French New Wave
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50 free French New Wave trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
A handful of film critics at a yellow-covered magazine decided they could do better than the French films they were panning, borrowed hand-held cameras and shopping carts, and changed cinema. The Nouvelle Vague lasted only a few years at full strength, roughly 1958 to 1962, but its jump cuts, location shooting and director-as-author thinking are still everywhere. These 50 questions cover the critics and the films: André Bazin and Henri Langlois as father figures, Truffaut's attack on the Tradition of Quality, Astruc's caméra-stylo, the auteur theory named by Andrew Sarris, and the Left Bank group of Resnais, Varda, Marker and Demy. You will get Breathless in detail, from Jean Seberg's fee to the cinematographer pushed in a wheelchair, and The 400 Blows from its idiom of a title to its freeze-frame ending, plus Jules and Jim, Cléo from 5 to 7, Hiroshima mon amour, Contempt and the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Easy questions cover directors and stars; the hard tier asks about Rivette's short, Rohmer's pseudonym and the American film Truffaut credited with starting it all. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French actor became a star as the car thief Michel in Breathless?
Jean-Paul Belmondo
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.
Q 02Which film magazine did Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and Chabrol all write for before directing?
Cahiers du cinéma
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.
Q 03In Godard's Band of Outsiders, the three leads sprint through which Paris museum to beat a record?
The Louvre
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.
Q 04Which French singer played the haunted pianist in Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player?
Charles Aznavour
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.
Q 05Which editing technique did Breathless make famous?
Jump cuts
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.
Q 06Which American actress plays Patricia, who sells the Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées in Breathless?
Jean Seberg
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.
Q 07What is the name of Truffaut's alter ego, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in five films?
Antoine Doinel
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.
Q 08On which device does The 400 Blows end as its runaway boy reaches the sea?
A freeze-frame
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.
Q 09Who is the 'spiritual father' to whom Truffaut dedicated The 400 Blows?
André Bazin
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.
Q 10Who co-founded the Cinémathèque Française, the Paris film archive where the future New Wave directors met?
Henri Langlois
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.
Q 11Which 1954 Truffaut essay attacked the French 'Tradition of Quality'?
Une certaine tendance du cinéma français
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.
Q 12Which American critic coined the English term 'auteur theory'?
Andrew Sarris
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.
Q 13Who wrote the 1948 manifesto 'The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo'?
Q 21Which New Wave director, maker of Paris Belongs to Us, plays a man run over in the street in Breathless?
Jacques Rivette
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.
Q 22Which American director named his production company A Band Apart after Godard's Bande à part?
Quentin Tarantino
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.
Q 23Which prize for young, independent-minded directors did Godard win for Breathless before its release?
Prix Jean Vigo
Alexandre Astruc
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.
Q 14Which 1958 Chabrol film is traditionally credited as the first New Wave feature?
Le Beau Serge
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.
Q 15Which 1955 Varda film is often cited as a forerunner of the New Wave?
La Pointe Courte
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.
Q 16Which name did critic Richard Roud give the New Wave circle around Resnais, Marker and Varda?
Left Bank
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.
Q 17Which 1953 American film, shot hand-held at Coney Island, did Truffaut credit with showing the New Wave the way?
Little Fugitive
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.
Q 18In which 1967 Godard film does a famous long tracking shot follow a traffic jam?
Weekend
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.
Q 19On Breathless, what did Godard push his cameraman around in instead of laying dolly tracks?
A wheelchair
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.
Q 20Who was the cinematographer of Breathless, hired by producer Georges de Beauregard?
Raoul Coutard
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.
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.
Q 24Who directed Nouvelle Vague (2025), which dramatises the making of Godard's Breathless?
Richard Linklater
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.
Q 25The French title of The 400 Blows, Les quatre cents coups, comes from an idiom meaning what?
To raise hell
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.
Q 26On the coast of which French region did Truffaut film the boy's final run to the sea in The 400 Blows?
Normandy
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.
Q 27Which award did The 400 Blows win at Cannes in 1959?
Best Director
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.
Q 28Who plays Catherine in Jules and Jim?
Jeanne Moreau
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.
Q 29Which war puts the friends in Jules and Jim on opposite sides?
World War I
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.
Q 30Who composed the score for Jules and Jim?
Georges Delerue
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.