A hell of a lot happened forty years ago this spring. Martin Luther King Jr. was assinated in April, Robert Kennedy was killed in June, Columbia University students took over their school in protest of the Vietnam War, and the so-called "Prague Spring" -- a series of revolts in Czechoslovakia against Soviet domination -- spanned from January to August of 1968.

Among these uprisings were the famous student riots in Paris, from May to June, chronicled by Bernardo Bertolucci in his 2003 feature film The Dreamers.

Protesting the Vietnam War, university policies, and the overall state of the world, the students in those riots were largely influenced by their national cinema -- namely the French New Wave. The directors of that group -- Jean-Luc Godard, Francoise Truffault, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and others -- not only chose revolutionary themes, but revolutionized cinema as well.

Their use of on-location, documentary-style shooting, non-professional actors, and hip, frenetic editing, as well as their prototypical postmodern approach to story-telling, influenced filmmakers worldwide. In the United States, the 1960s saw an explosion of counter-cultural cinema from the likes of Dennis Hopper, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, and John Cassavetes, to name just a few.

And for the first few weeks of May, should you find yourself in New York, you can see first-hand what all the fuss was about. Catch the early works of Godard at Film Forum, in Lower Manhattan, and see the films Godard and his New Wave compatriots inspired at Lincoln Plaza.

These cinematic archives are not merely exceptional works of art, but proof that art has immense power to inspire, provoke, and bring about radical social change.