french new wave

Alexandre Astruc argued in 1948 that a director should use a camera the way a writer uses a pen, calling the idea caméra-stylo; by 1954 François Truffaut had turned it into an attack, writing in Cahiers du Cinéma against the "tradition of quality" generation and its safe literary adaptations, in an essay that reads like a manifesto because it was meant as one. None of the Cahiers critics turned directors could get a major studio to fund anything bigger, so Breathless was shot fast and cheap on real Paris streets in 1960, jump cuts telling the audience the illusion was optional, while Michel steals a car, shoots the motorcycle policeman who comes after him, and goes back to Paris to talk an American student into running to Italy with him. Truffaut turned the pen on his own boyhood: a neglected Paris kid drifts from home into trouble with the law in The 400 Blows. Resnais took the same licence into the structure of the film itself, building Hiroshima Mon Amour out of hours of talk between a French actress and a Japanese architect in the rebuilt city. Melville kept the genre furniture and stripped everything else off it, down to a contract killer in a trench coat with the police on one side and his employer on the other, in Le Samouraï. You watch the rules being renegotiated while the film runs.

Distinguish from Italian Neorealism provided a key inspiration but maintained transparency as a principle — the camera as invisible witness. The New Wave made the camera visible, celebrated its own artifice, and turned form itself into content. New Hollywood absorbed New Wave techniques into big-budget American filmmaking but traded the movement's intellectual essayism for visceral genre storytelling.