Bonnie & Clyde is a product of the inspiration that Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty and Dede Allen took from the French New Wave style of filmmaking. This took a causal, freelance approach to filmmaking with no strings attached by conventional means of editing, cinematography, acting, dialogue and narrative. As a result, the film is edited in a way that brings our attention to the editing, as often the film will cut to the same image further on in time, and other times characters are further on in time after a cut, delineating, to an extent, from typical continuity editing. It also takes a new approach to camera work, often using handheld cameras and shaky camera work. The actors are unconvincing, and the dialogue is often written in a way that sounds unconvincing and undramatic.
Warren Beatty, the actor of Clyde and the films producer, had a large hand in the films final product. He chose the actors, the director, oversaw the script and wheeled the film into production in the first place. He took ideas from the French New Wave, and oversaw the film to ensure that it would contain imperfections. He also wanted to play Clyde as a morally grey character who killed, robbed, and suffered from impotency, going against the typical convention of a basically flawless, handsome, dashing male movie protagonist. He and Penn wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, shooting on location and using natural lighting, such as when the cloud goes overhead on the field as Clyde chases Bonnie. They wanted the film to be un-theatrical and wished to avoid creating any beauty in the film through cinematography, romance, or any way in which the film was made.
Dede Allen, the films editor, also took inspiration from the French New Wave. Her approach to editing was to avoid conventions, instead utilising apparent and often jarring methods. One editing technique popularised by the French New Wave was hard cuts, which are used in Bonnie & Clyde. Another is non-temporal editing, as often characters will be moving on one shot but much further on in time when the next shot appears, making the moment unnatural and the movement of the actor and editing of the scene jumpy and sometimes slightly jarring, alerting the audience to the films production. As did Penn and Beatty, she aimed to avoid any sort of conformity or comfortable typicality in the film that audiences were used to from other’s, using editing techniques that had an undertone of being unfinished/unpolished.
Arthur Penn took inspiration from the unconventional, unique style of filmmaking in the French New Wave. He incorporated this into Bonnie & Clyde in the overall product of the film feeling unfinished and different, clearly made with the aim of feeling different to other, more traditional films with strict narratives and forms of editing, cinematography, etc. He did this through making sure that the script felt off with its unnatural, for a film, dialogue that emulated real, un- orchestrated dialogue, similarly to the natural lighting and camera work affected by the hilly landscape it was filmed on, such as camera inside the car shaking as Bonnie and Clyde pulling up to see Malcom at the end of the film.
Finley Cairns A-Level Film Studies Blog 
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