Cahiers du cinéma

Cahiers du cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca. It was a development from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma and the members of two Paris film clubs - Objectif 49 (Bresson, Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, etc.) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin. Initially edited by Eric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer) it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut.

The critical writing of Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism (auteurs, mise-en-scène, la critique des beautés etc.) and film scholarship - establishing the 'value' of the Hollywood films of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks then directors including Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, and Anthony Mann, as well as Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophuls, and Jean Cocteau. While also attacking the existing French directors (La qualite francaise - novelization, over-elaboration etc.). The magazine also created the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave of French cinema, which was largly directed by ex-writers of the magazine.

After being reactionary and isolated in the 1950s the replacement of Rohmer by Jacques Rivette in 1963 meant that the magazine staff were more sensitive to political and social trends as well as responding more to non-Hollywood films. The style moved through literary modernism in the early 1960s to radicalism and "dialectical materialism" by 1970 and through the mid-70s the magazine was run by a Maoist collective. A return to more commercial perspectives in the late 1970s, marked by a review of Jaws, and a more organised turn-over of editors (Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, and Charles Tesson) meant the rehabilitation of some of the old Cahiers favourites as well as some new names (like de Oliveira, Raúl Ruíz, Hsiao-hsien, Chahine, and Pialat). More recent writers have included Serge Daney (natch), Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, Charles Tesson and Franck Nouchi, Andre Techine, Leos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Danièle Dubroux, and Serge Le Peron.\n