French New Wave

In 1959 a group of young French film makers burst onto the international scene. At the Cannes festival that May, Francois Truffaut won the best director prize for his first feature, The 400 Blows, a semi-autobiographical story of a neglected Paris schoolboy, and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour drew wide attention. In 1960 Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, with its abrupt jump cuts and handheld camerawork on real Paris streets, became the movement's emblem. Critics called the group the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave.¹²

Truffaut, Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette began as critics at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, founded in 1951 with the guidance of the theorist Andre Bazin. They admired American directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, whom they saw as authors with personal styles inside the Hollywood studio system, and Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane showed deep-focus photography. They argued that a director should be an author, not a technician. Lighter cameras, faster film stock and portable sound recorders now let them shoot cheaply on location, with natural light and small crews.¹³

The New Wave was short but extremely influential. Its techniques, from jump cuts to direct address, loose plotting and self-aware references to other films, spread fast. Directors in Czechoslovakia, Japan, Brazil and Britain developed their own new waves in the 1960s, and the American directors of the New Hollywood, including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, drew on its freedom. The idea of the auteur, the director as the author of a film, became central to how critics, festivals and audiences think about cinema.¹³