According to Jonathan Haynes, Western Europe looked to American cinema to reinvent itself following the devastation of World War II. Haynes's dissertation in Rhetoric/Film Studies, A History of Water: The Cinema in the Mid-Atlantic, 1958-1983, conceives of this relationship as a "mid-Atlantic object" that aided cultural exchange rather than cultural imperialism. "The cinema was a place," Haynes writes, "where Europe looked at America looking at Europe. For example, François Truffaut’s writings about Hitchcock … helped to re-establish Paris as the 'cultural capital of the world.'" The relationship declined in the 1970s in tandem with the close of the so-called "American Century," a period between the Spanish American War and the Vietnam War when the United States enjoyed a reputation for freedom. Haynes focuses on the French New Wave, New German cinema, and Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope experiment in the 1980s. By way of contrast, he considers how New Taiwanese directors re-imagined French cinema in the 1980s and 90s just as Western European filmmakers had re-imagined American cinema in previous decades.