An artistic movement whose influence on film has been as profound and enduring as that of surrealism or cubism on painting, the French New Wave (or Le Nouvelle Vague) made its first splashes as a movement shot through with youthful exuberance and a brisk reinvigoration of the filmmaking process. Most agree that the French New Wave was at its peak between 1958 and 1964, but it continued to ripple on afterwards, with many of the tendencies and styles introduced by the movement still in practice today…

French New Wave

The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm.
"New Wave" is an example of European art cinema. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm. Using portable equipment and requiring little or no set up time, the New Wave way of filmmaking presented a documentary type style. The films exhibited direct sounds on film stock that required less light. Filming techniques included fragmented, discontinuous editing, and long takes. The combination of objective realism, subjective realism, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end. It holds that the director is the "author" of his movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film.
The informal movement was spearheaded by a handful of critics from Cahiers du cinema Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette whose incisive writings were matched by their films: bold, modern takes on classical masters that reworked genres like noir and the musical, and experimented with techniques antiquated and discovered. The beginning of the New Wave was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying this philosophy to the world by directing movies themselves. Chabrol's “Le Beau Serge” is generally credited as the first New Wave feature. While Godard’s “Breathless” and Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” remain the twin groundbreaking events of the movement, films such as Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima mon amour” and Agnès Varda’s “Cléo from 5 to 7” were watersheds as well, finding excited audiences hungry for a new, energetic, political cinema opposed to the stuffy “cinema of quality,” as Truffaut put it, of the old guard. Though the movement quickly dissipated, filmmakers like Godard, Rivette, Varda, and Rohmer continue to pioneer today.

Cahiers du cinema

Cahiers du Cinéma means Notebooks on Cinema. It is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma (Review of the Cinema) involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 (Objective 49) (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, among others) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (Cinema Club of the Latin Quarter). Initially edited by Éric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer), it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut.
Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism and theory. A 1954 article by Truffaut attacked La qualité française ("the French Quality") and was the manifesto for 'la politique des Auteurs' which Andrew Sarris later termed the auteur theory — resulting in the re-evaluation of Hollywood films and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann. Cahiers du Cinema authors also championed the work of directors Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, and Jean Cocteau, by centering their critical evaluations on a film's mise en scène. The magazine also was essential to the creation of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, of French cinema, which centered on films directed by Cahiers authors such as Godard and Truffaut.

Origin of the Movement

Alexandre Astruc's manifesto, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo." This article appeared in L'Ecran, on March 30, 1948. This is one of thirty essays devoted to the cinema during this period, and this article specifically outlines some of the ideas that are later expanded upon by François Truffaut and the Cahiers du cinéma. It begins to argue that 'cinema was in the process of becoming a new mean of expression on the same level as painting and the novel:' "a form in which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of the "camera-stylo." Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for Cahiers du cinéma. By means of criticism and editorialization, they laid the groundwork for a set of concepts, revolutionary at the time, which the American film critic Andrew Sarris called auteur theory. (The original French "La politique des auteurs", translated literally, as "The policy of authors".) Cahiers du cinéma writers critiqued the classic "Tradition of Quality" style of French Cinema. Notable among these was François Truffaut in his manifesto-like article "Une Certaine tendance du cinéma français". Bazin and Henri Langlois, founder and curator of the Cinémathèque Française, were the dual father figures of the movement. These men of cinema valued the expression of the director's personal vision in both the film's style and script.
Truffaut also credits the American director, Morris Engel and his film "Little Fugitive" with helping to start the French New Wave, when he said "Our French New Wave would never have come into being, if it hadn't been for the young American Morris Engel who showed us the way to independent production with (this) fine movie.
The auteurs of this era owe their popularity to the support they received with their youthful audience. Most of these directors were born in the 1930s and grew up in Paris; relating much to how their viewers were experiencing life. With high concentration in fashion, urban professional life, and all-night parties, the life of France's youth was being exquisitely captured.
French New Wave was popular roughly between 1958 and 1964, although New Wave work existed as late as 1973. The socio-economic forces at play shortly after World War II strongly influenced the movement. Politically and financially drained, France tended to fall back on the old popular pre-war traditions. One such tradition was straight narrative cinema, specifically classical French film. The movement has its roots in rebellion against the reliance on past forms (often adapted from traditional novellic structures), criticizing in particular the way these forms could force the audience to submit to a dictatorial plot-line. They were especially against the French "cinema of quality", the type of high-minded, literary period films held in esteem at French film festivals, often regarded as "untouchable" by criticism.
New Wave critics and directors studied the work of western classics and applied new avant garde stylistic direction. The low-budget approach helped filmmakers get at the essential art form and find what was, to them, a much more comfortable and honest form of production. Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and many other forward-thinking film directors were held up in admiration while standard Hollywood films bound by traditional narrative flow were strongly criticized.
Many of the directors associated with the new wave continued to make films into the 21st century.

Auteur Theory

In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinct enough to shine through all kinds of studio interference and through the collective process. Auteur theory has influenced film criticism since 1954, when it was advocated by film director and critic François Truffaut. This method of film analysis was originally associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the French film review periodical Cahiers du Cinéma. Auteur theory was developed a few years later in America through the writings of The Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris. Sarris used auteur theory as a way to further the analysis of what defines serious work through the study of respected directors and their films.
One of the ironies of the Auteur theory is that, at the very moment Truffaut was writing, the break-up of the Hollywood studio system during the 1950s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of films Truffaut admired were actually being made.
Auteur theory draws on the work of a group of cinema enthusiasts who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma and argued that films should reflect a director's personal vision. They championed filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean Renoir as absolute 'auteurs' of their films. Although André Bazin, provided a forum for Auteurism to flourish, he explained his concern about its excesses in his article "On the Auteur Theory" (Cahier # 70, 1957). Another element of Auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen," which encourages directors to wield cameras as writers use pens and to guard against the hindrances of traditional storytelling.
Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that movie-making was an industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for, encouraging the director to use the commercial apparatus as a writer uses a pen, and, through the mise en scène, imprint his or her vision on the work (minimizing the role of the screenwriter). Recognizing the difficulty of reaching this ideal, they valued the work of directors who came close.
The definition of an Auteur was debated upon since the 1940s. Andre Bazin and Roger Leenhardt presented the theory that it is the director that brings the film to life and uses the film to express their thoughts and feelings of the subject matter as well as a world view as an auteur. An auteur can use lighting, camerawork, staging and editing to add to their vision. Michel Foucault wrote a literary piece called 'What is an author?" which contributes to the Auteur Theory. The texts relation to an anuthor is the "author function". This is connected to a legal system concerning who owns the text. This theory has become more complex than just attribution. According to Foucault, "author" does not refer to just a real individual but rather as an alter ego of an actual person. "author" is too narrow of a definition for some who Foucault calls "founders of discursivity".
In his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("A certain tendency in French cinema"), François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des Auteurs", asserting that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting than the best of the movies of Jean Delannoy. "Politique" might very well be translated as "policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to value and look at films in a certain way. One might see it as the policy of treating any director that uses a personal style or a unique world view as an Auteur. Truffaut criticized the Cinema of Quality as "Scenarists' films", which are works that lack originality and rely on literary classics. According to Truffaut, this means that the director is only a metteur en scene, a "stager". This tradition suggests that the screenwriter hands the script to the director and the director simply adds the performers and pictures. Truffaut provocatively said: "(t)here are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors".

Truffaut's article, by his own admission, dealt primarily with scenarists or screenwriters, precisely the screenwriting duo Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who, Truffaut believed, simplified and compromised many of the great works of French literature in order to support the political agenda of their day. In Truffaut's article, he references the director Claude Autant-Lara's characterization of his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh as an "anti-war" book, citing the problem that the book pre-dated the Second World War. Truffaut applied the term "auteur" to directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson, who, aside from exerting their distinct style, wrote the screenplays or worked on the writing of screenplays of their films.
In its embryonic form, the auteur theory dealt with the nature of literary adaptations and Truffaut's discomfort with the screenwriters Aurenche's and Bost's maxim that any film adaptation of a novel should capture the spirit of the novel and deal only with its "filmable" aspects. Truffaut believed that film directors like Robert Bresson were able to use the film narrative to approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes. To support this assertion, he used the film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest.
Much of the writing of Truffaut and his colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers du cinéma was designed to lambaste not only the post-war French cinema but especially the big production films of the cinéma de qualité ("quality films"). Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile, old-fashioned cinéma de papa (or "Dad's cinema"). During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did not allow the exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. In 1946, when French film critics were finally able to see the 1940s U.S. movies, they were enamoured with these films.
Truffaut's theory maintains that a good director (and many bad ones) exerts such a distinctive style or promotes such a consistent theme that his or her influence is unmistakable in the body of his or her work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of directors whose work showed a marked visual style (such as Alfred Hitchcock) as well as those whose visual style was less pronounced but whose movies reflected a consistent theme (such as Jean Renoir's humanism). Truffaut et al. made the distinction between auteurs and 'metteurs en scene', the latter not being described as inferior directors making inherently poor films, just lacking the authorial signature.
The auteur theory was also challenged by the influence of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism. The New Critics argued that critics made an "intentional fallacy" when they tried to interpret works of art by speculating about what the author meant, based on the author's personality or life experiences. New Critics argued that that information or speculation about an author's intention was secondary to the words on the page as the basis of the experience of reading literature.

A Radical New Type of Filmmaking

To get a general idea of what this new cinematic approach meant, it might help to understand that before they were directors, the main players of the New Wave were the original film geeks, or cinephiles. Cinema was very important in a culture-starved post-war France, and most of the New Wave directors spent a great deal of time in their early years writing or thinking about it. Some were film critics, some were simply lovers of film - nearly all sharpened their cinematic sensibilities through long hours spent in the various Parisian cinematheques and film clubs. Their influences included everything from movies by realist Italian directors like Roberto Rosselini to hard-boiled noir and B movies from America, as well as early silent classics and even the latest technicolor Hollywood musicals. From this passion for cinema they developed a belief in the theory of the auteur: that is, a conviction that the best films are the product of a personal artistic expression and should bear the stamp of personal authorship, much as great works of literature bear the stamp of the writer.
Although they admired many of the studio films being made at the time, they also felt that most mainsteam cinema, especially in France, was not expressing human life, thought, and emotion in a genuine way. Many of the popular movies of the era, they argued, were dry, recycled, inexpressive and out of touch with the daily lives of post-war French youth.
While the Nouvelle Vague may never have been a formally organized movement, its filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of the ‘cinéma de qualité’ (‘cinema of quality’), the pompous and expensive costume pictures that dominated the French filmscape at the time. Besides being made to impress rather than express, these films generally afforded their directors very little freedom or creative control, instead catering to the commercial whims of producers and screenwriters. Those New Wave directors who started as critics, mainly writing for the French journal called Cahiers du Cinema, regularly praised the films they loved and tore apart those films they hated in print. Through the process of judging the art of cinema, they began to think about what it was that might make the medium special. More importantly they were gradually inspired to begin making films themselves. While each director had a slightly different agenda, Truffaut could be said to encapsulate the group's mission when he said, "The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure."
Broadly speaking, the New Wave rejected the idea of a traditional story in the "Old Hollywood" sense - stories based on narrative styles and structures lifted from earlier media, namely books and theatre. The New Wave directors did not want to hold your hand through each scene, directing you emotion by emotion, through a fixed narrative. There was a feeling that this sort of storytelling interfered with the viewer's ability to perceive and react to film just as they would perceive and react to life. These directors wanted to break up the filmic experience, to make it fresh and exciting, and to jolt the moviegoer out of complacent viewing - to make the viewer think and feel not only about what they were watching, but about their own lives, thoughts and emotions as well. Dialogue was to be as realistic as possible, or strange in a way that made one think beyond the film, or inspired new ideas. Expressing the truth was of the utmost importance. The object was not simply to entertain, it was to sincerely communicate.
The scripts (or lack thereof) of these new directors were often revolutionary, but the films' modest budgets often forced them to become technically inventive as well. As a result, the movies of the Nouvelle Vague have become known for certain stylistic innovations such as: jump cuts (a non-naturalistic edit), rapid editing, shooting outdoors and on location, natural lighting, improvised dialogue and plotting, direct sound recording (as opposed to the dubbing that was popular at the time), mobile cameras, and long takes. In addition, their films often engaged, although sometimes indirectly, with the social and political upheavals of their times.

Film Techniques

The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as long tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Week End). Also, these movies featured existential themes, such as stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence.
Many of the French New Wave films were produced on tight budgets; often shot in a friend's apartment or yard, using the director's friends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots). The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations. For example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle), after being told the film was too long and he must cut it down to one hour and a half he decided (on the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) to remove several scenes from the feature using jump cuts, as they were filmed in one long take. Parts that didn't work were simply cut from the middle of the take, a practical decision and also a purposeful stylistic one.
The cinematic styling of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that go beyond the common 180° axis. The camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but to play with the expectations of cinema. The techniques used to shock and awe the audience out of submission and were so bold and direct that Jean-Luc Godard has been accused of having contempt for his audience. His stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer's naivety. Either way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects that now seem either trite or commonplace, such as a character stepping out of their role in order to address the audience directly, were radically innovative at the time.

Classic French cinema adhered to the principles of strong narrative, creating what Godard described as an oppressive and deterministic aesthetic of plot. In contrast, New Wave filmmakers made no attempts to suspend the viewer's disbelief; in fact, they took steps to constantly remind the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images, no matter how clever the use of light and shadow. The result is a set of oddly disjointed scenes without attempt at unity; or an actor whose character changes from one scene to the next; or sets in which onlookers accidentally make their way onto camera along with extras, who in fact were hired to do just the same.
At the heart of New Wave technique is the issue of money and production value. In the context of social and economic troubles of a post-World War II France, filmmakers sought low-budget alternatives to the usual production methods. Half necessity and half vision, New Wave directors used all that they had available to channel their artistic visions directly to the theatre.
Finally, the French New Wave, as the European modern Cinema, is focused on the technique as style itself. A French New Wave film-maker is first of all an author who shows in its film his own eye on the world. On the other hand the film as the object of knowledge challenges the usual transitivity on which all the other cinema was based, "undoing its cornerstones: space and time continuity, narrative and grammatical logics, the self-evidence of the represented worlds." In this way the film-maker passes "the essay attitude, thinking - in a novelist way - on his own way to do essays."

New Wave Characteristics

* Cinematography and Editing
One notable technique to emerge from the New Wave was the jump cut, in which two discontinuous images are juxtaposed. While jump cuts are regularly used in film and television editing today, at the time, they were very jarring to audiences, who were used to a smooth flow of images onscreen, rather than to editing that calls attention to itself.

* Budgetary Restrictions
French New Wave directors usually shot their films on an extremely low budget. Budgetary restrictions often produced many of the characteristics attributed to the New Wave. For instance, since directors had limited equipment available to them, they shot quickly, often with hand-held cameras, resulting in a less-polished, more naturalistic look to their films. In addition, directors often only had one camera available for use, which led to long tracking shots and fluid panning. Budgetary restrictions also often forced them to improvise with their locations and scheduling, and forced them into editing choices now considered to be representative of the New Wave. For instance, if a single, long shot wasn't usable and couldn't be reshot due to budget issues, the director might turn it into a series of jump cuts.

* Use of Location
Unlike the controlled studio sound stage and back lot shooting that characterized Hollywood filmmaking during this era, the French New Wave directors were dedicated to shooting in natural locations and using natural lighting as much as possible. Sound was also recorded live on the scene, which was unusual during this era.

* Story and Dialogue
In their revolt against what they perceived as Hollywood-style filmmaking, New Wave directors often leaned toward story lines that were open-ended and not tidily wrapped up at the climax. Stories tended to be unpolished and loosely structured. Characters were often eccentric or odd, and usually included a focus on young men dealing with personal chaos. Directors often allowed actors to improvise dialogue and even to make changes in the plot, a technique which was virtually unheard of at the time in Hollywood. During this improvisation, to achieve a natural sense, actors were also encouraged to talk over each other.

* Production Value
Film was expensive to buy and develop. Much of the aesthetic of New Wave films came from the need to make films as cheaply as possible. French New Wave filmmakers often shot their films using old, 16 mm, black-and-white news cameras. The cameras were hand-held and allowed the filmmakers to move them more easily. Because lights were just as big a cost as film, New Wave filmmakers shot outside in natural light to reduce the cost of renting lights. Frequently, non-actors were used along with professional actors.

* Existential Themes
Classical French literature and films were highly structured with strict narrative styles. The films of the New Wave broke with that tradition. Although most of the films followed a narrative story line, there was no attempt to create a bond between the lead character and the audience, as would happen in a traditional adventure film. New Wave stories were more likely to embrace existential themes than they were to tell a traditional story. Their central characters were more frequently in realistic situations than they were in fantasy scenarios.

* Narrative Innovation
Many narrative styles from the French New Wave have become commonplace in commercial film-making today, but they were startling and innovative when first used. New Wave cameras first broke the "rule of 180," meaning they were the first to circle all the way around a character or object. Characters stepped out of the story to address the audience -- another innovation of the French New Wave. Often scenes were improvised rather than scripted. Actors sometimes interacted with regular people in the street and the scenes were incorporated into the film. The techniques were in reaction to the films of Hollywood in which everything was controlled, staged and lit perfectly.

* Social Themes
Italian neo-realism took to the streets to show the harsh conditions of post-World War II Italy. French New Wave filmmakers were inspired by this kind of story-telling and worked to incorporate social themes into their stories. They chose to tell stories that showed the darker and less flattering sides of society and humanity. There were hardly ever heroes or villains in the French New Wave, except for the concept of the social strata itself.

The Cahiers du cinema Directors

Although opinions differ as to which directors belong in the Nouvelle Vague and which don’t, all are agreed that the five directors (Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette) who wrote for Cahiers du cinema are the core of the movement. The following is a selection of key films by members of this group which defined the New Wave during its heyday. We've started with the earliest films and have picked out the most fundamental to the movement.

* Claude Chabrol
After spending World War II in the village of Sardent, where he and a friend constructed a makeshift movie theater, Chabrol returned to Paris to study pharmacology at the University of Paris. There Chabrol became involved with the postwar cine club culture and met Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and others with whom he would write for Cahiers du cinéma throughout the 1950s. In 1957, with Rohmer, Chabrol co-wrote Hitchcock (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1957), a study of the films made by director Alfred Hitchcock through the film The Wrong Man (1957). Chabrol had interviewed Hitchcock with Francois Truffaut in 1955 on the set of To Catch a Thief, where the two famously walked into a fountain after being starstruck by Hitchcock. Years later, when Chabrol and Truffaut had both become successful directors themselves, Hitchcock told Truffaut that he always thought of them when he saw "two ice cubes floating in his drink."
In 1958, Chabrol made his feature directorial debut with Le Beau Serge (1958), a Hitchcock-influenced drama starring Jean-Claude Brialy partly funded by his wife's inheritance and among the first films of the French New Wave. A critical success, it won Chabrol the Prix Jean Vigo and was followed the next year by Les Cousins, one of the New Wave's first commercial successes, and Chabrol's first color film, À double tour, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. The most prolific of the major New Wave directors, Chabrol averaged almost one film a year from 1958 until his death. His early films (roughly 1958–1963) are usually categorized as part of the New Wave and generally have the experimental qualities associated with the movement. Beginning with his "Golden Era" films (1967–1974) he established what would be his signature "Chabrolesque" style, usually suspense thrillers in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock. His 1987 film Masques was entered into the 37th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1995 he was awarded the Prix René Clair from the Académie française for his body of work. In 1999, his film The Color of Lies was entered into the 49th Berlin International Film Festival.

* Francois Truffaut
It was the cinema that offered him the greatest escape from an unsatisfying home life. His obsession began at eight years old when he saw his first movie, Abel Gance's Paradis perdu. As he got older he truanted frequently, sneaking into theatres because he didn't have enough money for admission. The cinema became both a refuge and an alternative schoolroom. At the age of fourteen, after being excluded from school, he decided to be self-taught. Among his academic "goals" were to watch three movies a day and read three books a week. By the time he became a teenager, Truffaut was already a serious student of cinema, creating folders for his favorite filmmakers in which he filed away articles clipped from newspapers and movie magazines. He impressed his friends with his many feats of knowledge and was looked upon as a “living cinematheque.” His erudition was primarily the result of dedicated movie attendance at cinemas and film clubs. There were over four hundred movie houses in post-war Paris; two hundred of these were around the Truffaut apartment. The post-war years were also the golden age of the film society and Truffaut wasted no time in becoming part of the movement. “I was fanatic about joining,” he said, “I had this compulsion to join and become part of these places where films were programmed, presented and discussed.”
It was at these clubs, such as the Delta, which presented classic cinema of the thirties by directors such as Jean Renoir and Sacha Guitry that Truffaut learnt to analyze the aesthetics of cinema in depth. The greatest film-school of all was Henri Langlois' Cinematheque Francaise where he was exposed to the widest range of cinema from silent classics to countless foreign films from around the world. It was here that he first fell in love with American cinema and the work of such directors as Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock. After starting his own cinema club, Cercle Cinemane (the Movie Mania Club) in 1948, Truffaut met Andre Bazin who would have a great impact on his professional and personal life. Bazin was a brilliant critic and the head of another cinema society at the time. He became a friend and mentor to Truffaut and would help him out of various financial and criminal situations in the coming years.
The 400 Blows was released in 1959 to much critical and commercial acclaim. Truffaut received a Best Director award from the Cannes Film Festival, the same festival that had banned him only one year earlier. Following the success of The 400 Blows, Truffaut featured disjunctive editing and seemingly random voice-overs in his next film Shoot the Piano Player (1960) starring Charles Aznavour. Truffaut has stated that in the middle of filming, he realized that he hated gangsters. In 1962, Truffaut directed his third movie, Jules and Jim, a romantic drama starring Jeanne Moreau. Over the next decade, Truffaut had varying degrees of success with his films. In 1965 he directed the American production of Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451. It showcased Truffaut's love of books. His only English-speaking film was a great challenge for Truffaut, because he barely spoke English himself. This was also his first film shot in color.
Truffaut worked on projects with varied subjects. The Bride Wore Black (1968), a brutal tale of revenge, is a stylish homage to the films of Alfred Hitchcock (once again starring Jeanne Moreau). Mississippi Mermaid (1969), with Catherine Deneuve, is an identity-bending romantic thriller. Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970) are continuations of the Antoine Doinel Cycle. And The Wild Child (1970) included Truffaut's acting debut in the lead role of 18th century physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard.

Two English Girls (1971) is the yin to the Jules and Jim yang. It is based on a story written by Henri-Pierre Roche, who also wrote Jules and Jim. It is about a man who falls equally in love with two sisters, and their love affair over a period of years. Day for Night won Truffaut a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1973. The film is probably his most reflective work. It is the story of a film crew trying to finish their film while dealing with all of the personal and professional problems that accompany making a movie. Truffaut plays the director of the fictional film being made. This film features scenes shown in his previous films. It is considered to be his best film since his earliest work. Time magazine placed it on their list of 100 Best Films of the Century (along with The 400 Blows).
In 1975, Truffaut gained more notoriety with The Story of Adele H. Isabelle Adjani in the title role earned a nomination for a Best Actress Oscar. Truffaut's 1976 film Small Change gained a Golden Globe Nomination for Best Foreign Film. One of Truffaut's final films gave him an international revival. In 1980, his film The Last Metro garnered twelve César Award nominations with ten wins, including Best Director. Truffaut's final movie was shot in black and white. It gives his career almost a sense of having bookends. In 1983 Confidentially Yours is Truffaut's tribute to his favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock. It deals with numerous Hitchcockian themes, such as private guilt vs. public innocence, a woman investigating a murder, anonymous locations, etc.

* Jean-Luc Godard
Far more politically engaged than Truffaut was Jean-Luc Godard; in fact, the two were known to have been mutually disaffected with each other. Arguably, Godard, for whatever his inconsistencies, is the one who might ultimately have been the most influential and remembered. His Breathless (A bout de souffle), which was remade weakly in America in 1983, is still probably the most often cited film when the topic shifts to the French New Wave, and for good reason: it's a kinetic joy, full of jump cuts, lavish Paris location shooting, with cool jazz on the soundtrack, a noirish mood, and a lovely, literate romance, all adding up to one for the ages. Interestingly, the film is based on a story by Truffaut, the only time the two would come close to collaborating on anything.
Godard was the most prolific of all the major figures of this movement; he produced roughly two films a year in the 1960s, and amazingly, many of them still hold up today. In Le Petit Soldat and Pierrot le Fou in particular, Godard gave us his protoypical male characters, men who were full of self-doubt; the politics in the former seem a little more naive than what you'd find in Godard's later, more overtly politicized work, while the latter is essentially a mishmosh of every genre the New Wave seemed to have an interest in deconstructing (gangster, romance, musical) while ultimately ending up in tragedy-land. My favorite Godard film is A Band of Outsiders (A band aparte) which has an innate sense of playfulness at work as Godard very loosely adapts a book noir and (his wife at the time) Anna Karina at her most lovely (and naive). It features a memorable pantomime dance with Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey (who played, in Godard's own words, "the little suburban cousins of [Jean-Paul] Belmondo" in Breathless), and an overall sense of joie de vivre not seen in some of Godard's other films. Alphaville, Godard's homage to both science-fiction and American detective stories, is a fascinating, if slightly alienating, production; Godard's frequent collaborator, cameraman Raoul Coutard, shot modern-day Paris as a "dehumanized city of the future." It's one of Godard's more even-keeled and sustained films and an interesting parable about the alienating role technology plays in our lives. In fitting with the upheavals of the era, Godard became more overtly politicized in the late 60s and formed a film collective called the Dziga Vertov Group (named after the great Russian filmmaker).
His films then started to become increasingly inaccessible (not that he was ever striving for mainstream success, mind you). In that period, he produced a number of shorts outlining his politics, traveled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings. One notable exception is the fascinating, but disturbing Weekend, which contains one of the chillingly great set-pieces in all of cinema, a ten-minute tracking shot of the world's largest traffic jam as well as a cutting portrayal of the bourgeoisie. As Amy Taubin recently wrote in the Village Voice, Weekend is "kinetic and cruel... the film in which Godard really sticks it to narrative. Not only is it devoid of a single character anyone could care about, the fact that I've given away the ending doesn't matter a jot."
Godard the experimenting Marxist will still occasionally turn out interesting works, but they give the appearance of someone who seems to have gone off the deep end or lost touch with reality as most of us know it in his attempts to show his own. But this is Godard - simultaneously exasperating and brilliant, self-important and important. "I've always chosen to do what others aren't doing," he said in a 2001 interview with the BBC. "No one does that, so it remains to be done, let's try it. If it's already being done, there's no point in me doing it as well." And so it goes. And on goes his legacy, too.

* Major Works * Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) Francois Truffaut * À Bout De Souffle (Breathless, 1960) Jean-Luc Godard * Tirez Sur Le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) Francois Truffaut * Les Bonnes Femmes (The Good Girls, 1960) Claude Chabrol * Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, 1962) Francois Truffaut * Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live, 1962) Jean-Luc Godard * Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) Jean-Luc Godard * Bande à Part (Band of Outlaws, 1964) Jean-Luc Godard * Alphaville (1965) Jean-Luc Godard * Pierrot le Fou (The 400 Blows, 1965) Jean-Luc Godard * Week-End (1967) Jean-Luc Godard * Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night With Maud, 1969) Eric Rohmer * Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970) Claude Chabrol * Celine & Julie Vont En Bateau (Celine & Julie Go Boating, 1974) Jacques Rivette

The Left Bank Directors

Although the Cahiers du Cinema directors became the most celebrated members of the Nouvelle Vague, there was another loose contingent of brilliant and highly original filmmakers who were also associated with the movement. This was the Rive Gauche or Left Bank Movement whose core members included Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda. These filmmakers had backgrounds in documentary and literature, an interest in experimental storytelling, and identification with the political left. (Although it is worth noting that the label "Left Bank" was constructed by journalists years after the fact. At the time the friends did not consider themselves part of any group). Other associates of the movement included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Henri Colpi and by virtue of his marriage to Agnes Varda, the colorful Jacques Demy.

* Alain Resnais
The last of the three seminal initial films of the French New Wave released in 1959 is Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, probably the most inventive of all early New Wave works in terms of structure. Resnais's remarkable film unfurls not unlike a poem, an elliptical tracing of memory lost and time regained the chronology of which makes Memento look straightforward. What separates this work from most of the other French New Wave classics is its strong screenplay (by novelist Marguerite Duras) - whereas many of the other films relied at least in part on improvisation and less on a collaborative process with a separate writer. Resnais is actually a generation older than the Cahiers kids and, if he was "traditional" in any way, it was that he was more inclined to work from an original script than other members of the New Wave. But he was also equally interested in Henri Bergson and the avant-garde and first found acclaim at the height of the New Wave. His Last Year at Marienbad is a complete puzzle (written by Alain Robbe-Grillet), also scrambling the way time unfolds, rendering past, present and future basically meaningless. It's unsettling, to say the least, and either one of the most important films of the period, or pretentious nonsense, depending on your mood.
Resnais defined his own relationship by saying: "Although I was not fully part of the New Wave because of my age, there was some mutual sympathy and respect between myself and Rivette, Bazin, Demy, Truffaut... So I felt friendly with that team." He nevertheless acknowledged his debt to the New Wave because it created the conditions of production, and particularly the financial conditions, which allowed him Hiroshima mon amour.
The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has always refused to write his own screenplays and has attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledges. He is also known to treat the completed screenplay with great fidelity, to the extent that some of his screenwriters have remarked on how closely the finished film has realised their intentions. Time and memory have regularly been identified as two of the principal themes of Resnais's work, at least in his earlier films He has however consistently tried to modify this view of his concerns: "I prefer to speak of the imaginary, or of consciousness. What interests me in the mind is that faculty we have to imagine what is going to happen in our heads, or to remember what has happened". He has also described his films as an attempt, however imperfect, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism.
Another view of the evolution of Resnais's career has seen him moving progressively away from a realistic treatment of 'big' subjects and overtly political themes towards films that are increasingly personal and playful. Resnais himself has offered an explanation of this shift in terms of challenging what has been the norm in film-making at the time; having made his early films when escapist cinema was predominant, he has progressively felt the need to move away from exploration of social and political issues as that has itself become almost the norm in contemporary cinema. Experimentation with narrative forms and genre conventions has instead become a central focus of his films.
Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library in Toute la mémoire du monde, through the dreamlike innovations of Marienbad to the latterday playfulness of Les Herbes folles. Resnais himself traced a link to his teenage discovery of surrealism in the works of André Breton: "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life".

* Agnès Varda
Varda’s movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style. She studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre before getting a job as the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris. She liked photography but was interested in moving into film. After spending a few days filming the small French fishing town of La Pointe Courte for a terminally ill friend who could no longer visit on his own, Varda decided to shoot a feature film of her own. Thus in 1954, Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte, about an unhappy couple working through their relationship in a small fishing town, was released. The film is a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave.
Despite similarities to the French New Wave, films by Varda belonged more precisely to the complementary Rive Gauche cinema movement. The group was strongly tied to the nouveau roman movement in literature and politically was positioned to the Left. Like the French New Wave, its members would often collaborate with each other.
Varda was married to the film director Jacques Demy from 1962 until his death in 1990, with whom she had one child, actor Mathieu Demy. Jacques Demy also legally adopted Rosalie Varda, Agnes Varda's daughter from a previous union with actor Antoine Bourseiller, who starred in her early film Cléo from 5 to 7.
For the 1985 documentary-style feature film Vagabond/Without Roof or Rule she received the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival. In 2009 The Beaches of Agnès won the best documentary film of the César Award. On April 12, 2009, she was made Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur.
She was also a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 and a member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1983.

* Jacques Demy
After working with the animator Paul Grimault and the filmmaker Georges Rouquier, Demy directed his first feature film, Lola, in 1961, with Anouk Aimée playing the eponymous cabaret singer. The Demy universe here emerges full-fledged. Characters burst into song (courtesy of composer and lifelong Demy-collaborator Michel Legrand); iconic Hollywood imagery is lovingly appropriated as in the opening scene with the man in a white Stetson in the Cadillac, daringly set to Beethoven's "Seventh Symphony"); plot is dictated by the director's fascination with fate, and stock themes of chance encounters and long-lost love; and the setting, as with so many of Demy's films, is the French Atlantic coast of his childhood, specifically the seaport town of Nantes. La Baie des Anges (The Bay of Angels, 1963), starring Jeanne Moreau, took the theme of fate further, with its story of love at the roulette tables.
Demy is best known for his original musical, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), with a score by Legrand. Although the subversion of established genres was a typically New Wave obsession (notably Godard's playful thriller-cum-sci-fi, Alphaville), Demy was unusual in actually recreating them literally. The whimsical concept of singing all the dialogue sets the tone for this tragedy of the everyday.
The film also sees the emergence of Demy's trademark visual style: whereas Lola, filmed by Godard's cinematographer Raoul Coutard, has a New Wave black and white austerity, Les Parapluies is shot in saturated supercolor, with every detail — neck-ties, wallpaper, even Catherine Deneuve's bleached-blonde hair — selected for maximum visual impact. Interestingly, the young man, Roland Cassard, from Lola (Marc Michel) reappears here, marrying Deneuve. Such reappearances are typical of Demy's work.
Demy's subsequent films never quite captured audience and critical acclaim the way that "Les Parapluies" had, although he continued to make ambitious and original dramas and musicals. Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), another whimsical musical, features Deneuve and her real-life sister Françoise Dorléac as sisters living in the seaside town of Rochefort, daughters of Danielle Darrieux. It has stunning color photography, some of the best French songs of the period (it was nominated for an Oscar for best musical score), and breathtaking dancing by Gene Kelly and West Side Story's George Chakiris. Lola reappears in the naturalistic drama Model Shop (1969), his first American film, starring Gary Lockwood as a confused young architect navigating the streets of Los Angeles looking for love and meaning in life. Peau d'Âne (Donkey Skin, 1970) is a visually extravagant musical interpretation of a classic French fairytale which highlights the tale's incestuous overtones, starring Deneuve, Jean Marais, and Delphine Seyrig.
Subsequent films are less highly regarded, but may well be due for reappraisal: David Thomson wrote about "the fascinating application of the operatic technique to an unusually dark story" in Une chambre en ville (A Room in Town, 1982). L'événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la lune (1973) ("A Slightly Pregnant Man") is an interesting look back at the pressures of second-wave feminism in France, and the fears it elicited in men. After years of neglect, Demy's strengths have been recognized, and Parapluies de Cherbourg was digitally restored and reissued to great acclaim in 1998.

* Major Works * Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) Alain Resnais * Lola (1961) Jacques Demy * L’Année Derniere à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) Alain Resnais * Une Aussi Longue Absence (The Long Absence, 1961) Henri Colpi * Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962) Agnes Varda * La Jetée (The Pier, 1962) Chris Marker * Muriel (1963) Alain Resnais * Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) Jacques Demy * La Guerre est Finie (The War is Over, 1966) Alain Resnais * Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World’s Memory, 1956) Alain Resnais * Model Shop (1969) Jacques Demy * Peau d’Âne (Donkey Skin, 1970) Jacques Demy * Les Creatures (The Creatures, 1966) Agnes Varda * L’Opera-Mouffe (1958) Agnes Varda

Then and Now: The New Wave Continues

The Langlois affair showed that, despite their differences – both political and cinematic – the directors associated with the Nouvelle Vague could still come together as a group. Indeed, after their work came under attack from critics, and the film establishment began to reassert itself, they felt more willing to assert themselves as part of a movement than they had at the start. As Truffaut wrote in a 1967 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma: “Before, when we were interviewed – Jean Luc, Resnais, Malle, myself and others – we said, ‘The New Wave doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean anything.’ But later, we had to change, and ever since that moment I’ve affirmed my participation in the movement. Now, in 1967, we are proud to have been and to remain part of the New Wave, just as one is proud to have been a Jew during the Occupation.”
An enduring legacy of the French New Wave movement was the inspiration it provided for similar movements in other countries. In America, the “movie brat” generation of filmmakers that emerged in the late 1960’s and 70’s, was profoundly influenced by the storytelling techniques pioneered by the Novelle Vague directors. In Europe too, young directors in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, and elsewhere, were motivated to break with the past and tell their own stories. Even further afield, in countries such as Japan, Brazil, and Canada, similar movements prospered for a while.
In France the success of the Nouvelle Vague continued to open doors for new directors. Barbet Schroeder (More (1969)) Jean Eustache (La Maman et La Putain (1973)), Andre Techine (Paulina s’en Va (1975)), and Philippe Garrel (L’Enfant Secret (1979), made up part of what could be considered a post New Wave second wave. They, and other directors like Jean-Claude Biette, Claude Guiguet, and Paul Vecchiali, began, like their predecessors, writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, before turning to filmmaking themselves.
In the 1980’s a new generation of young directors emerged in France. Dubbed by the media the "New New Wave", the three main figures in the group, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson and Leos Carax, were quick to distance themselves from the earlier movement, expressing anti-New Wave sentiments in interviews. Their films, which included the hits Diva (Beineix (1980), Subway (Besson (1985), Betty Blue (Beiniex (1986), The Big Blue (Besson (1988), and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Carax (1991), were criticized for favouring style over substance. Their style of filmmaking became known as the ‘cinema du look’, and, although popular, was felt by many to offer little more than slick visuals and alluring stars.
The tragic early death of Francois Truffaut in 1984 brought an end to the career of the best known and best loved of the French New Wave directors. His later work, although varied and not always successful, included such highlights as the Oscar winning Day for Night (1973), the poetic La Chambre Verte (The Green Room) (1978), and Le Dernier Metro (The Last Metro) (1980), a story of the Resistance which was a critical and box office triumph in France. Apart from his work, Truffaut himself has become an icon and inspiration for impassioned, idealistic young directors, determined to remake cinema on their own terms.
As for his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, they continue making waves in the twenty-first century. Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Varda, Resnais, Marker, and others associated with the movement, are all now auteurs in their own right with an international following. Their prolific output continues to challenge audiences and expand the boundaries of cinematic expression. Retrospectives of their work and new prints of New Wave classics continue to keep alive a cultural revolution that produced some of the greatest films ever made and changed the course of cinema history.

International Influences

Although the French New Wave is the best known, similar cinematic movements were happening elsewhere, also fuelled by the cultural and social change that came in the wake of the Second World War. In Britain, the emergence of the Free Cinema movement in the 1950’s paralleled the course of the French New Wave. The first productions of these filmmakers who included Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz were documentaries chronicling working-class life that had a freshness, energy and modern satirical edge. These qualities were also characteristic of their subsequent feature films, many of which were adapted from the plays and novels of the so called “Angry Young Men” writers.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the New Wave helped to inspire groups of like-minded young directors in Communist controlled Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Shooting on location, often using non-professional actors, they sought to capture life as it was really lived in their societies. Italian cinema too, was encouraged by the example of the New Wave, as it moved beyond the Fantastical realism of Federico Fellini, the existential modernism of Michelangelo Antonioni, and the Marxist materialism of Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Francesco Rosi. Later in the 1960’s, the directors of New German Cinema -- like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog -- took the New Wave methods and created a style of cinema uniquely their own. Revolutionary film movements also arose in Japan and Brazil where directors like Nagisa Oshima and Glauber Rocha made films devoted to questioning, analyzing, critiquing and upsetting social conventions. Indeed, in countries around the world, young filmmakers armed with hand-held cameras and ideas inspired by the Nouvelle Vague were making films on their own terms. All had their own particular flavor, but, in each case, came into being as a reaction against what had come before and arose out of the feeling that such breaks in tradition were necessary to the positive evolution of cinema in their country.
It was happening even in America, the very heartland of commercial cinema. Directors such as John Cassavetes blazed a trail for independent American cinema with films like Shadows which bore remarkable similarities to the work of the French New Wave. At the same time, the Direct Cinema documentary movement led by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers. They applied similar techniques as the New Wave and Free Cinema in an effort to directly capture reality and represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship of reality with cinema.
Later, the Nouvelle Vague was a major inspiration on the New Hollywood generation of directors such as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese who began blazing their own paths in the late 1960’s and 70’s. This influence has continued to the present day with many of the major figures in contemporary independent American cinema, including Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson, professing admiration for the movement and has generously used its techniques. Tarantino is not shy in sharing his opinions about his favorite director, Godard, and the influence the new wave has had on his movies. It can be said that pulp fiction was made in tribute to such Godard films as A bout de Souffle. Tarantino even named his production company “A Band Apart” after the Godard film of similar name. As Scorsese he himself put it: “the French New Wave has influenced all filmmakers who have worked since, whether they saw the films or not. It submerged cinema like a tidal wave.”

New Wave: Importance of the Movement

For the purposes of this history, the New Wave should be seen as a large cinematic phenomenon that includes the earliest signs of changes in the industry (such as Vadim and Malle's films and the new Film Aid rules); the first successful new, younger directors and their films (Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard, among others); the talented pool of bold producers, actors, editors, and cinematographers; but also the "wave" of first-time directors, working hard to get their films finished and into domestic and international distribution. The New Wave is precisely a wave of productions, some very successful, some now forgotten, and some demonstrating the risk of failure that always faces new, youthful experiments in narrative film. But what finally makes the New Wave's significance so enduring is that it has marked all French film production ever since. No one looks to Germany for a revival of expressionism. No one would expect Italy this year to explode with a new era of pure neorealism, but every French film is to a certain degree measured against the New Wave, and not a year goes by without some critic somewhere asking whether two particularly interesting young French directors might not be the harbingers of another nouvelle vague. Would that they were. A few explanations concerning the book's overall format might prove helpful. I have tried to reduce the number of French phrases whenever possible in the interest of clarity and readability, though certain terms that have become part of the standard vocabulary of film studies, such as auteur, mise-en-scène, and cinephile, are used frequently. Film titles are given in original French on initial citations and their American, and occasionally British, release titles are also included.
Subsequent references are typically made with the English-language title, especially if that names very commonly used already in survey histories of French cinema. For instance, The 400 Blows has been more widely used than Les 400 coups (and it is much easier for non-French speakers to pronounce), so I employ the translated title most of the time. Films released abroad with their French title, such as Hiroshima, mon amour, are rare. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French sources are mine.
The illustrations from the movies are all frame enlargements shot directly off the films, not inaccurate publicity stills. Those images that may appear a bit compressed, such as frames from The 400 Blows and Malle's Les amants (The Lovers, 1958), are from anamorphic wide-screen prints. Since the book is aimed at intermediate-level film students who have already been exposed to introductory film analysis and perhaps the basics of film history but not necessarily the concepts and vocabulary of the most daunting of film theory, I have endeavored to minimize unnecessary jargon; I hope the resulting format proves clear and convincing. The ultimate hope for this overview, of course, is to generate renewed interest among French film fans, motivating the reader to go back to lesser-known films by favorite directors or, better yet, to retest assumptions about films that may have disappointed in the past. The New Wave may have officially ended in 1964, but while many observers continue to search for other New Waves on the horizon, it proves just as fruitful to return attention to the scores of films that created all the furor in the first place. There is nothing like rediscovering a nouvelle vague masterpiece and remembering why it is one does film history in the first place.

The nouvelle vague could be argued to be the most important film movement of the 20th century. Without it, film isn’t as open, as free, or as experimental today. Without the likes of Godard and Truffaut, studios and sets and literature would still limit movies. They freed up cinema to come into its own as an art form and differ itself like it never had been before. It is only now, in the newer generations that Truffaut’s famous “cinema du papa” refers to his own.

NOTES & REFERENCES

Books * The Oxford History of World Cinema * Film Art: An Introduction [6th edition]

Internet Links * www.imdb.com * en.wikipedia.com * www.brynmawrfilm.org * www.theblackandblue.com * www.newwavefilm.com * www.greencine.com * www.jonathanrosenbaum.com * www.cahiersducinema.com * www.criterion.com