The films did not make themselves. Behind every New Wave picture was a producer who believed in it, a journal that argued for it, a movement that made room for it, an editor who shaped it in three weeks flat. This is that other story.
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Les Films du Carrosse
Founded by François Truffaut in 1957 and named after Renoir’s The Golden Coach, Les Films du Carrosse was the production house through which Truffaut made every film of his career. A declaration of independence from the industry he had spent years attacking in print.
Argos Films
Anatole Dauman’s company. Produced Resnais, Marker, Varda — the institutional backbone of the Left Bank.
Les Films de la Pléiade
Pierre Braunberger’s house. Backed Godard’s early shorts and co-produced À bout de souffle.
Rome-Paris Films
Georges de Beauregard’s operation. Co-produced Breathless and Demy’s early work.
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Positif
Founded in Lyon in 1952, Positif positioned itself in direct opposition to Cahiers du Cinéma — surrealist where Cahiers was formalist, and fiercely dismissive of auteur theory as Truffaut practised it. The argument between the two journals defined French film criticism for three decades.
L’Âge du Cinéma
Short-lived Lettrist journal, 1951. Published Isou’s first film criticism and prefigured the underground.
Cinéthique
The Maoist rival to post-’68 Cahiers. Argued for a cinema of productive contradiction, not pleasure.
La Revue du Cinéma
The 1940s predecessor that Jean-Georges Auriol edited. Intellectual ancestor of Cahiers.
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Lettrism
Isidore Isou’s movement, arriving in Paris from Romania in 1945, placed the letter — not the word, not the sentence — at the centre of a new art. In cinema it meant treating image and soundtrack as separate, independent materials to be broken apart. Debord, before the Situationists, came from here.
The Left Bank
Varda, Resnais, Marker — the other New Wave. More literary, more political, less interested in Hollywood.
Poetic Realism
Carné, Prévert, Gabin. The 1930s mode the New Wave was partly reacting against — and partly continuing.
Situationism
Debord’s framework; shaped Godard’s post-’68 turn and the Dziga Vertov Group’s practice.
Cécile Decugis
Truffaut’s editor on Les Mistons and The 400 Blows; later Godard’s on Le Petit Soldat. Her involvement tracks the early New Wave more precisely than almost any other biography.
Georges Delerue
The composer whose strings became synonymous with Truffaut’s romantic register. Scored Godard, Malle and Resnais at various points in the 1960s.
Henri Decaë
Cinematographer on Le Beau Serge, The 400 Blows, Le Doulos. Fast film stock, available light — a different image altogether.
Ghislain Cloquet
Shot Marker’s La Jetée, Demy’s Donkey Skin, Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar. One of the great uncommemorated cameramen of the period.
Bronze Screen Dream 