Major Film Movements - French New wave

The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) was a term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950's and 1960's. Although never a formally organized movement, 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 youthful 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. 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 Style. Using portable equipment and requiring little or no set up time, the New Wave way of film making 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.

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 the famous film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Cahiers co-founder and theorist André Bazin was a prominent source of influence for the movement. By means of criticism, they laid the groundwork for a set of concepts, revolutionary at the time, which the American film critic Andrew Sarris called auteur theory. Cahiers du cinéma writers critiqued the classic "Tradition of Quality" style of French Cinema.

The auteur theory holds that the director is the "author" of his movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film. They praised movies by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, and made then radical cases for the artistic distinction and greatness of Hollywood studio directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. 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.

Apart from the role that films by Jean Rouch have played in the movement, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is traditionally credited as the first New Wave feature. Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard, with Breathless (1960) had unexpected international successes. The French New Wave was popular roughly between 1958 and 1964, although New Wave work existed as late as 1973.

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 more comfortable and contemporary form of production was, to them, a much. The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as long tracking shots. Also, these movies featured existential themes, such as stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence.