The new waves of the 1950s and 1960s

From the late 1950s, young filmmakers in many countries broke with established film industries. Lighter cameras, faster film stocks, portable synchronized sound and new sources of funding made it possible to shoot quickly on the streets with small crews. Critics turned directors, film schools, state funds and festivals supported new talent, and audiences of the postwar generation wanted films that spoke to their lives. This lesson surveys the French New Wave, British, Brazilian, Czechoslovak and German new waves, and the direct cinema and new cinema of Quebec, which grew from the National Film Board's French unit during the Quiet Revolution.

The conditions for change

Several developments came together around 1958 to 1962:

• Technology: lightweight 16 mm and 35 mm cameras that could be handheld, faster film stocks that worked in available light, and portable magnetic tape recorders, such as the Nagra introduced in the late 1950s, which made synchronized location sound practical.
• Funding: governments in several countries began offering grants, loans and advances for first features and for films of artistic or cultural value.
• Film culture: archives, film societies, film magazines and festivals created informed audiences and gave young critics a platform.
• Generational change: postwar young people rejected the conventions of what they saw as an outdated "cinema of quality" and wanted films about modern life, sexuality, politics and youth.

These conditions produced remarkably similar movements in different countries within a few years.

The French New Wave

In France, critics writing for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, attacked the polished literary adaptations of mainstream French cinema and championed directors, including Hollywood genre filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, whom they saw as true authors of their films. This "politique des auteurs", later called auteur theory in English, held that a director's personal vision could be traced across their films regardless of studio or genre.

Many of these critics learned cinema by watching films at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, run by Henri Langlois. Then they began making their own films. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), about a troubled boy in Paris, won the directing award at Cannes. Godard's Breathless (1960), about a small-time criminal and his American girlfriend, shocked audiences with jump cuts, handheld camera, direct address and casual, improvised-seeming performances. Agnès Varda, whose La Pointe Courte (1955) is often seen as a precursor of the movement, made Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), following a singer through two hours of Paris in nearly real time.

Typical features of New Wave films include:

• Location shooting with small crews and available light.
• Handheld cameras and long takes alongside sudden jump cuts.
• Loose narratives, open endings and digressions.
• References to other films and to the act of filmmaking itself.
• Young protagonists and contemporary urban life.

The French New Wave's direct influence lasted only a few years as a group movement, but its techniques and its idea of the director as author spread worldwide and shaped film criticism, film schools and independent filmmaking for decades.

The British New Wave

In Britain, the "Free Cinema" documentaries of the mid-1950s and the "angry young men" of theater and literature fed a wave of social-realist features from about 1959 to 1963. Films such as Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961) were shot partly on location in industrial northern England, featured working-class characters and dealt frankly with class, sexuality and frustration. These "kitchen sink" dramas, filmed in black and white, influenced British television drama and later social-realist filmmakers.

Cinema Novo in Brazil

Brazilian Cinema Novo emerged in the early 1960s, led by filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Inspired by Neorealism and the French New Wave but rooted in Brazilian politics and culture, Cinema Novo addressed poverty, hunger, land and colonialism. Rocha's manifesto, often translated as "An Aesthetic of Hunger" (1965), argued that films from poor countries should not imitate Hollywood polish but make poverty and violence visible. Its slogan was often summarized as "a camera in the hand and an idea in the head." After the 1964 military coup and especially from 1968, censorship and repression pushed filmmakers toward allegory or exile. Cinema Novo influenced the broader "Third Cinema" movement in Latin America, which called for politically committed film outside both Hollywood and European art cinema.

The Czechoslovak New Wave

In Czechoslovakia, graduates of the Prague film school, FAMU, made bold, often satirical and absurdist films in the mid-1960s as censorship relaxed. Directors such as Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová and Jiří Menzel used non-professional actors, improvisation and experimental styles. Chytilová's Daisies (1966) follows two young women in an anarchic, colorful revolt; Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966) won the Academy Award for foreign language film. After the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968 ended the Prague Spring reforms, many films were banned, and some directors, including Forman, emigrated; Forman later won Academy Awards for American films.

New German Cinema

In West Germany, 26 young filmmakers signed the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, declaring "Papa's cinema is dead" and demanding a new, independent cinema. Government funding bodies and television co-productions eventually supported directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Margarethe von Trotta, whose films in the 1970s confronted Germany's Nazi past, postwar prosperity and alienation. New German Cinema showed how public funding and television partnerships could sustain a national art cinema, a model relevant to Canada.

Direct cinema and the NFB

In North America, new lightweight equipment transformed documentary. At the National Film Board, the English-language Unit B produced the Candid Eye television series (1958–1961), observing everyday life with portable cameras. In the United States, Robert Drew's team, including Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles, made Primary (1960), following John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey during a Wisconsin primary election with handheld camera and synchronized sound. This observational approach, without narration or interviews, became known as direct cinema.

In France, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer (1961) took a different path, called cinéma vérité, in which filmmakers openly provoked and interviewed their subjects and appeared on camera. Rouch credited the Quebec filmmakers he worked with, and the NFB's French unit was at the center of these developments.

Quebec cinema and the Quiet Revolution

Quebec's Quiet Revolution, the period of rapid social, political and cultural change that began around 1960, transformed Quebec society and its cinema. At the NFB, which moved its headquarters from Ottawa to Montreal in 1956, French-speaking filmmakers gained more independence and created a cinema about Quebec life in Quebec French. Michel Brault, a pioneering camera operator, developed handheld techniques that moved the camera among people rather than observing from a distance. Les Raquetteurs (1958), a short film by Brault and Gilles Groulx about a snowshoe convention, is often cited as a founding work of this style.

Brault and Pierre Perrault's Pour la suite du monde (1963) followed the people of Île-aux-Coudres as they revived a traditional beluga whale hunt, giving voice to their language and memories; it was the first Canadian film selected for competition at Cannes. Groulx's Le chat dans le sac (1964), about a young Montrealer questioning his identity and politics, blended fiction and documentary techniques and became a landmark of Quebec's new cinema. Claude Jutra's Mon oncle Antoine (1971), about a boy coming of age in a small mining town, is often ranked among the greatest Canadian films; later revelations about Jutra's sexual abuse of minors, made public in 2016, led institutions to remove his name from awards and places, an example of how film history and its honors are reassessed.

For American audiences, direct cinema became a defining American documentary style through Drew Associates, the Maysles brothers, Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman, whose observational films about institutions began with Titicut Follies (1967), while the New American Cinema Group of independent and experimental filmmakers in New York published a manifesto in 1961 calling for personal, low-budget filmmaking.

Legacies of the new waves

The new waves changed more than style. They helped establish the idea that a national cinema could be built around personal, low-budget films supported by public money, festivals and film culture rather than by a commercial studio system. Film schools expanded in many countries during and after the 1960s, often teaching the history and techniques of the new waves as models. Critics adopted auteur theory as a standard way to write about films, sometimes overlooking the collaborative work of cinematographers, editors, writers and actors. Later movements in many countries, from the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s to independent filmmakers in North America, explicitly described themselves as heirs of the new waves. When you watch a contemporary film shot handheld on location with a small crew and non-professional actors, you are seeing techniques that became widely available and celebrated around 1960.