Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

“...it is one thing for experimentation to take place: it is another for it to acquire critical mass – or, to use a different metaphor, for ripples to become a wave.
...
One sign was the emergence or re-emergence of an international audience that actually sought out artistically challenging films.”
― Geoffrey Nowell-smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s

“If there were a cultural issue around which, in 1945 itself, a large measure of agreement existed, it was that the new cinema in Europe should be democratic and the inema should never again be allowed to be used, as it had been in Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy, as an instrument of totalitarian ideology. Over this question it was the Americans who took the lead. Following the Allied combat troops into Italy and France came the spiritual crusaders of the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), armed not with guns but with movies, mostly documentaries but also a handful of features, designed to re-educate the peoples of formerly Fascist and occupied Europe about the virtues of democracy.”
― Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-95