In partnership with the auction house Aguttes, the cinema is organising a week-long retrospective and an auction around the photographs of Raymond Cauchetier.
There are photographers whose names remain less well known than the images they produced — even though those images ended up defining, in the collective imagination, an entire movement of cinema. Raymond Cauchetier belongs to this category: stills photographer on À bout de souffle (Breathless), Jules et Jim and La Baie des Anges (Bay of Angels), he fixed on film the faces and postures that were to become the New Wave. The cinema Le Saint Germain des Prés, in association with the auction house Aguttes, devotes a New Wave Week to him, from 1 to 12 October 2026, combining a film retrospective with an auction of 218 of his photographs.
The programme opens on Thursday 1 October at 8 p.m. with a screening of À bout de souffle, in the presence of Antoine de Baecque and Kaoru Cauchetier, followed by a cocktail reception. The week continues with Une femme est une femme by Jean-Luc Godard on Wednesday 7 October at 8:30 p.m., La Baie des Anges by Jacques Demy on Friday 9 October at 8:30 p.m., Jules et Jim by François Truffaut on Saturday 10 October at 8:30 p.m., and La Peau douce, also by François Truffaut, on Sunday 11 October at 8 p.m. The week closes on Monday 12 October at 5:30 p.m. with the auction of the 218 photographs signed Raymond Cauchetier.
This programme is not merely a nostalgic celebration: by combining screenings and the sale of photographic archives, it offers a double entry into the photographer’s work — that of the big screen, where his images continue to live through the films he documented, and that, rarer, of ownership, since the 218 prints put up for auction will allow collectors to acquire material fragments of this visual history. The presence of Antoine de Baecque, film historian and recognised specialist of the period, and of Kaoru Cauchetier, at the opening evening, anchors the event in an approach that is both heritage-minded and living.
The choice of films selected — À bout de souffle, Une femme est une femme, Jules et Jim, La Peau douce, La Baie des Anges — draws a fairly faithful map of the moment when the New Wave invented itself, between Godard, Truffaut and Demy, three filmmakers whom Raymond Cauchetier followed on set with the same photographic eye, made of spontaneity and almost pictorial composition. It is precisely this tension between the captured instant and the constructed gaze that made his images icons as much as documents.
By organising this week within its own auditorium, the cinema Le Saint Germain des Prés places the retrospective in the venue that gives it its full meaning: seeing or seeing again these films on the big screen, before being able, a few days later, to acquire one of the instants that brought them into the history of cinema
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