SILVER SCREEN

FRENCH CONNECTION: HOW POST-STRUCTURALISM ARRIVED IN THE USA

MICHEL HOBERMAN

June 25, 2026

October 1966. A group of French intellectuals arrive in the United States for what appears to be an ordinary academic conference at Johns Hopkins University. When a young philosopher named Jacques Derrida delivers a lecture challenging the foundations of structuralism, a chain reaction begins that will transform American intellectual life for decades to come.

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Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through Baltimore, New Haven, New York, and San Francisco, the film French Theory in America chronicles the migration of postwar French thought into US universities, bookstores, and political movements. As ideas circulate through students, artists, activists, and academics, their creators gradually lose control over what they have unleashed. Part road movie, part intellectual thriller, and part historical epic, the film explores the transformation of radical theory into cultural institution.

When French Theory in America was restored by the Cinémathèque Française in 2026 and screened again at Cannes fifty years after its premiere, audiences were astonished. What had once seemed like an esoteric film about a group of French philosophers suddenly appeared as a remarkably accurate portrait of the intellectual architecture of the contemporary world.

The original poster for French Theory in America (1976). Marketed in France as a road movie, in America as a philosophical thriller, and in universities as a hiring strategy.

French Theory in America originally premiered at Cannes in May 1976. Audiences reportedly did not know what to make of it. Some critics dismissed it as a three-hour seminar disguised as a road movie. Others hailed it as the first serious attempt to turn the history of ideas into cinema. Over time, Jacques Rivette’s film has acquired a near-mythical reputation. It belongs to that peculiar category of works that seem to describe not merely a historical moment but the conditions under which an entire intellectual world became possible.

The film begins in Baltimore in October 1966 at the now-legendary Johns Hopkins conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” Rivette stages the gathering not as an academic event but as a collision between worlds. Structuralism, then at the height of its influence in France, arrives in the United States carrying the confidence of a completed system. Into this orderly universe steps a young Jacques Derrida, played by a seventeen-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis in his first screen appearance. The performance lasts barely five minutes. Derrida speaks, a few faces in the audience register confusion, and the conference continues. Yet Rivette films the scene like the opening of a gangster movie, a small act whose consequences will spread through the remainder of the narrative. By the end of the film, one realizes that the lecture was not simply a scene, but the crime around which the entire plot would come to revolve.

From Baltimore, we follow Deleuze and Guattari across a country on the verge of intellectual transformation. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Deleuze is among the great performances of 1970s European cinema. Léaud plays him as neither a philosopher nor an academic, but a man perpetually fascinated by the world around him. He spends much of his on-screen time listening. Jean-Pierre Kalfon’s Guattari, by contrast, never stops talking. He rushes around with the energy of someone who suspects that history is accelerating and intends to keep pace.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Jacques Derrida moments before delivering the lecture that launched a thousand dissertations, twenty academic departments, and several decades of arguments about what the lecture actually meant.

What Rivette understands better than most historians is that French theory did not arrive in the United States as a coherent body of ideas. It arrived as gossip, fashion, rumor, misunderstanding, enthusiasm, ambition, and desire. The most memorable scenes take place not in lecture halls but in apartments, diners, bookstores, and parties. A graduate student misquotes Derrida at a loft gathering in SoHo. An artist incorporates Deleuze into a performance piece she barely understands. A Columbia professor builds an entire career from a footnote. Rivette follows these moments with anthropological fascination.

The New York of French Theory in America is perhaps its greatest achievement. Shot largely on location in Lower Manhattan, years before the area became a luxury district, the city appears as a dense ecosystem of artists, poets, radicals, academics, and drifters. Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs wander through the film as themselves. Philip Glass’s minimalist score drifts in and out like an approaching subway train. Everyone seems to be reading, arguing, writing, or sleeping with the wrong person. Looking back from the present, the city feels almost impossibly alive.

The supporting performances deepen the sense of historical transition. Sami Frey’s Michel Foucault appears only intermittently, always arriving from somewhere else and leaving before conversations conclude. Jean-Pierre Cassel brings an unexpected elegance to Roland Barthes, portraying him as a man who recognizes that interpretation has become more important than literature itself. Dirk Bogarde’s Claude Lévi-Strauss carries the sadness of an emperor watching his empire fragment before his eyes.

Yet Rivette is too intelligent to make a film about intellectual triumph. The second half slowly darkens. The ideas that arrive as provocations become institutions. The students become professors. The outsiders become authorities. Conferences multiply. Journals appear. Departments expand. The energy of discovery gradually gives way to administration. By the film’s final hour, one realizes that French Theory in America is less concerned with the birth of a movement than with the moment a movement begins turning into an industry.

The final scene is magnificent. Deleuze sits alone in a hotel room overlooking Manhattan. Around him lie books, articles, conference schedules, and invitations. The city glows outside the window. His ideas have conquered America. Yet Léaud’s face suggests something closer to uncertainty than victory. Rivette leaves us with the uncomfortable suspicion that every successful revolution eventually becomes a bureaucracy.

Writing in Cahiers du Cinéma in June 1976, Serge Daney described French Theory in America as “a film about circulation rather than ideas.” Rejecting the notion that Rivette had made an intellectual history, Daney argued that the film’s true subject was movement itself: the movement of concepts between languages, of books between continents, of people between institutions. “The philosophers are not characters,” he wrote, “but vehicles.” Daney was particularly fascinated by Rivette’s decision to treat seminars, cafés, conferences, and demonstrations with the same visual language, suggesting that the film dissolved traditional distinctions between thought and action. While some critics complained that the film was too abstract, Daney insisted that its abstraction was precisely its realism. “Rivette understands,” he concluded, “that ideas have a social life no less material than money, desire, or power. French Theory in America is not a film about philosophy. It is a film about how philosophy travels.”

Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs as themselves. Rivette originally gave them a script, which they ignored with a level of discipline usually associated with professional actors.

Asked about French Theory in America during an interview at the Locarno Film Festival in 1976, Jean-Luc Godard dismissed it as “both too early and too late.” Yet he spoke about it at length. According to Godard, Rivette had made “the first film about the victory of ideas and therefore the first film about their defeat.” He admired the way the film refused to explain philosophy, arguing that “cinema cannot film thought, only its consequences.” At the same time, he complained that Rivette remained too attached to narrative and character. “The real protagonist is neither Deleuze nor Guattari,” he remarked. “It is the university. The university is the gangster in the film.” Godard concluded with one of his characteristic paradoxes: “In America they believed they were importing French philosophy. In reality they were exporting America into philosophy. Rivette understood this. Perhaps he understood it too well.”

A rare photograph of Jean-Luc Godard defending Rivette against Rivette’s admirers.

Watching the film today, one is struck by how accurately it foresaw the fate of theory itself. The concepts that once seemed dangerous have become familiar. The intellectual battles that consumed generations survive mostly as curriculum. Yet Rivette’s film reminds us that ideas were once lived before they were taught. They circulated through friendships, rivalries, love affairs, cafés, arguments, and accidents. They belonged to the world before they belonged to institutions.

Michel Hoberman (born 1997 in Grenoble) is a Franco-American writer and critic. His writing explores cinema, intellectual history, and the movement of ideas across cultures and institutions. He is particularly interested in the relationship between film and philosophy, and in the ways in which cultural forms survive beyond the historical moments that produced them. He is currently working on a book about the disappearance of the movie theater as a public institution.

French Theory in America (1976)

Runtime: 178 min.

Country: France / United States

Language: French, English

Release date: May 1976 (Cannes Film Festival)

Director: Jacques Rivette

Writer: Jean Narboni, Pascal Bonitzer, Jacques Rivette

Music by: Philip Glass

Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn

Genre: Drama, History, Road Movie

Cast

Gilles Deleuze — Jean-Pierre Léaud

Félix Guattari — Jean-Pierre Kalfon

Jacques Derrida — Daniel Day-Lewis

Michel Foucault — Sami Frey

Roland Barthes — Jean-Pierre Cassel

Julia Kristeva — Bulle Ogier

Hélène Cixous — Bernadette Lafont

Claude Lévi-Strauss — Dirk Bogarde

Young American Graduate Student — Michael Moriarty

Radical Organizer — Sam Shepard

Allen Ginsberg — himself

William S. Burroughs — himself

Trivia

Daniel Day-Lewis made his screen debut as Jacques Derrida at age seventeen.

The opening Johns Hopkins conference sequence was filmed in the actual conference hall where the 1966 event took place.

Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs insisted on playing themselves and improvised most of their dialogue.

Philip Glass composed the score while working as a taxi driver in New York.

User Reviews

★★★★★ “What once seemed like an obscure film about French philosophers now appears to be one of the most accurate films ever made about how ideas travel through culture. Rivette understood before anyone else that intellectual history is also social history.” —Review posted June 2026

★★★★★ “The Godfather for graduate students.” —Top 1,000 Reviewer

★★★★½ “Three hours of philosophers smoking cigarettes and talking in cafés. Somehow completely riveting.” —Verified Viewer

Critic Reviews

“It understands that every revolution eventually becomes a syllabus.” —Pauline Kael, 1976

“Rivette transformed intellectual history into cinema without sacrificing either.” —The New York Review of Books, 2026

“The missing link between La Chinoise and The Social Network.” —Sight & Sound, 2026

Cover image: Jean-Pierre Léaud as Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Pierre Kalfon as Félix Guattari at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, October 1966. One is already imagining new forms of life. The other is wondering why the seminar has not yet become a revolution.