French Names: New Wave Classics

In late 1950s France there emerged a group of young intellectual, experimental filmmakers, including François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean–Luc Goddard, who became known collectively as La Nouvelle Vague or New Wave, and changed the face of film.

In films like Breathless, they rebelled against traditional French cinema, employing such groundbreaking techniques as using  real locations, hand-held cameras, natural lighting and improvised scripts, jump cuts, voiceovers and slanguage, all of which had a profound influence on such later American directors as Martin Scorese, Francis Ford Coppola, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino.

But though their techniques emigrated across the Atlantic, the names of many of the characters in their films did not, and, looking through the casts of characters in these movies, we find a variety of fresh options, particularly on the female side, with sleek ine-_ending choices and feminissima _ette names.

GIRLS

BOYS

And next week we’ll be taking a look at the Italian names in Fellini-era films.