Widely considered the best film by director Francois Truffaut and one of the best films of the French New Wave, "Jules and Jim" is a collage of film techniques, including the use of freeze frames and photographs, narration, newsreel footage and innovative editing. The plot revolves around the intertwined love and relationships and friendships between three people. The film is based on Henri-Pierre Roché's semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund.
"The 400 Blows," directed by Francois Truffaut, is one of the defining films of the French New Wave movement and one of the first to usher in the new style. The story, with its natural dialog, setting and sound, was semi-autobiographical. The story focuses on a young boy in Paris who gets caught up in the juvenile offenders system. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay and is considered one of the best ever made.
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, "Pierrot Le Fou" is the story of unhappy Ferdinand Griffon, who has been fired from his job and who stumbles into a series of events which echo a typical Hollywood thriller. But Godard uses the thriller genre as a starting point for a film filled with references to literature, art and other films. "Pierrot le Fou" also stands out because of its nontraditional effects, including the use of bright primary colors.
Another one of the earliest French New Wave films, "The Good Girls" (titled "Les Bonnes Femmes" in French) provides a look at how the new aesthetic could be mixed with the traditional suspense of a director like Alfred Hitchcock. Director Claude Chabrol tells the story of four Parisian shop girls over a short period of time. But Chabrol's story was realistic and unsentimental, without a traditional Hollywood ending, which made it quite a departure for the era.