Documentary about the making of Marcel Carne's 1945 film Children of Paradise (France), interviewing the director, the actors and production designer, as well as other French directors.

In 1959, an unforgettable boy did "the four hundred tricks" in front of the camera of a beginner named François Truffaut and splashed with his success, popular and Cannes, the filmography of a nascent band of intrepid. Claude Chabrol's "Le Beau Serge", Jean-Luc Godard's "A bout de souffle", Jacques Rivette's "Paris nous appartient", Eric Rohmer's "Le Signe du lion", Jacques Rozier's "Adieu Philippine", Agnès Varda's "Cléo de 5 à 7"...: This wave, quickly named "New Wave" - an expression invented by Françoise Giroud in an article dedicated to youth - is the work of apprentice directors who, for many, have swallowed kilometers of film at Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque française and sharpened their judgment in the columns of Cahiers du cinéma.

Malcolm Shanks is a sad and lonely man, deaf, mute and living with his cruel sister and her husband, who delight in making him miserable. His only pleasure, it seems, is in making and controlling puppets. Thanks to his skill, he is offered a job as a lab assistant to Dr. Walker, who is working on ways to re-animate dead bodies by inserting electrodes at key nerve points and manipulating the bodies as if they were on strings. When the professor suddenly dies one night, Shanks gets the idea to apply their experimental results to a human body, and then to start exacting some revenge.

Au cimetière Montparnasse (14e), lors de l'installation sur la tombe d'Henri Langlois d'une stèle funéraire en verre composée de photos de cinéma, des comédiens et des metteurs en scène rendent un dernier hommage à ce passionné du septième art qu'était le cofondateur et secrétaire général de la Cinémathèque française.
Personnalités apparaissant dans ce document :
- Marcel Carné
- Henri Alekan
- Samuel Fuller
- Jacques Deray
- Jean Rouch
- Roland Lesaffre
- Michael Lonsdale