Hey John, I wrote this 4 years ago for a class- I was going to cut and paste the pertinent sentences but I have to go- maybe this will help.
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Though never officially classified as a cinematic movement, the French New Wave was inarguably a cinema revolution, born from myriad factors of aesthetic rejection, intellectual camaraderie, technological innovation, and necessary change. The directors of the French New Wave such as Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and many others, pioneered a new film language free from tradition, and from the constricts of the classical Hollywood narrative structure. Characterized by the use of techniques popularly unheard of prior to its arrival in the late 1950s, the directors of the French New Wave employed brute imagination, in direction as well as in editing, crafting their stories visually, encouraging the realism of the time and of the moment. The advent of smaller, portable sound recording equipment, lighter cameras and faster film stocks allowed a young generation of directors to take their visions on location to the streets of France, fostering a sense of environmental truth, enhanced by the casting of fresh faces in new roles, often as outcasts, antiheroes, and the sexually liberated. The French New Wave changed the role of the audience, asking it to become participants in, rather than consumers of the story. New styles of editing, such as the jump cuts, post synchronization and overlaying of dialogue in Godard's A Bout de Souffle and Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amor, and the introduction of the freeze frame at the end of Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups subtly announced the presence of the film maker behind the camera, and required a new kind of analytical viewer-ship. Les Cahiers du Cinema, founded by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Andre Bazin, and a group of young film critics, including Francois Truffaut in 1951, supplied the innovators of the French New Wave with the auteur theory, based around the concept of camerastylo ("cinema as an autonomous language, with the author 'writing' with the camera (Lanzoni. French Cinema. London, 2002),") and was contended by another influential review, Positif, which emerged in 1952 with ideas such as content versus form, giving the young auteurs a strong intellectual base to draw from.
Yet the French New Wave was born more as a tribute than as a revolution in the early 1950s. It was a new school of thought, forwarded by such models as Jean Pierre Melville, who directed unknown actors in Le Silence de la Mer in 1947 under a tiny budget. Seen as a godfather of the French New Wave, he inspired and was revered by the emerging auteurs, and over a decade later would honor Godard by playing the role of the pompous reporter interviewed by Patricia in A Bout de Souffle. He was one of the first filmic individualists, belonging to no school or thought group, he focused on the 'interior cinema' and founded his own production company in 1946. Le Silence de la Mer was remarkably photographed by Henri Decae, who was promptly launched and became one of the most contracted cinematographers of the New Wave, working with directors Truffaut (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1960), Chabrol (Les Cousins 1959, Le beau Serge, 1959, Les bonnes Femmes 1960), Clement (Purple Noon) and many, many others. He was admired for not only for his fluid pans and tracking shots, but for his enthusiasm and adeptness on set. Raoul Coutard was another precursor to the New Wave, being one of the first to utilize faster film stock and handheld cameras, precise framing, experimental camera angles and scene composition. As an art director, he worked with Godard in A Bout de Souffle and with Truffaut in Tirez sur le Pianiste and went on to enjoy a bountiful career in French cinema. Jean Rouch was also an integral factor in the evolution of French cinema, one of the first directors to embrace direct cinema, or cinema verite, using the natural light to capture ethnographic realism. The originator of verite film form however, may have been Georges Franju, who in 1934 explored the possibilities of personal expression in documentary form, and later, in Le Sang des Betes (1949) coupled images of beautifully photographed French suburbia with images of sheep and cattle being slaughtered and skinned, drastically defying convention and categorization. It is this same defiance of convention and the absence of category that created the French New Wave, and it was the French New Wave that made a lasting and permanent ripple around the globe that is still being felt today.
American directors of the 1960s through today have been inspired and influenced by the French New Wave. Films like Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, made in 1967 with Warren Beatty pay direct homage to the French New Wave with rapid, chaotic cuts, intense pacing and contradicting, complementary soundtracks. Robert Altman, Francis Coppola, Robert De Palma, Martin Scorcese, Mike Figgis, Tom Tykwer, Quentin Tarantino and Sofia Coppola have all applauded and sighted the significant influence that the directors of the French New Wave have had on their work, and the methods once thought of as mad by traditional French critics (like handheld cameras) are now so abundant in modern American film making that they have become almost a creative standard of their own, encouraging a constant ingenuity and experimentation in all aspects of film making.