February 26, 1984

G ive or take a few months, this year is the 25th anniversary of the Nouvelle Vague, that New Wave of young French filmmakers who, first by their sometimes outrageous statements and then by the extraordinary films they made to support those statements, forever changed the look of - as well as the way we look at - movies. Their new criticism, the sweeping and, at the time, revolutionary politiques des auteurs, announced that all films, even the most ghastly collaborations, could be seen as the work of a single artistic sensibility, that is, of the director-as-''author.'' Their films, made on limited budgets in the real world outside the walls of the studios, turned poverty into visual assets. They came up with new editing tricks, including the jump-cut that functions as cinema shorthand. They rediscovered others - such as the ''iris,'' by which a portion of an image can be isolated on an otherwise black screen - that had been abandoned as old-fashioned with the arrival of the talkies. It was almost as if films were being reinvented.

JERUSALEM T HE full dimensions of the Israeli-American setback in Lebanon have not yet been realized but the outlines are being drawn with growing clarity. The implications go beyond Lebanon; they involve the capacity of the United States and Israel to influence the complex flow of events in the Middle East. Many Israelis are beginning to see their involvement in Lebanon as a grave failure of perception - the mistaken belief that applying superior military force to a labyrinth of ancient feuds would bring desired results. The error, which the Americans also seemed to embrace for a time, has left both countries weakened, at least in the eyes of governments and factions in the region.

Neither the Canadiens nor the Forum cause visitors much fear these days. The Canadiens, with 21 Stanley Cup banners hanging from their rafters, have lost 30 games this season - their most since the 1950-51 season. And they have lost 15 in the hallowed Forum, a team record. ''We have gone from a team that consistently had more than 100 points in a season to one that this year will finish with 75-80,'' said Bob Gainey, the Canadiens' captain. Tonight, a day after the dismissal of their coach, Bob Berry, and with Jacques Lemaire directing behind their bench, the Canadiens picked up 2 points, beating the Rangers, 7-4. The victory once again had the Forum rocking.

I T was sometime around 1800 when Hachaliah Bailey put Somers on the map by importing an elephant, thought by local historians to be the first such beast ever to cross America's shores. ''It was here the American circus began,'' Florence Oliver, the Town Historian, said recently. Several buildings in Somers' core area testify to that period and give people like Mrs. Oliver a sense of pride and identity that International Business Machines and Pepsico cannot provide. But like others in Westchester, history buffs in Somers are worried about the possibility that proposed new development near these sites would alter the historic atmosphere that makes their hamlet unusual.

I*SIT surrounded by memoirs written by the New York intellectuals of the period between the 1930's and the 1970's - William Barrett's ''The Truants,'' William Phillips's ''A Partisan View,'' Irving Howe's ''A Margin of Hope,'' Irving Kristol's ''Reflections of a Neo-Conservative'' (only a small part of which is memoir). These books are, of course, only a small part of the recent flood of materials on the New York intellectuals. There are also two books of memoirs by Norman Podhoretz, excellent essays by Lionel Abel, scholarly works such as William L. O'Neill's ''A Better World - The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals,'' Nathan Glazer is a professor of education and sociology at Harvard University. His most recent book is ''Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964-1982.'' and others. And I am considering a question raised by Denis Donoghue in a paper he read at Columbia University last fall at the Lionel Trilling Seminar on the New York intelligentsia: Why are American intellectuals so different from their British counterparts?