1. A movement in French cinema in the 1960s, led by directors such as Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut, that abandoned traditional narrative techniques in favour of greater use of symbolism and abstraction and dealt with themes of social alienation, psychopathology, and sexual love. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/new+wave

3. Shooting on location

4. Natural lighting

5. Improvised dialogue and plotting

6. Direct sound recording

7. Long takes

8. In the 50s, a collective of intellectual French film critics, led by André Bazin and Jacques Donial-Valcroze, formed the groundbreaking journal of film criticism Cahiers du Cinema . Cahiers had two guiding principles: 1) A rejection of classical montage-style filmmaking (favored by studios up to that time) in favor of: mise-en-scene , or, literally, "placing in the scene" (favoring the reality of what is filmed over manipulation via editing), the long take, and deep composition. 2) A conviction that the best films are a personal artistic expression and should bear a stamp of personal authorship, much as great works of literature bear the stamp of the writer. This latter tenet would be dubbed by American film critic Andrew Sarris the "auteur (author) theory."