They were a bunch of university-type guys (and almost all of them were men), fitted by temperament and background for study and scholarship, who ran away to join the circus. But along the way, they studied the circus as it had never been studied before, and, when they got into the show, incorporated the results of their critical study (and even its very practice) into their routines. (The New Wave was greatly influenced by German Romanticism, and one of the keys to their cinematic adventure is Goethe’s novel “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” the story of a young bourgeois who joins a travelling theatre company.) The great paradox of the politique des auteurs is that it was a repudiation of respectable culture—but their disreputable passions were widely received as respectable. Their aesthetic hedonism soon became both a cornerstone of the ardent young intellectual’s self-definition and the main line of academic cinema studies. What started as a vehemently anarchic movement, energized by dropouts and grungily self-marginalizing graduates, got picked up by good students and grad students and systematized, normalized, turned into a sort of career path, as much for professors as for directors.