Whilst France was under under occupation by the Nazis during WWII, the screening of American movies was illegal. When the war was over, French cinemas were flooded with films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Orson Welles, and they were consumed eagerly by French film critics. In 1951, the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma was established. The authors of this journal - including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer - would watch each of the films by one of the aforementioned directors, and identify common themes and stylistic choices within their opuses (for example, the recurring theme of an innocent man on the run in Hitckcock's films). Based on this, Truffaut published the article "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" (