French New Wave

New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) is often referred to as one of the most influential movements in the history of cinema. The term was first used by a group of French film critics and cinephiles associated with the magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1950s and 1960s. Contempt for the Tradition de qualité, which dominated French film at the time, was the impetus that drove these young writers. This was apparent in a manifesto-like essay written by François Truffaut in 1953, Une certaine tendance du cinéma français[2], where he denounced the adaptation of safe literary works into unimaginative films, calling them le cinéma de papa.

The New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of the literary period pieces being made in France and written by novelists, their spirit of iconoclasm, the desire to shoot more current social issues on location, and their intention of experimenting with the film form. "New Wave" is an example of European art cinema.[3] 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 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.

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