The French New Wave was an informal and influential film movement that emerged in the 1950s and continued up until the late 1960s. It was most prominently pioneered and spearheaded by a handful of critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma, a famous French film magazine, including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. These young French directors of the late 1950s and 1960s created self-conscious films that took influence from the Italian Neorealism movement and classical Hollywood cinema, such as Film noir, albeit with strong rejection of the acceptable film techniques and norms dominant in French cinema at that time.
In addition to that, French New Wave directors often re-sculpted and re-contextualized genres and experimented with visual, narrative, and editing techniques, such as unconventional camera angles, long-lasting shots of trivial events, improvised dialogues and open endings.
