Cahiers du cinéma

Cahiers du Cinéma (French pronunciation: ​[kaje dy sinema], Notebooks on Cinema) is a French language film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma (Review of the Cinema established in 1928) involving members of two Paris film clubs—Objectif 49 (Objective 49) (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, among others) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (Cinema Club of the Latin Quarter). Initially edited by Doniol-Valcroze and, after 1957, by Éric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer), it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut.

History and profile

Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism and theory. A 1954 article by Truffaut attacked La qualité française ("the French Quality") (usually translated as "The Tradition of Quality") and was the manifesto for 'la politique des Auteurs' which Andrew Sarris later termed the auteur theory — resulting in the re-evaluation of Hollywood films and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, and Fritz Lang. Cahiers du Cinema authors also championed the work of directors Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, and Jean Cocteau, by centering their critical evaluations on a film's mise en scène. In turn, auteurs were compared and contrasted, and a true film dialogue was established. The magazine also was essential to the creation of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, of French cinema, which centered on films directed by Cahiers authors such as Godard and Truffaut. Movement by movement, style by style, the cahiers sought to advance and analyze the growth of world cinema.