The French New Wave was never one movement but two. Between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, a cluster of film critics from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette—picked up cameras and put their critical theories into practice, while a parallel group of filmmakers based on Paris's Left Bank, including Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy, pursued a different set of artistic priorities. This guide organizes the essential films of the era around that division, because understanding which camp a film belongs to is the fastest way to understand what it was trying to do.
Introduction to the French New Wave
As the Criterion Channel's introduction to its French New Wave collection puts it, "There was cinema before the French New Wave, and there was cinema after." The explosion of creative innovation that emanated from France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in Criterion's framing, forever altered the course of film history by opening new avenues of stylistic experimentation and trumpeting the concept of the "auteur" director, whose aesthetic vision and thematic obsessions took center stage. The movement liberated cinema from commercial demands and reclaimed it in the name of unfettered personal expression.
What made the New Wave distinctive was less a shared style than a shared attitude: a rejection of cinematic tradition, often under low-budget conditions, that produced films breaking existing filmmaking "rules" with a vigorously experimental style. Agnès Varda, describing what the movement's filmmakers had in common, pointed to "a lot of natural light, sometimes use non actors, natural sets, a sort of speed in the inspiration and the work." A documentary-esque approach to cinematography freed actors to move and improvise, as the film-analysis publication In Depth Cine notes in its account of the movement.
The Two Factions: Cahiers du Cinéma and Left Bank
The British Film Institute's survey of great New Wave films draws the essential map. There were connections, social and stylistic, between the two camps, but the French New Wave broke forth from two distinct groups: on the one hand, the critics-turned-filmmakers associated with Cahiers du Cinéma; on the other, the so-called Left Bank directors, "no less modernistic but less crazed by the love of movies for their own sake." Resnais and Marker came from documentary, and Resnais's first fiction feature, Hiroshima mon amour, began with a commission to make a documentary about the atomic bomb.
The distinction matters because the two groups arrived at modernism from opposite directions. The Cahiers alumni were obsessive cinephiles who had spent the 1950s writing criticism before directing; the Left Bank figures tended toward literary, documentary, and political concerns. Both emerged at the same time, in the late 1950s, and both changed cinema—but their films reward being watched as products of distinct sensibilities rather than a single school.
