Aggressive jump-cutting, the director as auteur, an unhealthy obsession with American crime thrillers, heart-rending tales of loneliness and tragic romance, politically astute, often dangerously subversive, sometimes sickeningly pretentious... Love it or hate it, it cannot be denied that the new wave of film directors of the late1950s and early 1960s left their mark on French cinema.
From the hot-headed former critics of the review magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Rohmer) to the great innovators such as Resnais, Varda, Demy, Rivette, not forgetting the talent of Malle, Rozier, Eustache, Lelouch and Costa-Gavras - all played their part in re-defining French cinema in the 1960s.
Here is a selection of the films which represent the triumphs of the French New Wave.
