In 1951, with the first yellow, black and white cover sporting Gloria Swanson and William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard," Cahiers du Cinema was launched. Although its sales rarely rose above 15,000 a month, the influence of this French intellectual publication was enormous. It sprang up, like a score of such magazines, in the postwar film frenzy that enveloped Paris when movies undistributed during the occupation streamed into art houses on the Left Bank. A generation of cinephiles were thus prepared to "rediscover" the American cinema and reevaluate the French cinema.

"Citizen Kane" and "The Little Foxes," both released in New York in 1941, were not seen in Paris until 1945, when they dazzled the apostles of deep focus, particularly Andre Bazin, who was acknowledged by the early Cahiers critics as their mentor and spiritual parent. On the screens and in the lobby of the Cinematheque, where decades of movies could be seen and reseen, studied and discussed, the politique des auteurs was born.

Beginning tomorrow, the Cahiers du Cinema and its director-oriented esthetic will be the subject of "Postwar French Film: Cahiers du Cinema Selects," a belated 40th birthday salute in the form of 14 films to be shown through March 17 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Among the directors represented are such old favorites as Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as such newer auteurs as Benoit Jacquot, Catherine Breillat and Francois Dupeyron.

The auteurist theory of the Cahiers writers involved not only an increased admiration for such hitherto unfashionable film makers as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, but also a deeper perception of the supposedly minor genres in which they worked. Indeed, the "little subjects" of film noir and romantic comedy became more revelatory than the official classics of social consciousness. Personal directorial styles were more conspicuous without the distracting political issues and literary cachet of the more critically respectable and "significant" works. Much of this revisionism was facilitated by a linguistic handicap: because Francois Truffaut, Mr. Godard, Mr. Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol didn't understand English very well, they concentrated on the images and thus pioneered visual analysis of American westerns, gangster films and other genres that had been dismissed by Anglophone critics.

The discoveries of the Cahiers critics were matched by awesome blind spots, and in their idiosyncrasies they were children of the 1950's. They loved wide screen and color and preferred the Cinemascope westerns of Anthony Mann to the graceful westerns of John Ford, and the garish comedies of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis to the comic subtleties of earlier directors like Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch.

If they championed the artistry of Hollywood film makers like Hawks, Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor, their attitude served also as a way of denouncing the French "tradition of quality" that they professed to despise. Many of their targets were beloved in America as French art films -- Jean Delannoy's "Symphonie Pastorale" (1946), adapted from the Andre Gide...