West Germany.

Bergman's anger and disappointment coloured his first venture in exile, The Serpent's Egg (1977), which prompted director Kjell Grede to ask him why a man with such a passionate love of life made films that were so melancholic and fatalistic. So, while back on the Baltic island that had been his home for a decade to make Fårö-Dokument 79 (1979), Bergman began writing a screenplay that drew on his childhood as the son of the chaplain to the Swedish royal family and amounted to `a huge tapestry filled with masses of colour and people, houses and forests, mysterious haunts of caves and grottoes, secrets and night skies'.

As he wrote in his journal: `By playing, I can overcome the anguish, loosen the tension, and triumph over destruction. I want at last to show the joy that I carry within me in spite of everything, joy that I have so seldom and so poorly given life to in my work. Being able to portray energy and drive, capability for living, kindness. That wouldn't be so bad for once.' The picture that restored Bergman's faith in himself and the wider world was Fanny and Alexander (1982).

The opening segment revolves around a family Christmas in the opulent home of an Uppsala theatrical family in 1907. Ten year-old Bertil Guve and his younger sister Pernilla Alwin watch with fascination, if incomprehension as the grown-ups over-indulge in pleasures that are more carnal than Christian. But the festivities are curtailed by the death of the children's father and their lives take a further turn for the worse when mother Ewa Fröling marries martinet bishop Jan Malmsjö. Stifled by their stepfather's Lutheran austerity and hypocritical tyranny, the two siblings are rescued from virtual captivity by Jewish moneylender Erland Josephson, who, along with his puppet-making nephew, restores them to a world of magic and imagination within the safety of his antique shop.

With its obvious references to past and present traumas, Bergman clearly intended this sprawling saga to exorcise some ghosts. But he was also determined to wreak allegorical revenge on those who had driven him from home, while also confounding the critics who had declared him a spent force after From the Life of the Marionettes (1980). Yet even though he announced that this would be his last picture, Bergman found funding hard to come by, especially as he wished to make a five-hour television version of the story in addition to a 188-minute feature. Finnish friend Jörn Donner, who was head of the Swedish Film Institute, eventually brokered a co-production deal for the $6 million required for a period extravaganza with some 60 speaking parts and 1200 extras. It proved money well spent, as the film won four Academy Awards and revived Bergman's critical reputation.