The French New Wave

The French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) was mainly comprised of two groups of filmmakers and their bodies of work released from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer, critics at the prestigious film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, formed the nucleus of one group reacting against the French "Tradition of Quality" studio-style of filmmaking. Greatly influenced by fellow critic André Bazin and Cinémathèque Française curator Henri Langlois, the Cahiers group revered directors Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others, and supported the auteur theory of cinematic authorship. The Left Bank group included Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda, whose films have a decidedly more novelistic and experimental bent. Together, these filmmakers represent a remarkably rich period in French national cinema.