From the Emergence to the Decline of the French New Wave: A Film Practice Movement Continually Generated Within Politics

Abstract

This article reconsiders the French New Wave's emergence, apogee, and dissipation through a socio-political lens. Rather than a sudden aesthetic rupture, it was a "prepared rebellion." The Occupation and postwar institutional consolidation supplied organizational infrastructure and market preconditions; Soviet montage and Italian Neorealism, mediated by André Bazin's realist hermeneutics, furnished its aesthetic and ethical foundations. Juxtaposing Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the article traces an internal split over the politics-cinema nexus: Godard moves from making political films to filming politically, while Truffaut sustains humanist narration and a micropolitics that frames auteur cinema as an ethics of communication with spectators. May 1968 marks the turning point-from the Langlois Affair to the suspension of Cannes-when the film field politicized itself, catalyzing political modernism and militant cinema and accelerating both collective fragmentation and the New Wave's 1970s ebb. Its historical significance thus exceeds low-budget practice or auteurist technique: through the interplay of institutions, aesthetic paradigms, and political events, it reconfigured cinema's possibilities as social practice and shaped later European and global film form and thought.