The origins of the New Wave were influenced
by several movements. The first was the French
cinema itself, including the 1930s cinematic style
known as poetic realism, a term that applied to
those movies that treated everyday life with a
moody sensitivity to mise-en-scène as well as the
more contemporary films of Jean-Pierre Melville.
The second was the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre,
the leading figure in French philosophy in the
postwar period, who believed that contemporary
artists should rebel against the constraints of soci-
ety, traditional morality, and religious faith; should
accept personal responsibility for their actions; and
should thus be free to create their own world. His
existentialist views helped shape the new French
cinema’s depiction of modern human beings, while
his Marxist views helped form its interpretations
of society and history. Finally, the movement
learned much from film critic and director Alexan-
dre Astruc, who declared that a filmmaker should
use the camera as personally as the novelist uses a
pen, thus giving inspiration to the idea of the movie
director as auteur.
Other influences on the French New Wave
include Italian Neorealism, the contemporaneous
British Free Cinema (discussed on page 462), and
contemporary developments in the French docu-
mentary film. While the Italians and the British
offered models of how to make narrative films that
told real stories about real people, cinéma vérité
evolved in France in the early 1960s as a documen-
tary style (the name, which means “film truth,” pays
homage to Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda—“film
truth”—work in the Soviet Montage movement).
Among other things, it advocated using the light-
weight, portable filmmaking equipment that
enhanced a filmmaker’s mobility and flexibility. Sty-
listically, its films had a rough, intimate look that
often reflected the informality of the filmmaking
process. Filmmakers appeared on-screen, cameras
jiggled, framing was often informal, scenes were gen-
erally unscripted, and continuity was provided prima-
rily through lots of close-ups and sound tracks that
continued under the shots. Later, such stylistic inno-
vations would characterize many New Wave movies.
Film theorist André Bazin, known as the father of
the New Wave, synthesized these concepts into the
coherent model on which the New Wave was estab-
lished. This interaction of intellect and creativity
recalls the origins of several movements you’ve
already encountered: the German, Soviet, and French
film movements of the 1920s. Bazin cofounded
Cahiers du cinéma,which became the leading French
film journal of the time, and in his capacity as editor,
he became the intellectual and spiritual mentor
of the New Wave. His followers included Cahiers’
contributors, many of whom would become direc-
tors: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude
Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer. Others
went directly into filmmaking: Chris Marker, Alain
Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Louis Malle. (There were
other major directors in postwar France who were
not directly involved in the New Wave movement,
including Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson, Jean
Renoir, Jacques Tati, Jacques Becker, and Max
Ophüls.) Bazin’s central tenets were realism, mise-
en-scène, and authorship (the director’s unique
style). For him, the most distinctive nature of a
movie was its form rather than its content. Accord-
ingly, he encouraged his followers to see as many
films as possible, looking particularly at the relation-
ship between the director and the material. In view-
ing these films, great and otherwise, the young critics
and would-be filmmakers developed a particular fas-
cination with those Hollywood films that seemed to
prove what Bazin, following Astruc, was saying about
the director-as-author. They recognized that most
directors of Hollywood films had little say over most
aspects of production, but they believed that through
his style, particularly the handling of mise-en-scène,
a great director could undermine studio control and
transform even the most insignificant Western or
detective story into a work of art.
Obviously, the New Wave was based on a theory
that advocated a change in filmmaking practices.
Truffaut’s 1954 Cahiersessay “A Certain Tendency
of the French Cinema” elaborated on the auteur
concept and started a critical controversy that has
not yet abated.^10 The issue remains: is it the direc-458 CHAPTER 10FILM HISTORY
(^10) See François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French
Cinema,” in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols,
2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), I,
pp. 224–237.