*La Nouvelle Vogue (French New Wave) is a french artistic movement formed against the french movie sector who is getting monotonous and uncreative. The founders of the movement are François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, also the most important directors that use the new style, weren't actually directors before the movement. They were editors in a cinema magazine called "Cahiers du Cinéma" (Cinema Notebooks). They wanted to give something new to the french movie sector because they thought that using similar techniques in cinema was lazy and not something that an artist would do. For them, an artist would search new ways to show something that people used to see, differently that they would get excited by seeing it. Contemporary cinema of their time was the exact opposite of this. So they did what an artist would do, they grabbed "the rule book of making movies" and threw it to the garbage. They wanted to show that things could be done differently. But they not only showed that, they also unknowingly changed the direction of cinema history.

Godard: "La photographie c’est la vérité. Et le cinéma c’est vingt-quatre fois la vérité par seconde." ("Photography is truth. And cinema is 24 times truth per second.")

With French New Wave, cinematographic revolution started in cinema. "The Young Turks" (Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard, Rivette) started to use techniques that are opposed to former ones. Such as Jump Cuts, Tell, Moving Camera, Natural Lighting, Natural Sound, Framing the Focus Point, Frame Freezing and, my favourite, breaking the 4th wall.


In movie editing, when you cut from a scene to another, you usually have to show some difference between the 2 shots. For example there is a rule in editing movies that is called 30 degree rule. Basically, when you cut through one shot to another, and these shots have the same character or object in them, there have to be at least a 30 degree change between the angles of each shot. Or at least there have to be a decent amount of zoom in or out to prevent distraction. But in jump cut the angle or distance to the object doesn't change significantly. Thus, showing the audience that they are actually watching a movie, making  the "magic" go away.

Jump Cuts weren't actually first introduced by The Young Turks. The Vanishing Lady (1896) and La Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) also used jump cuts in a different way. But in time, most directors decided that discontinuity in editing and montage destroys the reality in movies and makes the audience realise that they are watching a movie, but they wanted the audience to get lost in the movie and experience it without paying any attention to the shots, editing or camera angles. They were using plot and mise-en scene to swallow the audience and keeping editing out to achieve this effect. But because French New Wave is a revolutionary movement so they did the opposite by destroying that sense of reality in movies with jump cut editing but re-achieving it back with other methods.


If you watch Breathless by Godard, you can see that by discontinuous editing you can make some scenes more significant and emotional than the others or give new meanings to some shots that wouldn't be the same without jump cuts. In the car scene from Breathless, where the male character says:"I love a girl who has a very pretty neck, very pretty breasts, a very pretty voice, very pretty wrists, a very pretty forehead, very pretty knees... but who is a coward.",at the beginning of each sentence, he jump cuts so he underlines the compliments and at the end contrasts them with the criticism. In today's cinema, many directors uses this technique so we don't usually get distracted by it because we are used to it. And some examples that use jump cuts in today's cinema are Snatch by Guy Ritchie, Old Boy by Park Chan-Wook, Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson. 

Hand-Held Camera was another essence in French New Wave cinema. In past movies, camera was steady most of the time. Directors like Traffaut, Godard and Agnes Varda used hend-held cameras and stopped static recording. Remember what I said about re-achieving the reality sense of reality in movies by other methods? By using hand-held camera technique the movie becomes much more real. It feels like the audience is with the characters, walking around in Paris or driving around with them in their cars. They turn into companions and stop being invisible ghosts that watch them without making any move. Some example genres that use this technique are documentaries, mockumentaries and horror movies, a nice movie to watch with this technique is What We Do in the Shadows by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement.

The last technique that I want to talk about, and my favourite, is Breaking The 4th Wall. 4th Wall is the audience. In most movies, characters doesn't know that they are in a movie. There is a wall that hides the audience from their world, making the audience the invisible ghosts that I talked about. They cannot be seen, or cannot be talked. But French New Wave breaks the 4th wall by characters that know there is an audience behind the camera's "eye". They are watching them, they are basically with them. Therefore, making the audience is a part of the movie, making them participate to it. A great example is, another car scene, Pierrot Le Fou by Godard. In modern cinema, this technique became very common. Some great examples are Fight Club by Fincher, Monty Phyton and the Holy Grail by Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, Deadpool by Tim Miller.

Breaking the 4th Wall in Pierrot Le Fou

There are many other techniques that were introduced by French New Wave cinema but these three are the most important ones in my opinion. Some other techniques are Freezing the frame in important parts of the movie to emphasize one frame, just like taking a picture to remember that moment forever. Another technique worth mentioning is long shots in a "Show Don' Tell" kind of way. A great example is the beach scene from Les 400 Coups by Truffaut. The shot is longer than 1 minute and shows the kid's struggle by making us wait and wait. All these different techniques changed the cinema of their time and gave us the modern cinema that we love today.