In Paris in the 1940s there were many cinema clubs at which audiences could view a good variety of films and then discuss them all night long.
The Cinematheque was for many young people a place of learning as much as it was a place of entertainment, and although they were generally small, these clubs were popular because they weren't owned by any studios and didn't feature tiresome newsreels, or the more well-known presentations that packed out the larger movie-houses.
During the Occupation of France by the Nazis, the import of Hollywood films was banned, which meant that that the French missed out on an amazingly fertile period of Amercian cinema, and this included many of the early crime-thrillers we now call film noir.
