50 Fun Facts About French New Wave

Which French actor became a star as the car thief Michel in Breathless?

Jean-Paul Belmondo had mostly been cast as minor rebels and crooks; his Michel, a petty criminal who models himself on Humphrey Bogart, made him the leading face of the new French cinema.

Which film magazine did Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and Chabrol all write for before directing?

Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, wore plain bright yellow covers with a film still and no headlines; its young critics savaged French studio pictures, then went out and made their own.

In Godard's Band of Outsiders, the three leads sprint through which Paris museum to beat a record?

The Louvre: Franz, Arthur and Odile race through its galleries to beat an American's supposed record, a stunt that has nothing to do with the robbery they are meant to be planning.

Which French singer played the haunted pianist in Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player?

Charles Aznavour played a former concert pianist hiding out in a cheap Paris bar; Truffaut took the story from an American pulp novel as a tribute to the Hollywood crime thrillers he loved.

Which editing technique did Breathless make famous?

Jump cuts: the first edit ran far too long, so instead of dropping whole scenes Godard snipped pieces out of the middle of shots and left the jolts showing, a look nobody had planned during the shoot.

Which American actress plays Patricia, who sells the Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées in Breathless?

Jean Seberg had been burned by critics in two Otto Preminger films; Godard reached her through her French husband, and she took the low-budget role while privately doubting him.

What is the name of Truffaut's alter ego, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in five films?

Antoine Doinel starts as the runaway schoolboy of The 400 Blows; Léaud then grew up on screen in the part through courtship, marriage and divorce, ending with Love on the Run in 1979.

On which device does The 400 Blows end as its runaway boy reaches the sea?

A freeze-frame: the boy turns back from the waves and looks into the camera, and an optical zoom pushes in on his stilled face, caught with nowhere left to run.

Who is the 'spiritual father' to whom Truffaut dedicated The 400 Blows?

André Bazin, a critic, got the teenage Truffaut out of trouble more than once, using his contacts to free him from a military prison after he deserted; he died just as the film began shooting.

Who co-founded the Cinémathèque Française, the Paris film archive where the future New Wave directors met?

Henri Langlois was fired by the culture minister in 1968, and the directors he had schooled led street protests until he was reinstated, a row later seen as a prelude to that May's unrest.

Which 1954 Truffaut essay attacked the French 'Tradition of Quality'?

Une certaine tendance du cinéma français took aim at star screenwriters such as Aurenche and Bost and their stale literary adaptations; the uproar made the young critic's name and landed him a job at the weekly Arts.

Which American critic coined the English term 'auteur theory'?

Andrew Sarris set it out in a 1962 essay in Film Culture, putting Truffaut's 'la politique des auteurs' into English; Pauline Kael hit back in print, and he came to call her his arch-antagonist.

Who wrote the 1948 manifesto 'The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo'?

Alexandre Astruc wanted the camera to work like a pen, setting down thought as freely as a novel or an essay; the young critics who became the New Wave took his article as a manifesto for personal filmmaking.

Which 1958 Chabrol film is traditionally credited as the first New Wave feature?

Le Beau Serge was paid for with money his wife had inherited, so Chabrol could skip the studios and shoot for nine weeks in Sardent, the village where he had lived out the war.

Which 1955 Varda film is often cited as a forerunner of the New Wave?

La Pointe Courte was shot on a shoestring in a fishing quarter of Sète by a stills photographer who had never made a film and, by her own account, had scarcely ever been to the cinema.

Which name did critic Richard Roud give the New Wave circle around Resnais, Marker and Varda?

Left Bank was his label for a looser circle with roots in documentary and left-wing politics; they worked on one another's films, as when Resnais edited Varda's first feature.

Which 1953 American film, shot hand-held at Coney Island, did Truffaut credit with showing the New Wave the way?

Little Fugitive was filmed with a light 35mm camera that Morris Engel, a photographer, had built with a friend, so he could work among the beach crowds with a tiny crew and very little money.

In which 1967 Godard film does a famous long tracking shot follow a traffic jam?

Weekend follows a bickering bourgeois couple driving out of Paris after an inheritance; the camera tracks sideways along the jam for minutes on end, and their trip ends among cannibal revolutionaries.

On Breathless, what did Godard push his cameraman around in instead of laying dolly tracks?

A wheelchair spared him the cost and delay of hiring a dolly and laying track; Godard pushed it himself, because he wanted to be free to improvise and shoot wherever and whenever he liked.

Who was the cinematographer of Breathless, hired by producer Georges de Beauregard?

Raoul Coutard had learned his trade as a war photographer in Indochina; Godard had wanted another cameraman, but the producer's man proved ideal for shooting fast in the Paris streets, newsreel style.

Which New Wave director, maker of Paris Belongs to Us, plays a man run over in the street in Breathless?

Jacques Rivette plays the man run over in the street, and Godard gave himself a cameo too, as the passer-by who recognises Michel and informs on him.

Which American director named his production company A Band Apart after Godard's Bande à part?

Quentin Tarantino borrowed more than the name: the café scene where the three leads break into a line dance, the Madison, is echoed by the Travolta and Thurman dance number in Pulp Fiction.

Which prize for young, independent-minded directors did Godard win for Breathless before its release?

Prix Jean Vigo: the man it honors died at 29 with his boarding-school revolt Zero for Conduct banned, and France did not see the film again until 1945.

Who directed Nouvelle Vague (2025), which dramatises the making of Godard's Breathless?

Richard Linklater shot it in Paris almost entirely in French, in black and white and the squarish Academy frame, so that it looks like a film made alongside the one it depicts.

The French title of The 400 Blows, Les quatre cents coups, comes from an idiom meaning what?

To raise hell: legend traces 'faire les quatre cents coups' to 1621, when Louis XIII had 400 cannon shots fired at the rebel town of Montauban and it still refused to surrender.

On the coast of which French region did Truffaut film the boy's final run to the sea in The 400 Blows?

Normandy: the beach is at Villers-sur-Mer, a Channel resort near Deauville. In the story the boy slips away from a football game at the detention centre and runs across country until the land gives out.

Which award did The 400 Blows win at Cannes in 1959?

Best Director went to Truffaut, whom the festival had refused to accredit as a critic a year earlier after he called it a failure ruled by compromises and schemes.

Who plays Catherine in Jules and Jim?

Jeanne Moreau sings Le Tourbillon in the film; her neighbour Serge Rezvani wrote it, and Truffaut, who met him while staying at her house, cast him under a false name as one of Catherine's lovers.

Which war puts the friends in Jules and Jim on opposite sides?

World War I parts the French Jim from the Austrian Jules, each afraid of killing the other at the front; Henri-Pierre Roché drew the story from his own life and published it as his first novel in his seventies.

Who composed the score for Jules and Jim?

Georges Delerue left school in his teens for factory work; a long convalescence for a curved spine decided him on composing, and he went on to become Truffaut's regular composer.

Which Hollywood science-fiction film was inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short La Jetée?

Twelve Monkeys took its time-loop story from a half-hour film told almost entirely in still photographs; a woman opening her eyes is one of its few seconds of movement.

Which composer plays Bob the pianist in Cléo from 5 to 7?

Michel Legrand wrote the score and turns up in it himself, as the songwriter who comes round to rehearse with the anxious singer; he went on to make ten films with Jacques Demy.

Who wrote the screenplay for Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour?

Marguerite Duras was brought in after Resnais, hired to make a documentary about the atomic bomb, decided the subject could not be filmed head-on; her love story moved the bomb into the background.

In Hiroshima mon amour, which town on the Loire is the French heroine's home, where she once loved a German soldier?

Nevers becomes her name: in the last scene she calls her Japanese lover Hiroshima, and he answers that she is Nevers, the town where her wartime love for a German soldier ended in his death and her disgrace.

Which radical collective, named after a Soviet filmmaker, did Godard form with Jean-Pierre Gorin after May 1968?

Dziga Vertov Group borrowed the pseudonym of a Soviet documentary pioneer; its films were signed by the collective because Godard wanted to escape the cult that had grown up around his own name.

Which actress, Godard's first wife, starred in Vivre sa vie and Pierrot le Fou?

Anna Karina first walked out on him: he had seen her in a soap advert and offered a bit part in Breathless that meant undressing. He came back with the lead in Le Petit Soldat, and they married in 1961.

Which 1963 Godard film stars Brigitte Bardot, with the director Fritz Lang playing himself?

Contempt was already cut when its producers complained that they saw too little of Bardot's body; after months of argument Godard shot the opening bedroom scene to satisfy them.

In which country did Godard live from the late 1970s until his death in 2022?

Switzerland: he and Anne-Marie Miéville settled in Rolle, a small town between Geneva and Lausanne, and he seldom left his studio there; his death at 91 was an assisted one, which Swiss law allows.

According to a Godard aphorism, what do you need to make a movie?

A girl and a gun: his debut Breathless runs on little more, an American student in Paris and a car thief wanted for shooting a policeman. He also said a film needs a beginning, a middle and an end, though not in that order.

Which Truffaut film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film?

Day for Night, his comedy about a film shoot, so exasperated Godard that he wrote calling Truffaut a liar; Truffaut answered with a long, bitter letter, and the two old friends never spoke again.

In which Spielberg film did Truffaut play a French scientist?

Close Encounters of the Third Kind kept him for months in a vast hangar studio in Alabama, and Truffaut used the long waits between takes to write the script of his own next film, The Man Who Loved Women.

Which director was the subject of Truffaut's 1966 book-length interview?

Alfred Hitchcock said yes to his letter, and in the summer of 1962 the two talked for a week in his office at Universal; Truffaut spoke almost no English, so every question and answer passed through an interpreter, Helen Scott.

Which Ray Bradbury novel became Truffaut's first non-French film in 1966?

Fahrenheit 451, a tale of burning books from the book-loving Truffaut, was shot in England with a mainly English crew, though he could barely speak the language, and he found it an unhappy shoot.

In which country was Agnès Varda born?

Belgium: she was born Arlette Varda in Brussels to a Greek father and a French mother, and the war sent the family south to the port of Sète, where she later shot her first film.

In 2015 Varda became the first female director to receive which Cannes award?

Honorary Palme d'Or: three years later, at 89, she and Cate Blanchett led 82 women up the festival's red steps to protest how few female directors had ever climbed them.

Which Demy musical of 1964 has all its dialogue sung?

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg sings every line, small talk included, yet its story is a sad one: a young mechanic is drafted to the Algerian War, and the romance he leaves behind does not survive his absence.

Which port city of Demy's childhood is the setting of Lola?

Nantes was where he grew up and where his father ran a garage; the year after his death in 1990, Varda recreated those early years on film as Jacquot de Nantes.

One New Wave director built his pseudonym from the novelist Sax Rohmer and which film director?

Erich von Stroheim gave Éric Rohmer his first name and the Fu Manchu author his second; it was one of several pen names he tried, and he guarded his privacy so closely that accounts still disagree on his birth name.

Roughly how long is the full version of the rarely screened 1971 French film Out 1?

Thirteen hours, near enough, in eight episodes: it was made with French television in mind, but the broadcaster turned it down, so it premiered at Le Havre in 1971 and all but vanished, replaced by a cut of just over four hours.

Which 1967 Hollywood film was offered to Truffaut and then to Godard before Arthur Penn directed it?

Bonnie and Clyde was written by two young Americans steeped in the New Wave; Truffaut worked on the script before passing, talks with Godard came to nothing, and its star Warren Beatty ended up producing it himself.