On the Champs-Elysees in the late 1950s, cinematographer Raoul Coutard crammed himself inside a three-wheeled postal cart with a hole hacked in its side and secretly filmed actors walking down the sidewalk. That image captures the spirit of the French New Wave, a group of broke, movie-obsessed critics who dismantled the rules of traditional filmmaking. This episode explains what they were rebelling against: the post-war tradition of quality, with its polished literary adaptations and directors treated as mere technicians.

The conversation traces the movement's theoretical roots in Alexandre Astruc's 1948 camera-stylo essay, the Cahiers du Cinema critics guided by Andre Bazin and Henri Langlois, Francois Truffaut's 1954 manifesto, and the auteur theory that elevated Hollywood directors like Hitchcock, Welles, and Ford. It contrasts the Right ...