New Wave (cinema)

The work of certain French film-makers – Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut among them – who in the late 1950s and 1960s rebelled against conventionality, seeking instead a vital spontaneity. Their early modernist films proved to be hugely influential throughout Europe.

Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette (1928– ), Eric Rohmer and the others of the New Wave, often associated with the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, rejected the ‘literary’ style of the classic French film. They admired the American cinema, particularly the work of film-makers like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and the B-film directors, but disdained the coherent narrative flow of Hollywood cinema.