For Rivette and his colleagues at Cahiers, and for a large part of the French film world, May started in February, with “ L’affaire Langlois“: the board of directors of the Cinémathèque française had received direct order from de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, André Malraux, to relieve Henri Langlois of his duties as secretary general. Malraux, a hero of the Resistance and, at the time of his flirtation with communism, a leftist icon, had already become persona non grata at Cahiers after the censoring of Rivette’s The Nun (1966), which had prompted prompting Godard’s famous open letter, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, addressing Malraux as the minister of “Kultur“ and prime minister Pompidou as “Gestapo.” Malraux intended to replace the whole board of the Cinémathèque-including Langlois’s closest collaborators, Mary Meerson, Lotte Eisner, Marie Epstein-with civil servants, under the pretext of redressing Langlois’s disastrous management. Immediately a Cinémathèque Defense Committee was established, headquartered at Cahiers, and managed mostly by Truffaut, whose task mostly consisted of collecting signatures in protest and missives from important filmmakers Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang and Carl Theodor Dreyer-threatening to withdraw their films from the Cinémathèque if the situation was not corrected.Ī first demonstration organized by the Defense Committee was held in front of the Palais de Chaillot, the temple of culture that housed the Musée de l’homme and the Théâtre national populaire. The demonstration-which also included Nicholas Ray, next to other prominent actors and filmmakers both young and old (Carné was there to represent the ancien régime of the French cinema, the cinéma de papa)-ended with the police charging into the crowd. The demonstrations that followed, this time in the Rue de Courcelles, the site of the Cinémathèque, included student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

The spectacle yoko ono disrupting