Byline: MORRIS WOLFE

MORRIS WOLFE FIRST there was Henri Langlois, founder of Paris's Cinematheque Francaise, a film archive that became the most important, informal film school in the world. Francois Truffaut began attending in 1948, at age 16. There he met Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Andre Bazin, who became his mentor.

Langlois regularly screened acknowledged film classics such as Potemkin and The Blue Angel. But he also had strong views of his own. He'd rediscovered the serials of Louis Feuillade - Fantomas (1913-14), for example. He insisted on the importance of American filmmakers such as Eric von Stroheim and Howard Hawks. Hawks became a favourite of the "children of the Cinematheque" as they came to refer to themselves. According to Rivette, Hawks "taught (us) all that is best in the classical American cinema."

Then, in 1951, came Cahiers du Cinema, a monthly journal published in Paris that was to have a profound influence on the film world. Thus began a process, wrote Colin Young, director of London's National Film School, "by which a generation of critics tried to develop critical theories of the type which are common in other forms of art criticism but which were...