Cahiers du Cinema

Cahiers du cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma (Review of the Cinema) involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 (Objective 49) (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, among others) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (Cinema Club of the Latin Quarter). Initially edited by Éric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer), it included among its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and — most notably and influentially — François Truffaut.

Cahiers was arguably the most important and influential film magazine or journal ever produced anywhere in the world, at least from about the mid 1950s to about the end of the 60s. The Cahiers writers took film, especially the theatrical feature film, very seriously. In addition to expressing their opinions and prejudices, they attempted to find criteria by which to evaluate films, film acting, cinematography, film structure and editing, and — especially — film directing. Among other accomplishments, Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism and theory.

Cahiers and The Auteuer Theory

The importance of the role of the director had been known from the beginning of the history of theatrical films. André Bazin, co-founder of Cahiers, argued that films should reflect a director's personal vision. Bazin championed filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir. Although Bazin provided a forum for what became known as the auteur theory to flourish, he himself remained wary of its excesses. Another key element of auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen" and the idea that directors should wield their cameras like writers use their pens and that they need not be hindered by traditional storytelling.

In a 1954 Cahiers essay with the unassuming title "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("a certain trend in French cinema") — arguably the most important and influential single essay ever published anywhere on film theory and criticism — François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des Auteurs", and asserted that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting than the best of Jean Delannoy's. "Politique" might very well be translated as "policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to look at films and to value them in a certain way. Truffaut provocatively said that "(t)here are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors." Truffaut's essay can be said to be seminal for what has come to be called the "auteur theory.

The term auteur described by Truffaut was applied to directors such as Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson who aside from having a distinct style also wrote the screenplays or worked on the screenplays of their films as well. The auteur theory in its embryonic form dealt with the nature of literary adaptations and Truffaut's discomfort with the screenwriters Aurenche's and Bost's maxim that any film adaptation of a novel should capture its spirit and deal only with the "filmable" aspects of the books. Truffaut believed that film directors like Robert Bresson using the film narrative at its disposal could approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes, for which he used the film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest as an example.

Much of the writing of Truffaut and of his colleagues was designed to lambaste post-war French cinema, and especially the big production films of the cinéma de qualité ("quality films"). Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile, old-fashioned cinéma de papa (or "Dad's cinema"). During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did not allow the exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. When French film critics were finally able to see these 1940s U.S. movies in 1946, they were enamoured with these films.

Truffaut's theory maintains that all good directors (and many bad ones) have such a distinctive style or consistent theme that their influence is unmistakable in the body of their work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of both directors with a marked visual style (such as Alfred Hitchcock), and those whose visual style was less pronounced but who had nevertheless a consistent theme throughout their movies (such as Jean Renoir's humanism).

Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that moviemaking was an industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for: the director should use the commercial apparatus the way a writer uses a pen and, through the mise en scène, imprint their vision on the work (conversely, the role of the screenwriter was minimized in their eyes). While recognizing that not all directors reached this ideal, they valued the work of those who neared it.

The development of auteur theory resulted in the re-evaluation of Hollywood films and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, and Anthony Mann. Cahiers du Cinema authors also championed the work of directors Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, and Jean Cocteau, by centering their critical evaluations on a film's mise en scène.

The "Auteur" approach was adopted in English-language film criticism in the 1960s. In the UK, Movie adopted Auteurism, while in the U.S., Andrew Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962". This essay is where the half-French, half-English term, "Auteur theory", originated. To be classified as an "Auteur", according to Sarris, a director must accomplish technical competence in their technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior meaning (although many of Sarris's auterist criteria were left vague). Later in the decade, Sarris published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which quickly became the unofficial bible of Auteurism. The French Auteurist critics—Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer—wrote mostly about directors (as they were or wanted to become directors themselves), although they also produced some shrewd appreciations of actors. Later writers of the same general school have emphasised the contributions of star personalities like Mae West. However, the stress was on directors. But, as may be expected, screenwriters, producers and others have reacted with a good deal of hostility to the view. Writer William Goldman has said that, on first hearing the Auteur theory, his reaction was, "What's the punchline?" The late American critic Pauline Kael rejected the auteur theory and carried on a memorable in-print argument with Sarris about it. Today, nearly all knowledgable film scholars and critics have adopted and used the auteur theory, at least to some extent.

The French New Wave

Cahiers du Cinema was also essential to the creation of what came to be known as the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, of French cinema, which centered on films directed by Cahiers authors such as Godard and Truffaut. Apart from the role that the films by Jean Rouch have played in the movement, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is traditionally but arguably credited as the first New Wave feature. Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard, with Breathless (1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and financial, that turned the world's attention to the activities of the New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish. techniques and portrayed characters not readily labeled as protagonists in the classic sense of audience identification. Indeed, the New Wave has sometimes been called the Cahiers wave or the Cahiers films, as the films usually included as part of the New Wave were directed by writers or former writers for Cahiers.

Despite their similarities to the New Wave, Richard Roud argues that films by Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda belonged more precisely to the parallel Left Bank movement, along with Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Demy, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Cayrol and Henri Colpi.[1] The group was of an older generation and strongly tied to the nouveau roman movement in literature. Like the New Wave, its members would often collaborate with each other.

Louis Malle is often mistakenly called a New Wave director, but he was never part of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, and his filmmaking style shares little with the auteur theory. Robert Bresson is also sometimes called a new wave director, but he rose to prominence before the movement and was considered an influence on the new wave directors.

The New Wave came at a time when the films of Hollywood had declined in quality, so, for that and other reasons, the New Wave film were the freshest and most interesting and important being made anywhere in the world at the time. The role of Cahiers in founding and nourishing the New Wave must not be underestimated.

Cahers more recently

Jacques Rivette's editorial replacement of Rohmer in 1963 was a shift to political and social concerns and to paying more attention to non-Hollywood films. The style moved through literary modernism in the early 1960s to radicalism and dialectical materialism by 1970. Moreover, during the mid-1970s the magazine was run by a Maoist editorial collective.

In the mid-1970s, a review of the movie Jaws marked the magazine's return to more commercial perspectives, and an editorial turnover: (Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, and Charles Tesson). It led to the rehabilitation of some of the old Cahiers favorites, as well as some new names like Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Ruiz, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Youssef Chahine, and Maurice Pialat. Recent writers have included Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, Vincent Ostria, Charles Tesson and Franck Nouchi, André Téchiné, Léos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Danièle Dubroux, and Serge Le Péron.

In 1994, filmmaker Mike White began publishing the parody magazine Cashiers du Cinemart. It continues being published today.

In 1998, the Editions de l'Etoile (the company publishing Cahiers) was acquired by the press group Le Monde. Traditionally losing money, the magazine attempted a make-over in 1999 to gain new readers, leading to a first split among writers and resulting in a magazine addressing all visual arts in a post-modernist approach. This version of the magazine printed ill-received opinion pieces on reality TV or video games that confused the traditional readership of the magazine.^{[citation needed]}

Due to poor results of the new version of Les Cahiers,^{[citation needed]} Le Monde took full editorial control of the magazine in 2003. The then editor-in-chief of "Le Monde" film pages, Jean-Michel Frodon became editor-in-chief of Les Cahiers and put together a new writers team which is currently in charge of the magazine.

In April 2008, Le Monde announced its intention to sell "non-profitable or non-strategic" activities, including the Editions de l'Etoile which publishes Cahiers du cinéma.

Today Cahiers is still available, in both a printed version and an electronic one on the Internet.

External links

• Official website, Cahiers du cinéma, Retrieved September 28, 2007.
• Archives, Les Archives Cahiers du cinéma, Retrieved September 28, 2007.
• Top 10 list (for years 1951, 1955–1968, 1981–2002), Retrieved September 28, 2007.

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