Nouvelle Vague is the french new wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s — young critics turned filmmakers who reinvented cinema's grammar.
The Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) refers to a loose group of young French filmmakers who emerged between 1958 and 1962, most of them critics at 'Cahiers du Cinéma'. François Truffaut's 'Les Quatre Cents Coups' (The 400 Blows, 1959), Jean-Luc Godard's 'À bout de souffle' (Breathless, 1960), and Alain Resnais's 'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959) announced the movement to the world. They worked with portable cameras, real locations, available light, and small crews; they jump-cut, broke the fourth wall, and let their characters quote books and films. Underlying the visual revolution was a critical position: cinema was an art, the director was its author, and the canon should include American genre filmmakers like Hawks and Hitchcock alongside European auteurs. Few movements have rewired a medium so quickly. Within a decade the Nouvelle Vague's grammar had reached Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Japan, and the New Hollywood of Scorsese and Coppola.