The directors of the French New Wave were the original film geeks a collection of celluloid-crazed cinphiles with a background in film criticism and a love for American auteurs. Having spent countless hours slumped in Parisian cinmathques, they armed themselves with handheld cameras, rejected conventions, and successfully moved movies out of the studios and on to the streets at the end of the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Franois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol had changed the rules of filmmaking forever, but the movement as such was over. This guide reviews and analyses all of the major films in the movement and offers profiles of its principal stars, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina and Brigitte Bardot.
