Though never a filmmaker, André Bazin, who died this week in 1958, had a huge impact on cinema. As the editor and co-founder of the seminal French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Bazin championed underappreciated films and filmmakers and his passionate writings about the director as a film’s visionary center launched the auteur theory. Bazin also fostered the careers of precocious Cahiers critics Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, both of whom would become leading figures in the Nouvelle Vague, and Jean Renoir (whom Bazin championed) said “[he] gave the patent of royalty to the cinema just as the poets of the past had crowned their kings.” Just a few months after his fortieth birthday, Bazin succumbed to leukemia. His death came just a day into the filming of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a movie that is dedicated to Bazin.