Beyond the Nouvelle Vague (starts Fri., May 2, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) It's part of the paradox of the French New Wave that most of the films in International House's "Beyond the Nouvelle Vague" are, by most classifications, New Wave films, and yet they're far enough outside the timeworn canon that they might as well be from another country. Though it initially designated no more than a group of young French cineastes who turned to directing around the same time (the late 1950s and very early '60s), "the nouvelle vague" has become a canon, practically a genre, with a similarly narrow range of trademark characteristics. There's no easy way of explaining why, say, Agnès Varda isn't regularly mentioned in the same breath as, or even before, Truffaut, Godard and Resnais, or why so few of her films are available on video (though the excellent DVDs for Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond and The Gleaners and I are a good place to start). I-House's carefully curated two-weekend series pushes in the other direction, agitating for a splayed, omnivorous definition of French cinema d'un certain age.

Let's start, as the series does, with Varda. A photographer by training, Varda moved into documentary and then into fiction film, or at least a hybrid of the latter two. In La Pointe courte (1954), which screens Friday at 8 p.m., the mixture, so intoxicating in Cléo and Vagabond, hadn't yet gelled: The film mainly alternates between simple scenes of life in a Mediterranean fishing village and a protracted conversation between married couple Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort, who've come from Paris to the village where he grew up to try and save their marriage. The stilted theatricality of the latter scenes (prefiguring Bergman) only seems more artificial up against the neorealist story of a fisherman dodging the shore patrol while sweating out whether to ask a father for the hand of his 16-year-old daughter. Every time the film returns to Noiret and Monfort pondering whether they're "in love or just in love with our love," you start counting the seconds until the fisherman's back on the screen. It's possible Varda intended the parallel as a critique of artificial storytelling techniques, but if so, she succeeds in creating the stultifying pretension of the Noiret/Monfort sequences all too well.

Made just four years later, Varda's short L'Opéra-Mouffe, which screens before La Pointe courte, is something of a masterpiece. Subtitled "notebooks of a pregnant woman," the film interweaves documentary, surrealist imagery and ditties by Georges Delerue to uniquely evocative and lyrical effect. One moment, Varda free-associates a montage of patrons of the rue Mouffetard vegetable market -- a movement of nose-scratchers, of hair-arrangers, of people looking away from the camera, then looking toward it -- the next turns to a shot of a light bulb that is smashed to reveal a newly hatched chick inside. As with any sketchbook film, the relation between L'Opéra-Mouffe's parts is ambiguous -- generally speaking, the created imagery relates most obviously to Varda's pregnancy, while the market documentary sequences more or less stand on their own -- but of course coaxing the viewer to ponder such questions is precisely the point, and at a tidy 17 minutes, L'Opéra-Mouffe is the perfect length to suggest without needing to venture answers.

Something about the giddy energy of the New Wave seems to lend itself to the short form, which might be why Varda's short and Jean Eustache's featurette, Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966), screening Saturday at 8 p.m., are the weekend's most satisfying, even most fully realized offerings. Part of a boys-on-the-make double bill, Santa Claus stars New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as a young man trying to live stylishly on a shoestring budget. The knotted silk scarf around his neck speaks of bourgeois aspirations, but he's forced to take odd jobs just to save up the money for a fashionable duffel coat. One of these finds him posing as an absurdly skinny street-corner Santa, where he finds himself in possession of a strange, if temporary confidence; as long as he's wearing the suit, he can call out to girls he'd never dare to speak to otherwise, even set up dates with them -- although sadly, he can't bring the suit along. "In civilian clothes, I was a flop," the narrator notes. Drawing heavily on Léaud's performance in Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle (especially the short Antoine and Colette), Santa Claus is slight, perhaps, but perfectly airy. Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine (1963), which follows Santa Claus, is, by contrast, overlong and shapeless, with a love triangle that recalls Jules and Jim, but whose reconfigurations seem merely arbitrary. (The fact that it was assembled over a period of three years probably didn't help.)

Also on this weekend's bill: Jean-Luc Godard's Le Gai Savoir (1968), a (very) loose adaptation of Rousseau's Émile, which he re-edited in the wake of the student uprisings of May 1968 and marks his definitive break with narrative structure, preceded by the fascinating Two American Audiences, a document of Godard facing off against a classroom of NYU film students in April 1968. Stay tuned next week for films by Marguerite Duras, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Georges Franju, Chris Marker and Luc Moullet.

Holocaust Film Festival (Sun.Tue., May 4-6, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3033, www.cjhsa.org) This Holocaust-focused film series includes a pair of Oscar winners: James Moll's searing The Last Days (Mon., 1 p.m.) and Roman Polanski's quietly insinuating The Pianist (Sun., 7 p.m.), followed by a Q&A with Andrezej Szpilman, son of the movie's real-life subject.

Drive-In Theater Sundays (starts Sun., May 4, 7:30 p.m., Broadway Theatre, 43 S. Broadway, Pitman, N.J., www. exhumedfilms.com) Calibre Nine, an offshoot of Exhumed Films, kicks off a series of Sunday evenings devoted to cult, exploitation and horror movies with Wes Craven's brutal, unrelenting Last House on the Left. You've been warned. Upcoming films: The Candy Snatchers (May 11), 5 Masters of Death (May 18) and The Losers (May 25).

Election/Barton Fink (County Theater, 20 E. State St., Doylestown, 215-345-6789, www.countytheater.org; Ambler Theater, 108 E. Butler Ave., 215-645-7855, www.amblertheater.org. See Repertory Film listings on p. 35 for showtimes.) It's doubtful that anyone with eyes needs convincing that, as the County's two-week program would have it, "Not All Good Directors Are Dead!" But if it means an excuse to show Alexander Payne's toothy satire or Joel and Ethan Coen's uncomfortably incisive story of a well-meaning writer gone wrong, who's to quarrel?