The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring and avant-garde techniques. This is a fresh look at the social, economic and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. Jean-Pierre Melville, Alexandre Astruc, and the young Agnes Varda all offered valuable narrative lessons and cheap production models. They were followed by Roger Vadim and Louis Malle, whose sexy storylines and lively new narrative strategies helped define a marketable, youthful cinema. But Neupert demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinema - especially Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard - who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave.