Firstly, Les Sièges de l'Alcazar is a look at French film critics, centered on the eternal confrontation between Positif and Cahiers du cinéma magazines. But it is also the portrait of a cinephile generation, to which Moullet belongs, that invested an infrequent passion into his vision of filmmaking and thus determined a new kind of criticism and cultural activism during the '50s. With Ma première brasse, Moullet stages himself learning to swim and makes an analysis of his own hydrophobia.