A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma
by Emilie Bickerton

Reviewed by Mark Molloy

The film journal Cahiers du cinéma is best known as the crucible in which the founders of the French New Wave – Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut – conceived the innovations in form and content with which they were to reinvent the process of film direction and alter the trajectory of the medium. But Cahiers was more than just a vessel for the cultivation of the practical application of film direction; it was, in fact, first and foremost a crucial agent in the development of a systematic and mature theory of film. Though profound theories of film had already been developed (the most famous, perhaps, being Eisenstein’s theory of montage), Cahiers du cinéma was the first “Western” journal devoted solely to the elevation of the analysis of film to the level of rigorous critical discourse.

The revolutionary nature of the Cahiers project is most clearly illuminated when contrasted to the contemporary milieu against which it was conceived. A Short History author Emilie Bickerton describes the typical, exemplar film of the time as a “glossy literary adaptation... driven by patriotic impulses and the lazy assumption that film was an impoverished extension of theatre or literature rather than an art in its own right.” Lone directors such as Jean Renoir and Carl Dreyer did prove exceptions to the rule, but theirs was a lonely path, their films either critically derided or misinterpreted / misappropriated along strictly literary or nationalistic lines: Bickerton writes of “home-grown directors… celebrated for [their] expression of a distinctively French cinematic style and … confirmation of [their] country’s prestige.” The tentative steps taken by most film theorists in the pre-Cahiers years towards a serious critique of film tended to reinforce a cinematic conservatism. Praising silent film, for example, Alexandre Arnoux wrote effusively of “its relegation of speech, that old human bondage, to the background.” Walter Benjamin decried the threat sound posed to silent film’s “revolutionary primacy.”

Founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and sprung primarily from the work of their few critical forebears – including Roger Leenhardt, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer – Cahiers du cinéma was conceived from the start as a radical project, its original purpose to establish film’s inclusion among the laureled “high arts.” In its early years – roughly 1951-1959 – the Cahiers' staff set about the articulation of what they would term the politique des Auteurs, an aesthetic theory centered around the concept of the mise-en-scène. Essentially, this is the idea that each “master” director conceives and executes in a style unique to her own individual creative genius. Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo, which depicted “the film director as an individual artist comparable to a painter or an author, wielding his (sic) production unit as a novelist his fountain pen," is perhaps the classic formulation of this approach. To explicate each master’s style, Cahiers in these years focused on the technical aspects of film production: photographic quality, editing, the perspective of the camera, film scoring, sound design, etc. In the 50s Cahiers' critics championed – often pioneering the case for – directors including Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Akira Kurosawa, etc. By 1959, Jean-Luc Godard could – and indeed did – write that “the auteurs of film, thanks to us, have entered definitively into the history of art.”

In the 50s, Cahiers' generally rejected politics – associated with the reactionary criticisms of the French communist and conservative parties – as a valid basis for film criticism. Political criticism, it was held, led to “biased... pre-determined arguments.” As noted above, formalism was the operative paradigm. In the 60s, however, Cahiers changed direction – radically. This was due in part to the recognition that the politique des Auteurs was an inadequate theory for the analysis of avant-garde and experimental films. Directors previously untreated by the journal, including Sergei Eisenstein, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel, John Cassavetes, etc., were now seen – via their “rejection of conventional narrative ‘prose’ ” and their use of narrative ellipsis – as challenging the pure formalism of the 50s years. Cahiers critic Jacques Rivette, one of the primary agents in the formulation of the politique des Auteurs, editorialized in 1963 of “the perils of the ‘pure gaze’ attitude that leads one to complete submission before a film.” This formal shift =towards theories of disruption and discontinuity was, however, ultimately eclipsed in significance by the shift towards an overtly political criticism. “Critical attention,” Bickerton writes, “[shifted in these years] from issues of style or aesthetics to those of working conditions, economic structure and technical requirements.” It was during these years that the Cahiers' staff first applied the concepts and methods of critical theory, including those of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Lacques Lacan.

Roger Scruton, in his recent Times Literary Supplement review of Alain Badiou’s The Adventure of French Philosophy, recalls “the all but unintelligible metaphysics... which kept the Marxist scholastics busy during the 1960s and 70s.” As the 60s drew to a close, Cahiers did indeed devolve into a state of extreme arcana. It simultaneously likewise devolved into a state of extreme internal discord: “the great enemy against which [they] rall[ied],” Bickerton writes, was now perceived to be neither economic inequality nor imperialism, but instead the French Communist Party. Even Bickerton – herself a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review – concedes that Cahiers, in the extreme radicalism of this period, “now operated in an arena of cultural struggle which they had partly fabricated.” With the analysis of film more or less completely abandoned by the journal, readership plummeted.

With the arrival of the 70s, life once again breathed into the journal. In an echo of the gaps in coverage of the previous decade, a growing list of indisputably important directors were again found to have been neglected, this time due to the rigid dogmatism of the “Red” years. Directors Cahiers helped establish in these years – more accessible, perhaps, though no less formally rigorous or, arguably, political, than those championed in the “Red” years – include Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Satyajit Ray, Andrei Tarkovsky, etc. This engagement with previously untreated directors, again in a repeat of the previous decade, proved the catalyst for a rekindling of the journal’s elan vital. In the final years of the 70s, Cahiers entered a period of renewed brilliance and “obsessive rigor,” a period many consider to be the its golden age. Pascal Bonitzer was perhaps the greatest practitioner of these years, and his texts are among the classics of film theory. In the early eighties, the energy and esprit that had sustained the Cahiers project for three exceptional decades was lost. It became, in Bickerton’s words, just another “glossy monthly... preoccupied with Oscar contenders” and “blockbusters.” A status, she suggests, it retains to this day.

Bickerton, in accord with the critical agenda of Cahiers itself, focuses throughout A Short History on the journal’s evolving material and socio-economic setting. We are informed, of course, of the particulars of the films and directors treated here, as well as the biographies and theories of Cahiers' editors and critics. There is substantial coverage of Cahiers' successive publishers and widely varying circulation over time, and Bickerton relates the histories of the film industries in France and the US: of the French government’s creation of the Centre National du Cinema – a French cultural ministry responsible for the promotion of cinema in France – and the ways in which the French film industry – built upon cine-clubs (“independent ventures... often run by or associated with avant-garde directors”) – differed from the American model, “where each of the small number of major production companies owned all the theaters in which its products could be screened.“ She also provides a substantial background of the evolving geo-political landscape, an era that included the liberation struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as the “Kruschevite” thaw in Eastern Europe, and the reign of Mao in China.

Bickerton demonstrates an outstanding ear for the aesthetic subtleties and lyricism of critical theory. She quotes Rivette, for example, writing that Roberto Rossellini’s technique was that of the movement of “unremitting freedom, and one single, simple motion, through manifest eternity.” Elsewhere she quotes Bonitzer’s differentiation of Jean-Marie Straub and Godard as standing “at the two extremes of cinema. They are the focal points in the ellipsis along which the world of cinema was born, fragmented, and spun out of orbit... The extreme points reached by all constitute the spectrum of cinema. Straub the ultraviolet, Godard the infrared, both haunting the space whose limits they exceed.” Bickerton herself pens many a beautiful, and discriminating, passage.

A Short History ends with a return to the person of André Bazin, cofounder of Cahiers du cinéma. Bickerton does so for a reason. Later Cahiers contributors built upon the foundations Bazin set, and their accomplishments were enormous. The discourse of cinema would be far less rich without the politique des Auteurs of the 50s, without the embrace and deployment of critical theory of the 60s and 70s. But Bazin’s writings – which neither surrender to the “pure gaze” attitude nor abandon film to purely extraneous concerns – have with time come to be seen as the central nexus of the Cahiers project, and one of the focal points of all film criticism that followed. Bazin’s development of Leenhardt’s notions that “cinema’s primary value was attained through its adaptation to things as they are” and his assertion that “rendering was more valuable than signifying through metaphors” helped set film off on its own individual course, independent of literature and the theatre. Bazin’s was a criticism of immense depth; Renoir himself has stated that it was only after reading Bazin's texts on his own films that he first understood them. But, just as importantly, it was also criticism of immense clarity. He was, at heart, a popularizer, one who aspired to reach, engage, and educate the widest possible audience.

Driven in part by its founders’ zeal, Cahiers du cinéma persevered in its many diverse incarnations for thirty astonishing years, formulating a critical language with which to understand, rearticulate, and communicate the diverse natures of cinema, and the ways in which each relate to the world of which they are a part. Both the discourse of theory and the institution of cinema itself were forever changed. A Short History is an exemplary introduction to both the history of this superb journal and the nuances of film (and critical) theory.