In the last of the 12 chapters of Jean-Luc Godard'due south fourth motion picture, Vivre sa vie (1962), prostitute Nana (played past the director'due south then-married woman Anna Karina) and her pimp drive past a cinema where a crowd is queuing to encounter Jules et Jim, the arthouse sensation made past Godard'due south friend and former-rival François Truffaut, released in January that year.

In the months between the release of these two films, Godard and Karina both had cameos in Cléo from v to 7, a movie that confirmed the arrival of another vital filmmaker: Agnès Varda. Varda was married that aforementioned yr to Jacques Demy, whose own debut, the peerless Lola, had come out in 1961. Just as Lola was dedicated to director Max Ophüls, Vivre sa vie was defended to B-movies (as Godard'south outset motion-picture show, 1960'due south Incoherent was defended to B-movie studio Monogram Pictures) – and both Lola and Vivre sa vie were shot by Raoul Coutard and scored by Michel Legrand…

Get the latest from the BFI

Sign upward for BFI news, features, videos and podcasts.

Then the connections go on and on. These were years of extraordinary ferment in French movie theater, when commencement-time filmmakers quickly became tertiary- and fourth-time filmmakers, fired by freedom, filmic inspiration and the certainty that movies could and should exist as personal as a letter delivered straight into the audition'southward hands.

For them, cinema was a living, breathing cult and religion. The more famous cinema trip in Vivre sa vie occurs earlier in the film, when Nana sits in tears and rapture at a screening of Carl Dreyer'south silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). This is how movies affected the enfants terribles of the French nouvelle vague, and their passion for the medium – both for making it and for making reference to it – remains infectious more than half a century later.

In that location were alert surges in 1955 (Varda's La Pointe-courte), 1956 (Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur) and 1958 (Claude Chabrol'due south Le Beau Serge), merely the French New Wave became a drench in 1959, with Truffaut, Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette following Chabrol's route into moving picture production from a background in firebrand motion-picture show criticism at the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour and Chabrol'due south 2nd moving picture, Les Cousins, followed swiftly by Godard's Breathless in March 1960, announced a kind of cinematic gold blitz in which filmmakers in France (and before long the earth over) were post-obit their atomic number 82 in grabbing a camera, throwing out the stylistic dominion book, and taking to the streets to film the world unencumbered by the stodgy baggage or impersonality of establishment industry filmmaking.

The results in France lone amount to one of moving picture history'south purplest patches, every bit we'll find equally we count down x (one each for the key directors) of the era'south finest films.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Director:Alain Resnais

Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

In that location were connections – social and stylistic – between them, simply the French New Moving ridge broke forth from two distinct groups. On the one hand, in that location were the critics-turned-filmmakers associated with Cahiers du Cinéma (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette); on the other, the so-called Left Banking concern directors (Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda), no less modernistic merely less crazed past the honey of movies for their ain sake.

Resnais and Marker came from documentary, and Resnais' first fiction characteristic, Hiroshima mon flirtation, began with a commission to make a documentary about the atomic flop. Marker was on lath every bit a collaborator but dropped out, while Resnais – eager to not only repeat the effect of Night and Fog, his 1955 certificate of the concentration camps – turned to Marguerite Duras for a fiction screenplay. Duras, doyen of experimental fiction and the nouveau roman, penned a story of two lovers – a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese human (Eiji Okada) – whose affair in nowadays-24-hour interval Hiroshima is wracked by memories both personal and historical.

Memory, and the extent to which the past lives on in the present, was a central theme of much of Resnais' work. With Duras' incantatory dialogue and an avant-garde score by Giovanni Fusco and Georges Delerue, he made the gravest film of 1959, but 1 which took huge leaps forward with its nuanced portrayal of developed thought and emotion. A door opened, modern cinema got a foot in.

Run across as well: Last Yr at Marienbad (1961), La guerre est finie (1966)

Breathless (1960)

Director:Jean-Luc Godard

Breathless (1960)

Coming 10 months after Truffaut'due south autobiographical Les Quatre Cents Coups and ix after Hiroshima monday amour, Godard's outset picture was another tear in the cloth of moving picture. This time, the outcome was dizzying in its cool modernity: in critic Kent Jones'south words, it was free-jazz improvisation to counter Resnais' atonal music.

The story, such equally it is, involves a young criminal, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who steals a motorcar, kills a cop, and and so hides out in Paris with his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg) waiting for fate to catch upward with him. It's the insouciant manner in which Godard tells it that is cardinal. Shot with paw-held cameras by Raoul Coutard (Godard's regular cinematographer throughout the first phase of his career), Incoherent presents a thoroughgoing assail on the accepted grammar of filmmaking: cutting when the rules said information technology shouldn't; filming on the streets and in natural lighting; inserting sudden, disruptive music cues; and taking every opportunity to remind the viewer that what they're watching is a film and a fiction. Information technology'south a movie steeped in movie lore and movie references, simply one which attempted to hold up the medium by the ankles and shake it until everything we held true fell out.

See as well: Le Petit Soldat (1960), Une femme mariée (1964)

Les Bonnes Femmes (1960)

Director:Claude Chabrol

Les Bonnes femmes (1960)

With Godard, Claude Chabrol was the well-nigh prolific of the major nouvelle vague filmmakers. His 1958 debut Le Fellow Serge was one of the movement's early on alert signals, and by the end of the 60s he'd finished 16 more features and several shorts. He was more wedded to traditional genres than some of his contemporaries, and his 60s features comprise now largely forgotten spy films aslope a serial of essential thrillers that earned him plenty of comparisons to Hitchcock (of whom Chabrol and Rohmer had co-written a groundbreaking written report in the 1950s).

Already his fourth film by 1960, Les Bonnes Femmes is neither a thriller nor a spy pic – although there is a twist. It's a blackness-comic portrait of four single Parisian women (including Stéphane Audran and Bernadette Lafont) who piece of work in an electrical appliances shop. Each is striving for something improve, professionally or via romance. Chabrol documents their assorted encounters with the pic's coterie of low-life men with a cool middle for the grim ironies of human desire and behaviour. Audiences at the time rejected the film's pessimism, and it's still non as well known as it should be – all the improve for the unwary to experience the full shock of one of Chabrol's best. An severe treat.

See as well: La Femme infidèle (1969), Le Boucher (1970)

Shoot the Piano Histrion (1960)

Director:François Truffaut

Shoot the Pianist (1960)

Coming between his justly celebrated New Wave classics Les Quatre Cents Coups and Jules et Jim, Truffaut's second film is no less indispensable. Premiered at the London Picture Festival in Oct 1960, it's a flimsier affair than either – closer in spirit to the lurid genre games of Godard'south Incoherent or Bande à part (1964). Adapted from a novel by law-breaking writer David Goodis, it stars Charles Aznavour every bit a washed-upwards classical pianist who gets mixed up with gangsters subsequently taking piece of work mournfully tinkling the ivories in a Parisian swoop bar.

Freed from the autobiographical shape of his debut, Truffaut indulges his honey for American movie theatre with a full-throttle tribute to film noir, B-movies and silent comedy, delivered with a breathless panoply of nouvelle vague tricks that invigorate to this twenty-four hour period. It's a comedy, it's a thriller, it's a film about films – but for all its tricksiness, it endures because of the feeling in Aznavour's sadsack performance and considering Truffaut imbues so much passion and sensibility into every frame.

Come across also: Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), La Sirène du Mississipi (1969)

Lola (1961)

Director:Jacques Demy

Lola (1961)

Jacques Demy was affiliated with the Left Banking company group (he was married to Varda from 1962 until his expiry in 1990), simply his ardent cinephilia made him a kindred spirit with the picture show-mad Cahiers group too.

Made when he was thirty, his debut explicitly glances dorsum to Max Ophüls' Lola Montès (1955) and beyond to Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Affections (1930) – beautiful tales of women trapped in webs of male person control and desire. But Demy'southward tale of a cabaret dancer (Anouk Aimée) and the men who revolve effectually her has something new that makes it quintessentially mod and distinctly New Moving ridge: a coincidental, street-level naturalism that finds movie magic in humdrum places and situations. This is a moving-picture show that looks bleached white in the backgrounds, as Raoul Coutard's glorious, overexposed CinemaScope photography makes the Atlantic seaside boondocks of Nantes seem both vividly existent and on the cusp of daydream. Demy was the dreamiest of the New Moving ridge directors, and this yearningly romantic calling card paved the way for more fairytales of French coastal towns in which Michel Legrand's music grew ever more lilting and essential.

Run into as well: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967)

Adieu Philippine (1962)

Managing director:Jacques Rozier

Adieu Philippine (1962)

In the rush to make their start films, some New Wave directors stalled or got left backside. Rohmer and Rivette both started early, but saw delays to either the product or release of their debut features. Jacques Rozier fared poorly too: his first film, begun in 1960, faced production difficulties that delayed it hitting cinemas until 1962 – peradventure too late for his voice to exist heard in a higher place the clamour of acclamation for some of his peers, who were by and so onto their tertiary or 4th pictures.

Farewell Philippine remains well under the radar fifty-fifty at present; it is past far the to the lowest degree well known and well-nigh difficult to run across movie on this list. Which is a shame, because this story of a young Television set technician's affairs and adventures with two girls holidaying in Corsica represents the movement at its breeziest and most spontaneous. Youthful, chaotic and carefree, it'southward one of the era'southward films that feels most like a camera was grabbed, and people and places were nudged until they brutal together into a movie. Sad, then, that Rozier didn't follow it upward for near a decade, when he continued his interest in young people and the vacation mood in even less well-known films, Du côté d'Orouët (1971) and Les Naufragés de l'Île de la Tortue (1976), which are surely ripe for investigation.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Director:Agnès Varda

Cléo from 5 to seven (1962)

Cléo from v to 7 unfolds in shut to real time, in the freighted ninety-minute lull between a singer's test for cancer and the moment she receives the results. We join Cléo (Corinne Marchand) just subsequently the test, when she is visiting a tarot-card reader in the doomed promise of anticipating her prognosis, and so follow her to meetings with friends and lovers, to a rehearsal and to the shops, earlier a fateful stroll in the park.

Seven years later on her New Wave-anticipating debut La Pointe-courte, Varda returned to cinema with this wonderful present-tense drama, which eschews its setup's essential melodrama and sentimentality in favour of a delicate portrait of a mind and spirit in turmoil. Gently experimental in form but always firmly rooted to a sense of time and place (Paris's Left Banking company, from 5pm to half-dozen.30), information technology'due south also one of a number of early 60s New Wave films to flirt with the conventions of the musical. In Cléo'due south run-through of a number called 'Sans toi', Varda's mainly naturalistic film momentarily transforms into a stylised routine as she belts out the vocal to piano accompaniment. In New Moving ridge films, genres such equally the musical or the gangster motion picture can be tried on then discarded, similar garments in a dressing upwards box.

Run across besides: Le Bonheur (1965), Les Créatures (1966)

Le Mépris (1963)

Director:Jean-Luc Godard

Le Mépris (1963)

We said one film per director for this list, but for Godard rules need to be cleaved. Between his debut in 1960 and 'les événements' of May 1968 (later on which he turned away from film narrative altogether), the man made 15 films – all vital, pell-mell refractions of narrative movie house, remaking and remodelling a tired medium with new ideas, pop-art visuals and a bullish riot. For seven years, all anyone else in moving picture could do was try to continue up.

Vi films in, Godard made what looked like his most conventional piece of work to date: with a large star (Brigitte Bardot), heart-popping Technicolor, CinemaScope visuals (another nod for Raoul Coutard), and a relatively direct story. Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravia, information technology's all nigh a screenwriter'south all of a sudden fractious marital relations during filming in Italy of a production of Homer's The Odyssey. 'Conventional' is relative, but information technology'southward certainly his nigh emotionally straight film, taking its lead from Roberto Rossellini's keen marital breakdown drama Journeying to Italy (1954) in eloquently tracing the rot that sets in between lovers. Already, the effervescent qualities of Breathless seem out of reach for Godard, and Le Mépris reveals an escalating pessimism near love and movie theatre. Exciting stuff, then, simply film heaven if y'all're wired its manner.

Come across likewise: Pierrot le fou (1965), Two or Three Things I Know nigh Her (1967)

Claire's Articulatio genus (1970)

Managing director:Eric Rohmer

Claire'south Knee (1970)

Eric Rohmer was among those Cahiers critics who starting time picked up a camera at the end of the 1950s, simply his first film, Le Signe du lion (shot in 1959), was held back for release until 1962. It flopped, and Rohmer began his series of 'Six Moral Tales' with a couple of curt films before finally making his second feature film, La Collectionneuse, in 1967.

It was only with My Night with Maud (1969) and Claire's Knee that Rohmer's reputation began to scale the heights of his former colleagues. The first of Rohmer's keen series cycles, the 'Half dozen Moral Tales' present situations in which a male protagonist'due south fidelity or resolve in affairs of the middle is tested. Claire'due south Knee, the penultimate tale, is a deceptively unproblematic yet highly ambiguous and troubling movie near the nature of want and fixation (specifically that of a vainglorious alpha male with a teenage neighbour'due south articulatio genus). It's both naturalistic and uniquely otherworldly, rather like watching a version of Les Liaisons dangereuses or a ladylike medieval parable transposed to summer vacation season at Lac d'Annecy.

Run into also: La Collectionneuse (1966), My Night with Maud (1969)

Céline and Julie Become Boating (1974)

Director: Jacques Rivette

Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

In the era of online cinephilia, Jacques Rivette's stock is perhaps the highest of all the New Wave directors (fed by cultish interest in his 13-60 minutes film maudit Out 1). It wasn't ever like that – at the time, none of Rivette'due south films had the widespread impact or notoriety of those of his peers. Though he began shooting his first film, Paris nous appartient, in 1957, it wasn't ready for release until 1961, by which time it felt less like an earthquake and more than like an later on-tremor. By 1974, the time of Rivette's fourth feature, people might well have wondered if the French New Wave was even still a thing. Godard had retreated into Marxist video experiments, Truffaut and Chabrol looked increasingly traditional, and Rohmer had finished his Moral Tales and needed a new direction.

Everything has to end somewhere, so with Céline and Julie Go Boating Rivette takes the nouvelle vague down a rabbit hole. Riffing on Alice in Wonderland, he spins a yarn near two female friends (Dominique Labourier and Juliet Berto) who discover that sucking mysterious boiled sweets transports them to a strange house where a strong menstruum-clothed melodrama is playing out. It'due south a motion-picture show about spells in which the magic is everyday, and a film near narrative in which the 'story' seems grasped out of the air of the summer's solar day when we first run across Céline in a Paris park. The New Wave may have receded, only Rivette was still intent on pushing the boat out.

See likewise: Paris nous appartient (1961), L'Amour fou (1969)

Your suggestions

Jules et Jim (1962)

To our list above, you voted to add these classics of the French New Wave…

  1. Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
  2. Les Quatre Cents Coups (François Truffaut, 1959)
  3. Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
  4. Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
  5. Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960)
  6. Lift to the Scaffold (Louis Malle, 1958)
  7. Bob le flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)
  8. Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
  9. Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959)
  10. Paris nous appartient (Jacques Rivette, 1961)

The votes are counted and this week's winner as the picture you thought was the almost glaring omission from our list is François Truffaut'southward immortal ménage-à-trois romance Jules et Jim.