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The introductory montage of Jules and Jim (1962) and the minutes that follow illustrate that the titular men, Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre), live a bohemian life of whimsy and art, through which they have built a friendship that is almost magically profound in nature.

Truffaut tells us about these characters and foreshadows the events of the film with each brief shot. We find that Jules is a German import in Paris, he’s attempting to attend a ball, and Jim helps him gain admission though the two hardly know one another. As all this is being said through voiceover, the men simply play dominoes. The dominoes become a leitmotif born in the first seconds of the film, recurring throughout the pair’s life, eventually spreading to the other people in their lives who are yet to exist.

Before that, as the men rummage through a trunk full of clothes, we gather their collective appreciation for accepting life as it happens, while Jules specifically searches for a slave costume indicative of the thematic emotional enslavement to Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in which he will spend most of the film. (Both titular men, as well as others, fall victim to Catherine’s wiles, but none so profoundly as Jules). The fellows trot a cobbled street with frivolity representative of their lifestyles, and of the audience demographic who would identify with the French New Wave theory of life, as it would be later dubbed.

Jules and Jim are mutual with all their actions, their trust for one another shown in the later frames of the opening sequence when Jim pretends to be blind and Jules hops on his back. The two move forward unaware of their destination, in the same manner they navigate these younger years of their lives.

Throughout these scenes, time is condensed through editing, selection of images, and the use of laconic voice-over narration, which presents the information in short form and also establishes a story is being told—one of the past, where the events have already unfolded and are now being recollected by a third party. What is being shown and what is being stated by the narrator are always linked in a complementary fashion, wherein the visual scenes work to emphasize the profundity of the spoken word as opposed to merely illustrating what is being said. It flows like a reading of a children’s book, free of hyperbole, presented in a rather deadpan tone, merely stating things of significance with consistently-paced candor.

The opening also informs us Truffaut will be using exaggerated techniques throughout the film. Retrospectively, this is the expectation of what became French New Wave—and Jules and Jim is a defining entry in showing what the art was all about. The components, from the freeze-frames, usage of stock footage, handheld camerawork, photographic stills, pan shots, wipes, dolly shots, voiceover; all are the keystones of the movement. Truffaut and his peers were linked by a spirited iconoclasm and location-based, socially-charged experimental filmmaking concepts which Jules and Jim demonstrates from its first frames.

The opening sequence of Jules and Jim also introduces the film’s awkward and unsettling emotional grain. It is fast and free, hapless and whimsical—a strong contrast to the slow and sobering shots that finish the film 90 minutes later. The cinematography moves with the characters, whose relationships with one another and with Catherine become complex and weary through the years of age, love, war, and evolution.

Much of what has established Jules and Jim, along with Godard’s Breathless (1960), as one of the pinnacle achievements of French New Wave can be seen in the early minutes of the film.