Cahiers du cinéma
Encyclopedia
Cahiers du Cinéma 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 amongst its writers Jacques Rivette
, Jean-Luc Godard
, Claude Chabrol
and François Truffaut
.
and theory
. A 1954 article by Truffaut attacked La qualité française ("the French Quality") and was the manifesto for 'la politique des Auteurs' which Andrew Sarris
later termed the auteur theory
— resulting 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 magazine also was essential to the creation of the Nouvelle Vague
, or New Wave, of French cinema, which centered on films directed by Cahiers authors such as Godard and Truffaut.
Jacques Rivette replaced Rohmer as editor in 1963, shifted political and social concerns and paid more attention to the non-Hollywood cinema. 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 American 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 favourites, as well as some new film makers 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 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.
Le Monde took full editorial control of the magazine in 2003, appointing Jean-Michel Frodon
as editor-in-chief.
In February 2009, Cahiers was acquired from Le Monde by Phaidon Press
, a worldwide publishing group which specialises in books on the visual arts.
Phaidon appointed Stéphane Delorme editor-in-chief in July 2009.
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
founded in 1951 by André Bazin
André Bazin
André Bazin was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.-Life:Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918...
, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze was a French actor, critic, screenwriter, and director...
and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca
Joseph-Marie Lo Duca
Joseph-Marie Lo Duca was an Italian-born writer and critic. He was based in Paris and was one of the founders of Cahiers du cinéma.-Bibliography:...
. 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
Robert Bresson
-Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
, Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
and Alexandre Astruc
Alexandre Astruc
Alexandre Astruc is a French film critic and film director born 13 July 1923, in Paris .Before becoming a film director he was a journalist, novelist and film critic...
, among others) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (Cinema Club of the Latin Quarter). Initially edited by Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma....
(Maurice Scherer), it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette is a French film director. His most well known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the cult film Out 1....
, Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol was a French film director, a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s...
and François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
.
History
Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film criticismFilm criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...
and theory
Film theory
Film theory is an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large...
. A 1954 article by Truffaut attacked La qualité française ("the French Quality") and was the manifesto for 'la politique des Auteurs' which Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris is an American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.-Career:Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the U.S...
later termed the auteur theory
Auteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
— resulting in the re-evaluation of Hollywood films and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
, Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
, Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich was an American film director, writer and producer, notable for such films as Kiss Me Deadly , The Big Knife , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte , The Flight of the Phoenix , The Dirty Dozen , and The Longest Yard .-Biography:Robert...
, Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
, Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
and Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann was an American actor and film director, most notably of film noirs and Westerns. As a director, he often collaborated with the cinematographer John Alton and with James Stewart in his Westerns.-Biography:...
. Cahiers du Cinema authors also championed the work of directors Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
, Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
, Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
, Max Ophüls
Max Ophüls
Maximillian Oppenheimer — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany , France , the United States , and France again...
, and Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
, by centering their critical evaluations on a film's mise en scène
Mise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
. The magazine also was essential to the creation of the Nouvelle Vague
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
, or New Wave, of French cinema, which centered on films directed by Cahiers authors such as Godard and Truffaut.
Jacques Rivette replaced Rohmer as editor in 1963, shifted political and social concerns and paid more attention to the non-Hollywood cinema. The style moved through literary modernism in the early 1960s to radicalism and dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
by 1970. Moreover, during the mid-1970s the magazine was run by a Maoist editorial collective. In the mid-1970s, a review of the American movie Jaws
Jaws (film)
Jaws is a 1975 American horror-thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. In the story, the police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant man-eating great white shark by closing the beach,...
marked the magazine's return to more commercial perspectives, and an editorial turnover: (Serge Daney
Serge Daney
Serge Daney was an influential French movie critic who went on from writing film reviews to developing a “television criticism” and onto building a personal theory of the image...
, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque and Charles Tesson). It led to the rehabilitation of some of the old Cahiers favourites, as well as some new film makers like Manoel de Oliveira
Manoel de Oliveira
Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira, GCSE is a Portuguese film director born in Cedofeita, Porto. He began working on films in the late 1920s, but did not receive international recognition until the early 1970s. Since the late 1980s he has been one of the most prolific working film directors and...
, Raoul Ruiz
Raoul Ruiz
Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino was a Chilean filmmaker.Ruiz spent some years at the Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina's cinema school. Back in Chile, he directed his first feature film Tres tristes tigres in the late 1960s, winning the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival...
, Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Hou Hsiao-Hsien is an award-winning film director and a leading figure of Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement.-Biography:...
, Youssef Chahine
Youssef Chahine
Youssef Chahine was an Egyptian film director active in the Egyptian film industry since 1950. He was credited with launching the career of actor Omar Sharif...
, and Maurice Pialat
Maurice Pialat
Maurice Pialat was a French film director, screenwriter and actor noted for the rigorous and unsentimental style of his films...
. Recent writers have included Serge Daney
Serge Daney
Serge Daney was an influential French movie critic who went on from writing film reviews to developing a “television criticism” and onto building a personal theory of the image...
, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, Vincent Ostria, Charles Tesson and Franck Nouchi, André Téchiné
André Téchiné
André Téchiné , is a French screenwriter and film director. He has had a long and distinguished career that places him among the best post-New Wave French film directors....
, Léos Carax
Leos Carax
Leos Carax is a French-born film director, critic, and writer. Carax is noted for his poetic style and his tortured depictions of love. His first major work was Boy Meets Girl , and his notable works include Lovers on the Bridge and the controversial Pola X...
, Olivier Assayas
Olivier Assayas
Olivier Assayas is a French film director and screenwriter.He made his debut in 1986, after directing some short films and writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.-Career:...
, Danièle Dubroux, and Serge Le Péron.
In 1998, the Editions de l'Etoile (the company publishing Cahiers) was acquired by the press group Le Monde
Le Monde
Le Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...
. 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.
Le Monde took full editorial control of the magazine in 2003, appointing Jean-Michel Frodon
Jean-Michel Frodon
Jean-Michel Frodon is a journalist, critic and historian of cinema.-Biography:Born Jean-Michel Billard, he writes with a borrowed pseudonym from "The Lord of the Rings." He has a masters degree and a DEA in history. He worked as an educator from 1971 to 1981. Next, he was a photographer from...
as editor-in-chief.
In February 2009, Cahiers was acquired from Le Monde by Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press is a British publisher of books on the visual arts, including art, architecture, photography, and design worldwide.As of 2009, Phaidon's headquarters are in London, UK, though they were in Oxford for many years, with offices in New York City, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Tokyo...
, a worldwide publishing group which specialises in books on the visual arts.
Phaidon appointed Stéphane Delorme editor-in-chief in July 2009.
External links
- Official website
- Archives
- Top 10 list (for years 1951, 1955–1968, 1981–2009)
- Dave Kehr's Article on the magazine on its fiftieth anniversary
Further reading
- Bickerton, E. (2009), A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma. London: Verso.