French New Wave - Nouvelle Vague

Breaking the Rules

What makes the French New Wave such an important movement

Cinema Cinema - Documentaries on The New Wave

The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) is a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s.

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, along with 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.

Breathless (French: À bout de souffle; "out of breath") is a 1960 French film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard about a wandering criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg). It was Godard's first feature-length work and represented Belmondo's breakthrough as an actor.

Breathless was one of the earliest, most influential examples of French New Wave (nouvelle vague) cinema.[2] Together withFrançois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, both released a year earlier, it brought international acclaim to this new style of French filmmaking. At the time, the film attracted much attention for its bold visual style, which included unconventional use of jump cuts.

Jules and Jim (French): Jules et Jim, is a 1962 French film directed by François Truffaut. Set around the time ofWorld War I, it describes a tragic love triangle involving French Bohemian Jim (Henri Serre), his shy Austrian friend Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jules' girlfriend and later wife Catherine (Jeanne Moreau).

The film is based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel describing his relationship with young writer Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, whom Hessel married.[2] Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books at a bookseller along the Seine in Paris. Later he befriended the elderly Roché, who had published his first novel at the age of 74. The author approved of the young director's interest to adapt his work to another medium.

The 400 Blows (French: Les Quatre Cents Coups) is a 1959 French drama film, the debut by director François Truffaut; it starsJean-Pierre Léaud, Albert Rémy, and Claire Maurier. One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. Written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, the film is about Antoine Doinel, a misunderstood adolescent in Paris who is thought by his parents and teachers to be a troublemaker. Filmed on location in Paris and Honfleur, it is the first in a series of five films in which Léaud plays the semi-autobiographical character.

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