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May 18, 2024 · 1. La Pointe Courte (1955) Directed by Agnès Varda, “La Pointe Courte” is a landmark film that somewhat predates the French New Wave movement while embodying many characteristic themes and techniques. This poignant and reflective film, telling the story of a disintegrating marriage set against the backdrop of a small French fishing village ...
- L’ Atalante
- Shoot The Piano Player
- Le Boucher
- Jules et Jim
- Le Fou Follet
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
- Elevator to The Gallows
- The Mother & The Whore
- Eyes Without A Face
- Au Hasard Balthazar
Starting off with a caveat: Jean Vigo’s 1934 film pre-dates the Nouvelle Vague by several decades, but the impact of this previously underseen work’s resurgence and co-incidental meetings with main New Wave players like Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut qualifies its place here because it’s a key reason why this list even exists. There are cou...
Francois Truffaut’s follow-up to the much acclaimed ‘The 400 Blows’, ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ takes a uniquely passive approach to crime cinema- settling it comfortably into the liquid cool of Nouvelle Vague-era Paris and allowing the story to unfurl at its own compelling pace. It develops the keen ambition present in his debut whilst not taking it...
Cladue Chabrol’s 1970 reaction to the quick edits and breathless storytelling of the early Nouvelle Vague, ‘Le Boucher’ follows a well-liked school ma’am who engages in a platonic relationship with the local butcher and struggles with her suspicions as the women of the town begin to turn up dead. It’s a refreshingly reflexive and patient character-...
Truffaut’s finest achievement, ‘Jules et Jim’ tracks through the complex relationship of two male friends and a woman that both divides and unites them as time goes on. The premise itself is realized to superb effect with love struggling through the ages despite disagreements, allowing its audience to indulge in a rare look at people’s growth that ...
Emerging in the same year as ‘Jules et Jim’, ‘The Fire Within’ marks Louis Malle’s first slot on this list with a serious examination of a man teetering on the precipice of suicide. Addicted to the booze and unconscionably lonely, it draws comparisons to Bresson’s ‘Pickpocket’ of 1959, which was in hot competition for this place. Malle’s picture su...
Jacques Demy’s films have proven their endurance recently with a key inspiration for Damien Chazelle’s ‘La La Land‘, some even taking note of the near-plagiaristic tendencies the young American talent exacted in his tribute to movie musicals from around the world. Ignoring the muddy politics of the matter, to love ‘La La Land’ is to surely find som...
The other Louis Malle flick, ‘Elevator to the Gallows’ is perhaps most notable (or ironically shoved to the side) for pre-dating many of the ideas found in Godard’s ‘Breathless’. Unlike the funhouse farce who directed that film, however, Malle’s own debut here is one represented by unprecedented professionalism and an attentive understanding of wha...
Often deemed the closing statement of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean Eustache’s 1973 film is also remarked as one of the most important and essential hard-to-find movies ever made. Seeking it out and enduring its 200-minute runtime is richly rewarded with a meditation on romantic relationships and the nature of human sexuality that remains both alluring ...
Georges Franju made a documentary after the Second World War shocking in its subject and profoundly horrifying in its implication with 1949’s ‘Blood of the Beasts’. It’s an important piece to consider, in the context of the same fears of the flesh that permeate his landmark 1960 film ‘Eyes Without a Face’. It’s credited as lending a respectable sen...
Questionably, Nouvelle Vague, considering Bresson’s long-established style, ‘Balthazar’ is nonetheless unique for its protagonist being a donkey and involved with the movement through Goddard volunteering to cut its trailer. The continuing evolution of Robert Bresson’s method, in conjunction with an explosion of creativity brought on by Breathless,...
The New Wave is often considered one of the most influential movements in the history of cinema . The term was first used by a group of French film critics and cinephiles associated with the magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1950s and 1960s. These critics rejected the Tradition de qualité ("Tradition of Quality") of mainstream French ...
- The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) (1959) Essential Films - The 400 Blows. What is there to say about The 400 Blows that hasn’t already been said? It’s stunning, beautiful, heartbreaking, despairing, hopeful and liberating all at once.
- Breathless (A bout de souffle) (1960) Breathless - How World War II Changed Cinema. Breathless is largely regarded as the most defining film of the French New Wave, but why?
- Contempt (Le Mepris) (1959) Le Mepris - Restored Trailer. French New Wave filmmakers were massively inspired by the film movements that came before, including: German Expressionism, Italian Neorealism and the Golden Age of Hollywood.
- My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie) (1962) Vivre Sa Vie - Trailer. It’s awfully hard for a movie to be more depressing than Vivre Sa Vie is. Director Jean-Luc Godard’s portrait of a young woman who becomes a prostitute is about as bleak as narrative cinema comes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a great film.
- The 400 Blows (François Truffaut – 1959) Truffaut’s directorial debut might just be one of the best coming-of-age films of all time. It marked the creation of the immortal character of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud), an unwanted child who finds himself slipping through the cracks in the system.
- Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard – 1960) Breathless might not even be Godard’s magnum opus (that might go to his 1967 film Weekend), but it is undoubtedly one of the significant works of the French New Wave.
- Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais – 1961) Alain Resnais’ dreamlike masterpiece resists traditional interpretations and it polarised critics at the time of its release.
- Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda – 1962) Agnès Varda’s 1962 masterpiece is an endlessly charming film about a young singer who experiences extreme anxiety due to questions of mortality and existence.
Aug 13, 2015 · There were warning surges in 1955 (Varda’s La Pointe-courte), 1956 (Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur) and 1958 (Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge), but the French New Wave became a deluge in 1959, with Truffaut, Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette following Chabrol’s route into film production from a background in firebrand film criticism at the journal Cahiers du Cinéma.
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May 26, 2016 · The movie had both an all-star cast—including Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone—and an incredible cinematic style. What makes this film so unique is the cinematography and editing. The movie almost looks as if it was filmed in a single shot. It feels like the long tracking shot of the French New Wave taken to the extreme.
