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‪Gradually recognised as an art form during the interwar period in France, from the second half of the 20th century, cinema became a major issue in the field of education. The Government may have recognised the necessity of granting the seventh art an official place within schools, but this did not result in any concrete or truly ambitious measure on a national scale before the 1980s. For nearly thirty years, therefore, the teaching of cinema occupied an ambivalent place between school hours and extracurricular time, on the fringes or within the classroom itself, depending on specific individual initiatives of film-loving teachers within the networks of popular education, and encouraged by a few pioneering inspectors and heads of establishments. It finally obtained a clearly delimited status within the educational field at the end of the century. This article will therefore study this key period that saw cinema emerge from extracurricular activities to find its place in the classroom by exploring the educational, political and economic challenges that this institutional recognition implies.‪