Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0674090659
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the turbulent sixties, the provocative French film journal Cahiers du Cinema was at its most influential and controversial. The first successes of the New Wave by major Cahiers contributors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol focused international attention on the revitalization of French cinema and its relation to film criticism; and in the early 1960s the journal's laudatory critiques of popular American movies were attaining the greatest notoriety.
As the lively articles, interviews, and polemical discussions in this volume reveal, the 1960s saw the beginnings of significant new directions in filmmaking and film criticism changes in which the New Wave itself was a major factor. The auteur theory that the journal had championed in the 1950s began to be rethought and revalued. At the same time, along with a reassessment of American film, Cahiers began to embrace new, often oppositional forms of cinema and criticism, culminating in the political and aesthetic radicalism of the ensuing decade.
The selections, translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, are annotated by Hillier, and context is provided in his general introduction and part introductions. For an understanding of the important changes that took place in cinema and film criticism in the 1960s and beyond, this book is essential reading.
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a cinema not of images and editing, but of camera shots and camera continuity. But the films I have made have everything to do with editing. Up till now, editing has been the most important part of my films. In an extreme case, I could absent myself from the shooting, but I'd have to be there at the editing. Besides, during shooting I'm increasingly interested in framing and photography rather than the shot itself. I believe in the shot less than I used to. There's another idea that was common to
'sophism' Uofroi): you have the impression that they exist quite independently from the way the camera has caught them. And it is the autonomy of what is shown (something Rohmer was arguing for in these columns last month 6 ) that generates in the spectator that exquisite sensation of arbitrariness linked to some mysterious necessity called grace. Silent cinema was essentially functional (like the sentence I have just written): there was no such thing as the well-turned phrase or the polished
for the film primarily as an attempt to expel reality as a referent for film, in favour of the film's own reality, Doniol placed special importance on its attempt to provide 'the first cinematographic equivalent of "mental time", a time perpetually in the present' .35 But Doniol's main point, and attack, was a more general one: Robbe-Grillet often explains that modern art is in a phase in which each work is a searching which ends by destroying itself, and that that is why Rivette's Paris 110115
character, a masochistic side which is more or less apparent. Their violence is merely the counterpart of this masochism. If the inability to be happy reaches a peak in the case of people like Major Brand, Captain Leith,I7 Jesse James or the teacher in Bigger than Ufe, self-destruction is no less present in the other characters. Farrell and Rico are no exception to this fixed pattern. They punish themselves in their own way. But in this respect there are important differences between Party Girl
phenomena and disturbances in our climate. Indeed, we now know that sunspots affect the human metabolism. The director, being essentially human, like other people, is therefore subject to the variations due to sunspots. Why not take account of that, while we are about it, in criticizing their films? So now I too am launched into general ideas. Is it my fault, when sociologists, filmologists and critics so often talk to us of the Cinema with a capital C? The Cinema is an art. The Cinema is an