Despairing of the thematic clichés and rococo décor of their elders, a group of young Frenchmen—dubbed ‘The New Wave’ in 1958 by the French critic Pierre Billard—set out to re-invent film-making in France: first in theory, then in practice. The theoretical aspect, adumbrated in the new journal Cahiers du Cinéma, centred around the notion of the director as ‘auteur’: what these critics admired in Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, for example, or in the work of the Italian neo-realists, was their ‘autonomy’—the way they had managed to ‘sign’ their own films even when working within studios.
