The French New Wave
Youth, freedom, and reinventing the rules
Cahiers du Cinéma and the Politique des Auteurs
The French New Wave began not in a film school or a studio but in the pages of a film journal. Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951 by André Bazin, gathered a group of young critics — François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer — who were among the most passionate and polemical film writers in history. They watched everything: Hollywood genre films, Italian Neorealism, Japanese classics, the entire back catalogue of cinema. And they argued.
Their central intervention was the politique des auteurs — auteur theory — the argument that the director is the primary author of a film, expressing a personal vision as recognisably as a novelist or painter. This was controversial because it attributed authorship to studio directors working within commercial genre constraints: it claimed that Howard Hawks was as much an auteur as Jean Renoir, that Alfred Hitchcock's films were as personally expressive as those of Bergman or Fellini.
The strategic purpose of auteur theory was to create a critical framework that elevated cinema to the status of the other arts — and to justify the kind of personal, low-budget filmmaking the Cahiers critics themselves wanted to do. If the greatest films were the products of a single directing intelligence imposing a personal vision on the material, then a young person with a camera and a point of view could make a great film without a studio, a star, or a big budget.
André Bazin, the intellectual conscience of the group, was more cautious about auteur theory than his protégés. He worried that it would lead to an overvaluation of style at the expense of content, and to a cult of personality around individual directors. His early death in 1958 — on the day of the final shoot of Truffaut's The 400 Blows — removed the moderating influence from the movement just as it was becoming a revolution.
The Founding Films: 1959–1960
The New Wave announced itself at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) won the Best Director prize and Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour played in competition. Within a year, Jean-Luc Godard had released Breathless (À bout de souffle) and Jacques Rivette was at work on Paris Belongs to Us. French cinema had been transformed overnight.
The 400 Blows was autobiographical — its young protagonist Antoine Doinel shared Truffaut's biography closely — and it was shot on the streets of Paris with a hand-held camera and a small crew. Its final image, Antoine frozen at the edge of the sea, is one of the most famous endings in cinema: a refusal to resolve, a portrait of a child who has nowhere to go and no one to take him there. It was personal, political, and formally audacious.
Godard's Breathless was equally revolutionary in a different register. Shot in twelve days with a camera hidden in a wheelchair (to get authentic street footage without permits), using jump cuts that violated every convention of smooth editing, it was a film about American gangster movies made with French intellectual irony. Its hero, Michel Poiccard, wants to be Humphrey Bogart; the film both indulges this fantasy and dismantles it.
The formal innovations were not mere style. The hand-held camera meant location shooting without the infrastructure of studio filmmaking; the jump cut was not a mistake but a statement about the artificiality of conventional continuity. Every technical choice was a political choice — a rejection of the "quality" French cinema these critics had attacked in print, a claim that cinema could be made the way a novelist writes: alone, quickly, with total personal authority.
Godard: The Cinema of Questions
Jean-Luc Godard is the most radical and influential filmmaker the New Wave produced — and the one whose later career most dramatically exceeded its original scope. From Breathless (1960) to his final film The Image Book (2018), his work constitutes an unbroken interrogation of cinema itself: what it shows and what it hides, how it creates meaning, what it has done to our understanding of history and image.
In his first decade, Godard made films with the energy and wit of someone who had been waiting all his life to make them. Vivre sa vie (1962) told the story of a woman's entry into prostitution in twelve discontinuous chapters. Bande à part (1964) was a New Wave caper film that kept interrupting its own plot to meditate on film, language, and boredom. Pierrot le fou (1965) was a road movie and a love story that dissolved into pure colour and abstraction. Masculin Féminin (1966) was a portrait of "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola."
After May 1968, Godard abandoned narrative feature filmmaking almost entirely. He formed a political film collective, the Dziga Vertov Group (the name was a deliberate homage), and made Maoist agitprop. He spent years working in television and video, deconstructing the image with the tools of new media. His monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), a nine-hour video essay, attempted nothing less than a history of the twentieth century through film — using montage, quotation, and association to argue that cinema had both recorded and failed to record the catastrophes of the age.
Godard's later films are not always watchable by conventional standards; they are not meant to be. They are arguments, provocations, meditations — cinema as philosophy, conducted with the same restless intelligence that had made Breathless the most exciting film of 1960.
Truffaut, Rohmer, Varda: Personal Cinema
While Godard moved toward radical politics and formal abstraction, other New Wave directors pursued quieter but equally distinctive paths. The diversity within the movement is itself significant: the Nouvelle Vague was not a unified style but a shared set of permissions — the freedom to make personal films on modest budgets about subjects that interested you.
François Truffaut continued to develop the Antoine Doinel character through four more films (Stolen Kisses, 1968; Bed and Board, 1970; Love on the Run, 1979), creating cinema's most extended fictional autobiography. His later films — Jules and Jim (1962), Day for Night (1973), The Wild Child (1970), The Story of Adèle H. (1975) — were warmer, more formally classical than Godard's, but equally personal in their obsessions: childhood, memory, love, the relationship between art and life.
Eric Rohmer built his career around a series of moral tales — stories of people who talk too much about their desires and act in ways that contradict what they say — made in real locations with minimal crews over the course of three decades. His films are almost entirely composed of conversation, yet they are among the most intensely cinematic work of the period: the landscape, the season, the quality of light are always morally significant.
Agnès Varda, often associated with the New Wave but always slightly outside it, made films of extraordinary range and formal invention: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000). Where the male New Wave directors often celebrated masculine freedom and independence, Varda was consistently interested in women's experience, in ageing, in marginalised lives. Her work is in many ways more radical than that of her male contemporaries — and has been more fully recognised in recent decades.