Cahiers Du Cinema, or Notebooks on Cinema, was founded in 1951 by Andre Bazin, Jacques Doniol, and Joseph-Marie Leduca. It was developed from Revue de Cinema, Review of Cinema, that began in 1928.
Two Paris film clubs came together to write what became the oldest French language film magazine. OBJECTIF 49 with Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, and Alexandre Astruc and CINE-CLUB DU QUARTIER LATIN.
The magazine was edited by Eric Rohmer and written by Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Goddard, Claude Chabrol, and Francois Truffaut.
Rivette – Celine & Julie Go Boating / Goddard – Breathless / Chabrol – Le Beau Serge / Truffaut – 400 Blows / Bresson – Au Hansard Balthazard / Cocteau – Les Enfant Terribles / Astruc – Amour de Poche / Rohmer – My Night at Maud’s
Cahiers du Cinema is a small journal containing 4-5 articles, film reviews, director appreciation, theoretical essays, intellectual form of criticism, and advocating realism.
Bazin’s opinions dominated the journal until 1954 when Truffaut’s “La Qualite Francaise” was published. This denounced the lionization of boring French film, pushing the idea of the director being the film’s author. The article became the manifesto POLITIQUE DES AUTEURS.
These young critics re-evaluated American films by Hitchcock, Hawks, Ray, and lang as good.American critic Andrew Sareis latched onto this theory and dubbed it the “auteur theory.”
Th journal’s format changed, including interviews with “auteurs”. By the end of the 1950s the writers were so dissatisfied with writing about film that they became filmmakers, creating the French New Wave.
Rohmer hired new editors that railed against the auteurs. The journal’s focus shifted from literary modernism to dialectical materialism to Maoism and back to love for Hollywood with the release of Jaws.
The journal was a hotbed of discourse and creativity. All was focused on the love of film, despite the differing views. Some of the myriad of significant moments the journal claimed responsibility for include first coining the term “Film Noir,” , Hitchcock-Hawkensiens, Miss-En-Scene – the emanation of film from the Director’s soul, basic concepts of post-war film criticism, cinemane – a full time cinema watcher, and was the breeding ground for so many important new filmmakers.
© 2023, mikegallagherart. All rights reserved.
