French New Wave
The name wasn't originally a film term. In 1957 the weekly magazine L'Express surveyed people aged 18 to 30 and wrote that a "new wave" was coming for that generation. It was a term about society. A critic named Pierre Billard carried it over into cinema the following year, in 1958. This map has several stories shaped like this one — a name usually arrives from outside, and later. It began as criticism. In 1954, a 22-year-old Truffaut wrote "A Certain Tendency of French Cinema" for Cahiers du Cinéma, dismissing the well-regarded literary films of the day as "the fossils of French cinema." The idea that the director is the true author of a film — the politique des auteurs — is also his. And then the critics picked up cameras themselves. This is where technology opened the door. The Cameflex, released in 1947, was France's first reflex 35mm camera, light enough to carry on the shoulder. The Nagra recorder, released in 1951, made synchronized sound recording portable. Filmmakers could leave the studio and shoot on the street, in available light. On Breathless, Godard is said to have pushed a wheelchair carrying cinematographer Raoul Coutard down the Champs-Élysées, and in another scene, to have hidden Coutard and the camera inside a postal delivery tricycle, with the lens poking out through a hole cut in the front. The famous jump cuts are often explained with a simple story: the finished cut ran too long, so the boring parts were removed, and the jump cuts were what remained. But this is not a settled account. An academic paper laid out and examined five different explanations, and found no consistent account from Godard himself. The more famous the anecdote, the simpler it seems to get. Even the movement's "first film" isn't settled. Among the five Cahiers critics, the first to release a feature was Chabrol, with Le Beau Serge (1958); the first to win Best Director at Cannes was Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959) — a critic banned from Cannes the year before, receiving an award there the next year. And the critic Georges Sadoul and others argued that the real first film was Agnès Varda's La Pointe Courte, shot in 1954. The wave didn't stay in one country. In Prague, in Munich, in Rio, in Tokyo, young filmmakers began shooting around the same time — and the term "new wave" itself spread with them, around the world.