What Is the French New Wave? Background and Revolutionary Techniques

The French New Wave permanently changed how films are made and influenced some of the greatest directors of our time. But what is the French New Wave? How did it start, and why? This article will give you a definition, a brief historical background, and highlight some key features of the earliest pioneer movement. As we’ll see, the influence of the French New Wave continues to be felt through modern filmmakers like Tarantino and Scorsese, to name just a couple.

Background and Style

For one of the most influential movements in film history, it’s not easy to define it! Before we go on to discuss some of the movement’s stylistic contributions to filmmaking, let’s look at a bit of background.

What Is the French New Wave?

The French New Wave was a film movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and one of the most influential in the history of cinema. Also known simply as the “New Wave,” it gave rise to a new kind of film: highly self‑aware, and radically subversive of mainstream filmmaking. A group of French critics writing for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma believed that movies had lost their original charm. They felt that these films were disconnected from people’s real lives.

Many notable French directors took part in the movement, including François Truffaut, Jean‑Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy. Their films were characterized by a rejection of cinematic tradition—but how did they accomplish this?

Characteristics of the French New Wave:

• Little emphasis on plot and dialogue, often improvised
• Jump cuts instead of continuity editing
• Location shooting
• Handheld cameras
• Long takes
• Direct sound and available light (on‑location recording, often without relighting)

A Brief History of the French New Wave

The French New Wave was born in a postwar, hungry France. Critics and cinephiles, starved for culture and left only with mainstream media that felt stale and mannered, began experimenting with different filmmaking techniques. Their influences included Italian Neorealism and American film noir of the 1940s and 50s.

During World War II, foreign films stopped being imported into France. After the war, these bans were lifted, and these film buffs and critics were flooded with a wealth of “new” movies. All the works of Hollywood giants like Welles, Hitchcock, and Ford energized the French critics—and the rest is history.

Revolutionary Techniques

For decades, mainstream filmmaking, especially in Hollywood, had set the standards and “rules” for how to make a movie. French filmmakers understood these rules… and then threw them out the window. Smaller, lighter cameras were often “liberated” from tripods and used handheld, bringing new life and energy to films.

Nonlinear and fragmented editing became another crucial and exciting contribution. For decades, every shot A led logically to shot B, leaving no gaps in information that might confuse the audience. Now, in these French films, logic became secondary.

The video essay The Image You Missed highlights the radical choices of French director Jean‑Luc Godard. His film Breathless (À bout de souffle) became one of the defining works of the movement and launched one of the most exciting and artistically significant directing careers in cinema.

Representative New Wave Films

Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964)

This film follows three young people who plan a heist together. Naturally, things don’t go as planned, and chaos ensues. For modern audiences, there are few French New Wave films better than Bande à part. That’s not to say it’s superior to its contemporaries, but it’s more restrained and perfectly balanced commercially.

In a nutshell, Bande à part is a fun heist movie, but relatively conservative and clearly less daring than most of Godard’s films.

Pierrot le fou (1965)

Perhaps Godard’s boldest film, this surreal on‑the‑run story stars French New Wave icons Anna Karina and Jean‑Paul Belmondo. It may not entirely measure up to Godard’s very best work, but thanks to its superb cinematography it is undeniably stunning. It also showcases the unabashed depictions of sex and romance that were just beginning to emerge in early French New Wave films.

Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960)

Shoot the Piano Player is perhaps most notable for its use of widescreen cinematography, but it’s also a great and daring story. Following The 400 Blows, François Truffaut’s first film, was an almost impossible task, but he succeeded brilliantly with the technically innovative Shoot the Piano Player. The film is one of the French New Wave titles that helped popularize many Hollywood genre conventions—such as the ruthless American gangster film.

Les cousins (The Cousins, 1959)

The Cousins is a gripping psychological drama about a clash between two opposites. Charles is naïve and hardworking, while Paul is an outgoing performer, gifted and flamboyant. The only thing these characters share is that they are cousins. But when Charles falls in love with a woman with a promiscuous past, he threatens to destroy his fragile relationship with his cousin. It is often regarded as one of famed director Claude Chabrol’s best French New Wave films.

Lola (1961)

Jacques Demy’s directorial debut, Lola, tells a twisting love story set on the French coast. The film stars Anouk Aimée as a cabaret performer longing for the man who abandoned her seventeen years earlier.

To a large extent, Lola has been overshadowed by Demy’s later works The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, which is a shame, because it is one of the absolutely essential French New Wave films.

Adieu Philippine (1962)

Adieu Philippine perhaps better than any other film of the movement conveys the whimsical, youthful spirit that has become synonymous with the French New Wave. The film revolves around the impact of the Algerian War on family life in France, a theme common to many New Wave films.

Adieu Philippine is director Jacques Rozier’s masterpiece about the trials and pains of growing up, and is one of France’s finest New Wave films.

Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, 1962)

François Truffaut’s exhilarating wartime love story Jules and Jim is a key film of the French New Wave. It tells the story of a love triangle between two young men, Jules and Jim, and their infatuation with a beautiful young woman named Catherine. Jules and Jim is a film about everything and nothing at once—war, sex, and romance in such abundance that they obscure the simplicity at the core of the story.

L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961)

Alain Resnais’s surreal Last Year at Marienbad is one of the most visually unforgettable films of this period. It follows three unnamed characters (two men and one woman) at a fashionable party, struggling to be recognized by one another.

But nothing in Last Year at Marienbad is what it seems: time and space warp in an instant, objectivity is abandoned, and relationships change from moment to moment. Writer and critic Mark Polizzotti makes this case in his essay “Last Year at Marienbad: Which Year? Which Place?” The film is a foundational work that influenced stylistic choices in The Shining and Memento.

Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima My Love, 1959)

Although Hiroshima mon amour was made by Left Bank Group member Alain Resnais, in many ways it launched the French New Wave. It marked a huge leap in visual storytelling and film editing, and showed that French cinema was moving in new directions both technically and narratively. With its explicit sexuality, unapologetic creativity, and innovative filmmaking techniques, Hiroshima mon amour broke free from the stagnation of the French film industry.

Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, 1961)

Paris Belongs to Us is a shocking nightmare about a world at a moral and existential crossroads. The film follows a young woman named Anne who finds herself caught up in a series of absurd situations, all of them linked to death. After nearly sixty years of debate, the meaning of Paris Belongs to Us is still up for interpretation. Some see it as an allegory for Cold War tensions, while others compare it to a visual rendering of a Kantian thought experiment.

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962)

Agnès Varda is one of the most important figures in French cinema, and Cléo from 5 to 7 is her signature work. The film depicts two hours in the life of Cléo, a beautiful and successful singer. Though the world is at her feet, Cléo is more miserable than ever, worried she will receive bad news from a cancer test. Cléo from 5 to 7 employs many hallmark French New Wave techniques, such as jump cuts, montage structure, and long takes. It is a deeply moving yet optimistic portrait of life, love, and empowerment.

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (My Life to Live, 1962)

Few films are more depressing than Vivre sa vie. Jean‑Luc Godard’s portrayal of a young woman who becomes a prostitute is as bleak as narrative cinema gets—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great film. In fact, quite the opposite: Vivre sa vie is one of the director’s greatest works and a bold step forward for the French New Wave. Anna Karina also steals the show, playing a well‑intentioned woman caught in the treacherous currents of a harsh, ever‑changing society.

Le mépris (Contempt, 1963)

French New Wave filmmakers were deeply inspired by earlier film movements, including German Expressionism, Italian Neorealism, and Hollywood’s Golden Age. Le mépris combines the best aspects of these three movements: it features Fritz Lang, a famous heir to German Expressionism; it was shot at Cinecittà, Italy’s renowned studio; and it uses Hollywood archetypes in its story. It is one of Jean‑Luc Godard’s most personal films and a symbol of freedom and eroticism in cinema.

À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960)

Breathless is widely regarded as the most iconic French New Wave film. Ironically, many of the era’s directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, were not broadly celebrated in the United States until the 1970s, with the arrival of the film‑school generation—the Hollywood New Wave. Breathless is the work that best synthesizes the New Wave’s popular techniques: jump cuts, long takes, and a deliberately “rough” style.

Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959)

What is left to say about The 400 Blows? It is astonishing, beautiful, heartbreaking, despairing, hopeful, and liberating. The film completely transformed the landscape of French cinema, and its popularity helped ignite the New Wave. François Truffaut tells the story of a rebellious boy at odds with a changing society, a story that feels as relevant today as it did in 1959. The 400 Blows is not only the finest film of the French New Wave, but very likely the greatest French‑language film ever made. It is the first of four features about the fictional Antoine Doinel, a semi‑autobiographical stand‑in for Truffaut himself.