French nouvelle vague
Group of individualistic French film directors of the late 1950s, including Claude Chabrol , François Truffaut , Jean-Luc Godard , Louis Malle , Eric Rohmer , Alain Resnais , and others.
Most of the New Wave directors were associated with the important film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma , in which they developed the highly influential auteur theory , calling for films to express the director's personal vision. Their films were characterized by a brilliance of technique that sometimes overshadowed the subject matter. Among the most important New Wave films were Godard's Breathless (1959), Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), and Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959).