There was cinema before the French New Wave, and there was cinema after. The explosion of creative innovation that emanated from France in the late 1950s and early ’60s forever altered the course of film history by opening up new avenues of stylistic experimentation and trumpeting the concept of the “auteur” director, whose aesthetic vision and thematic obsessions took center stage. Featuring early works and rarities by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer, this selection of nouvelle vague shorts charts the evolution of a movement that rewrote the rules of cinema by liberating it from commercial demands and reclaiming it in the name of unfettered personal expression.