French broadcast of American films by Jean Renoir, René Clair and Julien Duvivier crystallized the great critical and ideological tensions between 1944 and 1948. At the time of the Blum-Byrnes agreements, French cinema sought to constitute a collective identity. The concept of “resistance” was introduced from the border, thus allowing a double exclusion: those who, inside the group, had not resisted (purging, at least part of the artists who collaborated during the war) just like those who placed themselves outside. Thus, the fact that Duvivier, Clair and Renoir left for Hollywood during the war was not very well accepted, the more so as it took long for them to return, at one moment when the French cinema needed them. To the point where their presence (or absence) of these directors on the national scene sometimes warped the reception of their films, at least by the critics. More than one reason for a political combat, the Blum-Byrnes agreements seemed consequently the catalyst of a mobilization for French cinema, destiny to be fought not as well as to find itself and to be defined. In the immediate future post-war period, French cinema undoubtedly needed to find an enemy so as to better understand what it really wanted to be.