Auteurism
In 1954, twenty-two-year-old Truffaut wrote "A Certain Tendency of French Cinema." There are no good films and bad films, he argued — only good directors and bad ones. It was a combative piece, naming screenwriters and picking a fight. When the idea crossed the ocean, it changed shape. In 1962, the American critic Andrew Sarris introduced it as "auteur theory" and gave it a system. The following year, 1963, Pauline Kael wrote a rebuttal: this risked becoming nothing more than admiring a director's tics. It's often said this was a long, fierce argument, but the actual back-and-forth seems to have been shorter than that. What happened here also happened in another band of this map: a word that crosses the ocean becomes a different word on the other side. In France it had been a flag to fight under; in America it became a theory for classification.
Even so, this word made things visible that hadn't been visible before. Bergman, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Antonioni — they stopped being received simply as "foreign films" and started being read as "that person's work." Reading a film by its author's name is a habit we now take for granted, but it was a circuit criticism invented.
This band has one more story, about someone who protected film itself. In February 1968, France's Minister of Culture dismissed Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque. Truffaut, Godard, Simone Signoret, and Jean Renoir, among others, stood up in protest; it grew into a demonstration of three thousand people that clashed with police, and Godard's glasses were broken. He was reinstated in April. Looking back, people call this a preview of May '68. On May 19 that same year, they shut down the Cannes Film Festival itself.