"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 scene" 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. Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and
has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whale.
Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal
the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixeddoctrines
but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions
to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about
film.
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