The French New Wave was not primarily a technical revolution. It was a philosophical one.

Gosse-grained film stock, handheld cameras, location shooting, jump cuts — these are the technical signatures of the New Wave. But these techniques were means to an end, and the end was a different relationship between filmmaker and material.

Truffaut and Godard and Rivette were not interested in the seamless classical Hollywood cinema. They were interested in the marks that cinema leaves on the world — the gaps, the contingencies, the accidents. The jump cut in À bout de souffle is not primarily a stylistic flourish. It's a refusal of the invisible edit, which is itself a refusal of the idea that cinema should conceal its own construction.

The influence of the French New Wave on American cinema in the 1970s was not primarily technical either. What Scorsese and Coppola borrowed was the permission to treat cinema as personal expression rather than professional craft. The auteur theory was the French New Wave's most exportable product, and like most exported ideas, it lost some nuance in translation.