This conference will consider The American New Wave’s cultural, political and aesthetic legacies fifty years since its birth. It will seek to look afresh at the films produced during its short lifespan and assess their continued significance. It will explore the films these directors produced in the years after 1980 to consider how far the values and ideals of the earlier period persisted or whether they were subsumed by the cultural conservatism that has dominated mainstream cinema since then. It will also investigate those filmmakers we might consider to have picked up the baton from their predecessors and pursued challenging material in more recent times.