Interview with Bertrand Tavernier at the Frasne station: he returns with pleasure to the Jean Becker cinema club in Pontarlier for the screening of three of his films and praises the work of this association: "we can talk freely with people who are interested in cinema it’s great". He particularly appreciates the contact with cinema enthusiasts who are far from certain Parisian fashions.
At the Carmaux high school, presentation of the activities of the film club created in 1960 by two teachers, and of the film club created two years later for students wishing to make cinema. Interviews and situational images of the members of the film club, interviews with teachers. The members of the filmmakers' club present their functions: two girls are respectively scripte or speakerine, four boys are they director, assistant director, editor or cameraman.
Michel Piccoli talks about the benefits of movie clubs: thanks to them, films that are not immediately marketable exist. The comedian is also pleased that movie clubs make audiences more critical and "aware of their choices".
At the end of a screening, students of a C.E.S. de Lambersart speak about the film club organised by their teachers. A boy declares that "the cinema-club is the way to be lucid, to say consciously what we unconsciously understood". A teenager thinks that the ideas we express are too influenced by the interventions of other students and especially teachers.
Jean-Paul Le Chanois, Henri Langlois and Lotte Eisner tell (alternately) how the cinema club "Le Cercle de cinéma" was created by Langlois and Franju in 1935. The screenings (of silent films only) were not followed by debates, which allowed everyone to come without the fear of being questioned. In the audience: Sartre, Beauvoir, Gide, Picasso, the Prévert group, the October group... Langlois presented the film with a kind of speech "a little incoherent" or "ridiculous" according to the protagonists' memories!
Georges Franju, alongside Henri Langlois, evokes their meeting in a printing shop where Langlois had been placed by his father to learn to have order, but "Langlois has a scientific sense of disorder"! Henri Langlois tells the circumstances of the creation in 1935 of the cinema club "Le Cercle du cinéma".
Report to the Ivry Popular Film Club, whose role is to complement a culture sometimes considered to be failing. This place allows to exchange political ideas and to develop the social sense of the participants. "Here the discussion is more important than the film that made it born". Images of the audience of this film club, interviews of a worker and a baker who frequent it. The latter explains the evolution of his relationship to cinema since he attended the cinema club, which gave him the means to judge.
Interview with Jean -Charles Tachella about "Travelling avant". With this film, the director recounts the life of film enthusiasts in 1948, which corresponds to the first big wave of cinema in France: "we opened cinemas everywhere, Langlois began his daily screenings at the Cinémathèque", "a whole culture was being created";
Interview with director François Truffaut who has just been elected president of the French Federation of Film Clubs. He explains the vital role of film clubs, and remembers how important they were to him as a young spectator in the post-war years. Later he was brought to work with André Bazin. He wants to develop exchanges between French and foreign film clubs.
In Sardent, village of his childhood, Claude CHABROL accompanied by the journalist Bertrand JEROME tells how he created and held a cinema club with the help of Georges MERCIER during the war.