Cahiers Du Cinema

Cahiers du Cinéma was the single most influential project in the history of film. Founded in 1951, it was responsible for establishing film as the ‘seventh art,’ equal to literature, painting or music, and it revolutionized film-making and writing. Its contributors would put their words into action: the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer were to become some of the greatest directors of the age, their films part of the internationally celebrated nouvelle vague. In this authoritative new history, Emilie Bickerton explores the evolution and impact of Cahiers du Cinéma, from its early years, to its late-sixties radicalization, its internationalization, and its response to the television age of the seventies and eighties. Showing how the story of Cahiers continues to resonate with critics, practitioners and the film-going public, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma is a testimony to the extraordinary legacy and archive these ‘collected pages of a notebook’ have provided for the world of cinema.

The Cahiers du Cinéma has played a major role in establishing film theory and criticism as an essential part of the late 20th century culture. This volume contains articles from the 1950s.

'With admirable clarity, Mrs Peters sums up what determines competence in spelling and the traditional and new approaches to its teaching.' -Times Literary Supplement

"A richly illustrated, faithful record of Eastwood’s work, containing film stills and set photographs as well as previously unpublished photographs from his personal collection, dating from his youth and early years as an actor." --Publishers description.

This new volume in this influential series of anthologies covers the vibrant and turbulent period in which the editorial make-up and policy of the journal changed radically, and theory, history and politics dominated critical debate.

"Cahiers du Cinema is the most prestigious and influential film journal ever published. An anthology devoted entirely to its writings, in English translation, is long overdue. The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts racked the world of film criticism with their provocative views an international cinema - American, Italian, and French in particular. They challenged long-established Anglo-Saxon attitudes by championing American popular movies, addressing genres such as the Western and the thriller and the aesthetics of technological developments like CinemaScope, emphasizing mise en scéne as much as thematic content, and assessing the work of individual filmmakers such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray in terms of a new theory of the director as author, auteur, a revolutionary concept at the time. Italian film, especially the work of Rossellini, prompted sharp debates about realism that helped shift the focus of critical discussion from content toward style. The critiques of French cinema have special interest because many of the journal's major contributors and theorists Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol were to become same of France's most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave. Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, the selections have far the most part never appeared in English until now. Jim Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whole. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film". --Publisher.

Before turning to filmmaking, Francois Truffaut was a film critic writing for Cahiers du Cinema during the 1950s. The Early film Criticism of Francois Truffaut makes available, for the first time in English, articles that originally appeared in French journals such as Cahiers du Cinema and Arts. Truffaut discusses films by such acknowledged masters as Hitchcock, Huston, Dymytryk, and Lang, but also examines the work of such lesser-known directors as Robert Wise, Don Weis, and Roger Vadim.

Cahiers du Cinema: Interviews with Film Directors, 19531970 brings together eighteen directorsOtto Preminger, Roberto Rossellini, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Max Ophuls, Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini, Robert Bresson, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Jean Renoir, and Eric Rohmer -- who are among the leading auteurs in the history of the cinema. The interviews were all commissioned for the legendary movie journal Cahiers du Cinema (the oldest such French-language magazine in continuous publication), the first critical enterprise to treat films, particularly Hollywood films, as a serious art form. Co-founded in 1951 by Andre Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, Cahiers was edited, after 1957, by Rohmer himself, including among its writers (and interviewers) Jacques Rivette, Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Truffaut -- all of whom went on to become highly influential filmmakers. Conducted in Cahiers famously in-depth, critical and engaged style, the interviews in this volume catch each director at a crucial juncture in his development as an artist, and stand as a historical record of the dominance of the Euro-American tradition in cinematic art. This is the first such collection of its kind in English, edited with a contextualizing introduction, critical biographies, career filmographies, and a comprehensive index by the American scholar James R. Russo.