[4] This was apparent in a manifesto-like 1954 essay by François Truffaut, Une certaine tendance du cinéma français, where he denounced the adaptation of safe literary works into unimaginative films.

[5] Along with Truffaut, a number of writers for Cahiers du cinéma became leading New Wave filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol.

The combination of realism, subjectivity, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end.

"Kitchen sink realism" as an artistic approach intellectually challenging social conventions and traditions in the U.K. is an example, as are some elements of the "new sincerity" subculture within the U.S. that involve deliberately defying certain critical expectations in filmmaking.

Alexandre Astruc's manifesto "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo", published in L'Écran on 30 March 1948, outlined some of the ideas that were later expanded upon by François Truffaut and the Cahiers du cinéma.

"[8] Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for the famous film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.

Apart from the role that films by Jean Rouch have played in the movement, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is traditionally (but debatably) credited as the first New Wave feature.

Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959), and Godard, with Breathless (1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and financial, that turned the world's attention to the activities of the New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish.

Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Sam Fuller and Don Siegel[1] were held up in admiration.

Godard also acknowledged filmmakers such as Resnais, Astruc, Varda, and Demy as esteemed contemporaries, but said that they represented "their own fund of culture" and were separate from the New Wave.

[15] The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as long tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Weekend).

[17] The cinematic stylings of the French New Wave brought a fresh look to the cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that broke the common 180° axis of camera movement.

Godard was arguably the movement's most influential figure; his method of filmmaking, often used to shock and awe audiences out of passivity, was abnormally bold and direct.

In the context of social and economic troubles of a post-World War II France, filmmakers sought low-budget alternatives to the usual production methods, and were inspired by the generation of Italian Neorealists before them.

[18] On the other hand, the film as the object of knowledge challenges the usual transitivity on which all the other cinema was based, "undoing its cornerstones: space and time continuity, narrative and grammatical logics, the self-evidence of the represented worlds."

"[19] The corresponding "right bank" group is constituted of the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with Cahiers du cinéma (Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard).

Roud described a distinctive "fondness for a kind of Bohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in experimental filmmaking", as well as an identification with the political left.