François Truffaut

François Truffaut was a very important French filmmaker, producer, actor and one of the founders of the French New Wave.

The New Wave or La Nouvelle Vague was created in the 50s-60s. This association was never a formalized movement.

The most important pioneers among the group were: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. Andre Bazin was the co-founder and theorist who brought a great influence to the movement.

The New Wave filmmakers:

-had a desperate fight against the typical cinema of the time.

-were linked by their self-conscious

-had rejection of classical cinematic form

-had a spirit of youthful iconoclasm

-were engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.

-attack on the viewer's naivete.

The movement has its origin in rebellion against the reliance on past forms (novellic structures), criticizing in particular the way these forms could force the audience to submit to a authoritarian sequence.

Some characteristics and unprecedented methods:

-seven-minute tracking shots

-movies featured existential themes ( ex. Stressing the individual and absurdity of human existence)

-films produced with tight budgets (shot in a friend's apartment, using the director's friends as the cast and crew)

-Directors were forced to improvise with equipment (ex. using a shopping cart for tracking shots).

-fresh look to cinema (improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that go beyond the common 360º axis).

The challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. That is why François Truffat is still a huge icon of cinema, not only because he produced good movies, but he and his fellows created a new way of seeing movies

The challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. That is why François Truffat is still a huge icon of cinema, not only because he produced good movies, but he and his fellows created a new way of seeing movies