'Conventions' of French New Wave

Deconstruction : Their movies deconstruct cinema, narrative, the separation between a actor and a character and the role of the audience as passive watchers of a movie and much of traditional storytelling.


Doing It for the Art : Believers and practitioners, who tended to keep pushing their limits and go against contemporary trends even when their films became the trend.


Downer Ending : Not big believers in the Happy Ending or endings on the whole. Gainax Ending was a common occurence.


Existentialism : Rougly contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, he was a major influence on all their films, even a Catholic like Eric Rohmer.


The Face Of The Band : François Truffaut initially and then Jean-Luc Godard, especially after the former's death.


Follow the Leader: The directors of the new wave pioneered all kinds of production and editing techniques like the Jump Cut which went on to inspire the New Hollywood and much of the film-school graduated professionals who worked in advertising and music videos.


Foreign Culture Fetish: Hollywood and American culture (authors like Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner, George Gershwin and Bob Fosse) were constantly identified as touchstones though the New Wave radically broke away from the classical style of film-making.


Genre-Busting : The French New Wave believed and practiced this, their films combing styles and themes and motifs from different genres.


Homage : A frequent claim for their film's many references.


Last of His Kind: With the death of Jacques Rivette in January, 29, 2016, Jean-Luc Godard is the last of the New Wave, having outlived all his friends.


Lets See You Do Better: They were pioneering film critics — one of the first to use tape recorders^note From Grundig, one of the few brands that advertised in their magazine during The '50s to interview film-makers and produce long-form detailed profiles that had never been done before, in addition to extensive research and cross-referencing by tracking names across movie credits. And they became pioneering film-makers.


Serious Business : As critics and as directors, they took film-making in all its aspects very seriously. Eric Rohmer stated that audiences who didn't like Howard Hawks didn't understand cinema and Jean-Luc Godard became famous for his many comments on a similar note.


"Shaggy Dog" Story / Shoot the Shaggy Dog : Their movies tend to have very thin plot and the story keeps subverting any narrative resolution. Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us is a conspiracy movie without a conspiracy, the atmosphere generally stemming from the Cold War Post-Historical Trauma.


Shadow Archetype : To the British Invasion as well as artists like Bob Dylan. They achieved in movies what The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Dylan did in their music in the same time. Their works were widely seen and greatly influenced the same set. Marianne Faithfull made a cameo in a Godard film and Godard made a film documenting the recording of Sympathy for the Devil with the Stones.


Shout-Out : To the whole of film history, literature, art, history, architecture and contemporary advertising.


Small Reference Pools : French cinema tends to avert this, but the New Wave were even bigger aversions. The films of Jean-Luc Godard in particular engaging with everything from philosophy to science, fashion to contemporary advertising, to movies from every era, to Modernist architecture, fiction, painting and music.


Start My Own: The movement was created by some film critics who thought they could make better movies on their own.


Three Chords and the Truth: The New Wave were believers and practitioners in the cinematic equivalent. At a time when Hollywood were making the Epic Movie, expensive, big-budget blockbusters, they argued for smaller, intimate films about everyday life and problems, using real locations instead of giant sets, natural lighting instead of studio lighting (which the new cameras and improved film stock made possible) and direct sound instead of studio-produced soundtrack. It should be noted that this wasn't a total dogma for them and the New Wave would move away from them, but generally their credo is embodied by Godard:

Jean-Luc Godard: All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.

Viewers Are Geniuses : Major believers in this. Their narratives did not wrap everything neatly, and many of them expected their films be seen twice to get the meaning and emotional force from their films.