Background.

In the mid to late 1960s a group of young film directors began, quite independently of one another, to form the beginnings of an American art cinema. Serving as their inspiration were the rich and challenging films by Italian, Swedish, British, and especially French directors. In France in the late 1950s directors Francois Truffaut] and Jean-Luc Godard, themselves inspired by American filmmaking, formulated the auteur theory, in which the director is the primary creative force of a film. This theory held that the various works of one director are thematically, if not structurally, linked. What interested American directors about the French films was their form, which often featured unusual camera angles, cuts, and movements and were often narratively and visually disjointed. Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962) and The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1959) embodied this bold new filmmaking style. The Americans were also influenced by...