What they proposed in their own work was a personal style and personal stories-characteristics that became the hallmarks of the New Wave. Although he admired Renoir enormously, Truffaut and his young colleagues were critical of the French film establishment.1 They criticized Claude Autant-Lara and Rene Clement for being too literary in their screen stories and not descriptive enough in their style. These critics and future filmmakers wrote about Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, Anthony Mann, and Nicholas Ray-all Hollywood filmmakers. Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette were all key figures, and it was Truffaut who wrote the important article "Les Politiques des Auteurs," which heralded the director as the key creative person in the making of a film. What developed in Paris in the post-war period was a film culture in which film critics and lovers of film moved toward becoming filmmakers themselves. The writing about film was cultural as well as theoretical, but the viewing of film was global, embracing film as part of popular culture as well as an artistic achievement. The New Wave began in 1959 with the consecutive releases of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, but in fact its seeds had developed ten years earlier in the writing of Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin and the film programming of Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque in Paris.
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