A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma (review)

Cahiers du cinéma is almost certainly the most celebrated and influential film journal there has ever been, despite competition from the US Movie and its Parisian rival Positif, and in Emilie Bickerton it has found not only a well-informed chronicler but an ardent and provocative devotee — of the earlier part of its history at any rate. Bickerton, in the most literal sense, annonce la couleur with the bright yellow dust-cover of her book, evocative of Cahiers in its heyday, and even the photograph of her on the inside back flap seems designed to recall a gamine version of Jean-Pierre Léaud in Truffaut's Les 400 Coups. Her enthusiasm, however, sometimes leads to excessively sweeping assertions, such as that Cahiers 'was the last modernist project' (p. ix), which not only begs the question of what is meant by modernism, but fails to make plain whether this was inevitable, undesirable, or indeed both. There is a wealth of documentation here on the journal's provenance, antecedents, and activities, providing important information not readily available in English before, which makes the book of great value to film studies students and scholars, as well as to those working in French. The work of Georges Sadoul and Roger Leenhardt, as well as of the better-known André Bazin, is given its due prominence here, prompting the thought that English-language anthologies of these writers would be a welcome development. The polemical spikiness of the writing, almost as if in homage to the early coattrailing of such as Truffaut and Godard, makes the book stimulating to read, although much of it should be treated with caution. Thus the statement that for Pascal Bonitzer the critic's work focused on 'various concepts that were for critics flunking the film, not for engaging in more collective discussions by sharing an experience of watching with other viewers or the director' (p. 102) left me bemused. How are 'critics' to be differentiated from 'other viewers', other than by the aleatory fact of, presumably, being published? Bickerton seems to adopt an unreconstructedly gauchiste approach towards the Mitterrand years — 'The 1980s marked the rapid disillusion of any remaining hopes for the Left in the face of its crumbling organized channels' (p. 114) — ignoring the fact that the major such 'organized channel', the Parti socialiste, in fact held up fairly well during that period, and that a hostile political and economic climate in the rest of Europe and the US was in part responsible for the disenchantment of the second Mitterrand term. There are also significant factual and interpretative errors. Giscard was elected president in 1974 not 1975, while a liking for Joseph Losey, who left the US after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, is taken to imply 'a conservative, even right-wing position' (p. 40). Any evaluation of the Langlois affair should surely take on board the account of it by Pierre Barbin — designated by Malraux as Langlois's successor — La Cinémathèque françake: inventaire et légendes, 1936-1986 (Paris: Vuibert, 2005). Bickerton is also somewhat cavalier in her dismissal of such latter-day directors as Téchiné and Carax; it is difficult to work out who in her view has been making worthwhile films in the France of the past quarter-century. These asperities and inaccuracies may detract from the scholarly quality of the book, but in another way they make it a curiously fitting homage to a journal that in its pomp was never fearful of taking boldly provocative positions.