Nothing But Cinema: Cahiers du cinema: The 1950s – Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave
edited by Jim Hillier
(BFI/Routledge Keagan Paul, 1985)

Written-up from the notes of a talk (organised by John Conomos [1947-2024] and Barrett Hodsdon) given at the Chauvel cinema, Sydney (Australia), 2 March 1986. My consideration (and appreciation) of Cahiers du cinéma changed and deepened considerably in subsequent years! See, for instance, the 1994 essay “Refractory Characters, Shards of Time and Space” in my Mysteries of Cinema (2018/2020).

If cinephilia, in contemporary parlance, is the perverse desire for cinema, than Francophilia is the perverse desire for things French (or Parisian). I’m not referring here to a broad import on the order of the so-called “French disease” of our time – i.e., the mania for fetishising the scattered output of particular hit-star philosophers such as Jacques Derrida – but, rather, a specifically film-inflected Francophilia such as it develops in an Anglo culture like ours in Australia.

Francophiles of this sort – and I am among them – love (with a love that is, at once, quietly constant and seethingly passionate) Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy … and that estimable monthly, Cahiers du cinéma magazine. They love Cahiers even if they’ve never been able to read more than a few sentences of it, just as they already love Raúl Ruiz’s or Jacques Rozier’s entire œuvre after seeing only one of their films locally. To cite only one major film writer whose taste seems almost entirely (in)formed by Cahiers: Peter Wollen. But I could easily name a hundred others.

Franco-cine-philes entertain an intense relationship to mythology, gossip, and a defined, well-constructed imaginary constellation: they worship a mad ideal of the cinema that is always in excess of a thousand given, achieved films. And they pick up on the vibration of anything that contributes to this dream-aura: a stray, decontextualised slogan by Godard, an enigmatic still from the latest Jacques Rivette or Éric Rohmer film, the naughty thing Anne-Marie Miéville said immediately after François Truffaut’s death … (I’m not going to tell you: ask another Francophile.)

Franco-cine-philia is not necessarily a disease, but it’s most certainly a condition. True to its grounding in the imaginary, it projects and introjects (ref. Edgar Morin’s film books) like crazy – seeing in that fleeting, fragile, never-to-be-repeated (except in future screenings) moment of Anna Karina turning her head in the train in Bande à part (1964), or Robert Rossellini’s camera flicking past a grimy wall, an intimation of truth and totality … a veritable revelation.

Once, upon quizzing a Francophile student (who not only had a mail subscription to Cahiers but even, as a young teen, appeared in Demy’s Lady Oscar [1979]!!) as to why Bande à part made her go weak at the knees (during a Melbourne Cinémathèque screening that had drawn a packed gathering of the Godard Faithful), I received a sigh of exasperation at my demand for an solid inventory of quality contents: “Adrian, everything is in that film!” Life, love, crime, death, coffee, music … the whole damn thing. Everything? Hey, you don’t argue with a Franco-cine-phile.

Cahiers is that kind of Holy Grail, too; with its (sometimes) difficult French, its in-house photothèque of luminous stills, and its hundreds of copies stretching back to time immemorial in bound volumes on the library shelf that lack only the too-dearly-loved pages ripped out by the Philes (particularly the Godard Special no. 300; and own up, you cads who stole the Marguerite Duras/Carlos D’Alessio India Song flexi disc from every available copy of no. 312/313!), Cahiers just must contain … well, everything. Or so it seems.

All previous English-language glimpses of it, such as Andrew Sarris’ ratbag, short-lived and stiffly translated 1960s publication Cahiers du cinéma in English, or even the more sober bits of it rendered (with varying degrees of care and precision) in journals including Screen or Wide Angle, have contributed to this Myth of the inexhaustibly vast riches contained between the glowing yellow covers (at least for the 1951-1964 period) of Cahiers.

This 1950s-based anthology edited by the excellent UK scholar-critic Jim Hillier [1941-2014], the first in a four-volume series, does the old British-rationalist-overkill trick on Cahiers. In trying to make the magazine’s historic contents pedagogically “accessible”, it may succeed only in demystifying the Magnificent Beast once and for all. Maybe! Hélas, the thrill is gone, for the fragile Francophiliac Imaginary is sorely affronted by this gross book. Time and again you flick through its pages, compulsively, hoping there was something between the lines that you missed … but no, it’s true, this text just never happens, doesn’t come alive, doesn’t do it to you like you always dreamed it would.

Forget the retroactive alibi of the Nouvelle Vague, the films that (some of) these cool cats would go on to make – as film criticism, this stuff just doesn’t always cut it. And, courtesy of the British Film Institute, there are three further volumes on the way. That’s what I call rubbing salt into the wound. (The BFI would probably call it a public service.)

Volume I covers the pre-Nouvelle Vague 1950s. Some of the writing collected here, congealed into a heavy book format, was never intended for such posterity (on this point, I tend to agree with David Thomson’s take on the book in Film Comment, November-December 1985). It is rushed, polemical, impressionistic, strategic, ephemeral – which would be fine to read in the Here and Now if Hillier had better managed to set up the macro and micro contexts of its practice. In 96 pages of editorial matter, however, you will learn next to nothing about the class positions, lifestyles, love lives, or even the ages of Cahiers contributors; you’ll learn even less about contemporaneous, frequently rival publications such as Positif, and what they stood for.

Without this lowdown on the politics, religious beliefs (or lack thereof), aesthetic reference-sets, and so on, underpinning Cahiers in this period, the work on offer begs to be evaluated in only one way: as film criticism. The publisher’s blurb certainly (and predictably) takes this tack: Cahiers as the original and the best film writing; and this anthology as the archive of how they did it, and how, implicitly, you can do it, too.

But as critics, viewed in this format, many of the Cahiers writers have to be judged severely. Claude Chabrol and Truffaut, if scribbling for the first time today, would surely be video-review hacks (of the “good movie, like the actress, check it out, reminds me of the last film I saw, and do you recognise the name of that ace camera operator?” variety); and Godard (bless his soul) appears to have penned most of his throwaway pieces in the back of a car en route to the Cahiers office … or in the nearest café, if not at the side of the chief editor’s desk.

Other contributions are simply (and agreeably) loony, like Luc Moullet’s intriguing precursor to more recent paeans to the B movie (in general, Hillier’s editorial effort to link Cahiers to the birth of film-genre studies seems, to me, misguided; only André Bazin had a major interest in that); and then there are those which are downright terrible (Rohmer on Voyage in Italy [1953]: “I confess that as I watched the film my mind went off in directions far from those of the plot …”).

On the credit side, though, even as we miss out on the critical rigour of Jean Douchet or Andre S. Labarthe (both are absented by Hillier), we taste more of the work of Jacques Rivette, always fascinating, elegant and proto-modernist (which is a rarity for Cahiers in those years). And we can never get enough of Bazin (dead at 40!), who once again survives his bad ideological press with critical insights that shame most of the assembled company – and that preview explorations pursued, in some cases, only many years later. For instance, look at this stunning passage on Anthony Mann, from “Beauty of a Western”.

If the landscapes that Anthony Mann seems fond of are sometimes grandiose or wild, they are still on the scale of human feeling and action. Grass is mixed up with rocks, trees with desert, snow with pastures and clouds with the blue of the sky. This blending of elements and colours is like the token of the secret tenderness nature holds for man, even in the most arduous trials of its seasons. (p. 167, trans. Liz Heron)

However, beyond scoring points to this or that writer, I believe it’s useful to propose a general critique of the Cahiers line of the ‘50s – and of its lasting effects on a few different strands of film writing, thinking and teaching.

The Cahiers project was idealist through and through. I mean this in the sense that the stake, at all times, was a pure cinema, an essential cinema. We can sympathise, now as then, with the rhetorical gambit: this demand for a cinema that is truly cinematic, not cripplingly novelistic or theatrical (as in the type of cinema that Cahiers, Truffaut in particular, was reacting against: the films of Jean Delannoy, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Claude Autant-Lara, etc. – although it’s no doubt time, by now, to question and revise this accepted historical wisdom). But Cahiers went altogether too far in celebrating a cinema that became, in their accounts of it, virtually empty of any conventional notion of content – even Rivette was, at times, guilty of this. From the word go, Cahiers was already giving cinephilia a bad name.

The Australian Film Institute season at the Chauvel (February-March 1986), which tapped the publication of this book as a pretext to screen some glorious ‘50s Hollywood and early Nouvelle Vague gems, took its title from a typically idealist gush from Godard on Nicholas Ray.

One cannot but feel that here is something which exists only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anywhere else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen. […] The whole cinema and nothing but the cinema. (pp. 116, 117, trans. Tom Milne)

Even Godard felt he needed to immediately add a caveat to that one: “This eulogy entails a reservation. Nothing but cinema may not be the whole cinema”. Taking the initial statement at face value, however – which is how it is usually cited – we have to ask: nothing but cinema … what does that mean? Or: what can it mean? Historically, what has it meant? – since what we are really talking about here is the way critical writing can itself create a cinema, the idea of a cinema, through the projection of certain ideals, the conjuring of certain “states of the soul”.

Rossellini’s films, for instance, can hardly be said to have been “seen” or evaluated with any objectivity by members of the Cahiers crew (Rohmer, Rivette, Godard); they were truly (and productively!) hallucinated. And that hallucination/projection was what they worshipped and took their nourishment from. Rossellini, it seems, figured that it was in his best professional interest to play along with their vision.

The idealism of Cahiers was summed up in its magic buzzword: mise en scène. We are still suffering from the loose, scrappy usage that the magazine’s eager writers bestowed upon this term. As a word for something precise, technical and material, it has a definition – start with the one in Bordwell & Thompson’s Film Art, and work it up from there. [Note: 28 years after speaking that sentence, I finally worked up my own book on the topic.] To be fair, the Cahiers use of the term was tactical and poetic (it’s possible to be both of those things simultaneously): mise en scène was, for them, that elusive essence of filmic creation, synonymous with a somewhat mystified conception of the act of direction.

It was, ultimately, an ideal of free filmmaking as could only be done with a caméra-stylo – an abstract gadget conjured by a youthful Alexandre Astruc in the late 1940s when he initiated a dream still being chased by technological advancement. (See, for example, the fascinating 1983 discussion on “The Genesis of a Camera” between Godard and Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala [1937-2019], translated in Camera Obscura, no. 13/14, 1985).

Once again, there was something suggestively correct in the Cahiers formulation of mise en scène, a decent response to the felt need to fill what was lacking in the reigning lit-crit highbrow movie appreciation that still, today, haunts the pages of Sight and Sound or Cinema Papers. Against the tyranny of script-and-actor-based reviewing, mise en scène was to be “a song, a rhythm, a dance”, “a particular way of needing to see and to show” (that’s later Astruc); the use of visual movement in space, “confrontations, looks, distances”, constituting “the language of true filmmakers” (Rivette). Mise en scène, then, as the articulation of elements; style and form as one with content; seeing & showing as saying … Cahiers was, at that point, approaching a theory of mise en scène as an expressive principle, something that creates themes, figures and embodies them, articulates something.

However, Cahiers in that period, kept on emptying style of content, returning to a vacant “essence” that makes it hard, at this distance, to meaningfully distinguish between many of the films that the magazine’s gung-ho writers championed. For instance, here is what Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1953) offered Rivette.

What tempts him [i.e., Preminger], if not the fashioning of a piece of crystal for transparency with ambiguous reflections and clear, sharp lines or the rendering audible of particular chords unheard and rare, in which the inexplicable beauty of the modulation suddenly justifies the ensemble of the phrase? (p. 134, trans. Heron)

Hell, I love Angel Face too (as my closest friends can testify), and I scratched out my own wobbly translation of Rivette’s text as a tender teen Franco-cine-phile, but all the same … Where did that film about a woman loving her father and killing her stepmother vanish to? For Rivette, that’s simply not “the essential” (the title of his piece); in fact, the entire plot-theme-character matrix is rendered – in a move that is all too familiar now in criticism – as “banal”, merely a “pretext” for the magical flight of the mise en scène. But then, so what? Who can really care, at the end of the day, about “style for style’s sake”, if it doesn’t at some level express something?

In strategically emphasising and upgrading the constitutive, creative role of form in film, Cahiers debased the notion of content, neglecting to re-think it. (Bazin, one should note, was never really on board with this drift of the Young Turks under him.) The magazine, and with it many subsequent trails in film criticism, has never quite recovered the ground lost with this move.

As Cahiers entered the ‘60s (“turbulent decade”, as the media cliché goes), it proved to be only a small step to a full-blown Formalism of (roughly) Russian inspiration, most evident in the serialisation throughout 1967 of Noël Burch’s Praxis du cinéma (1969 book in French; in English, Theory of Film Practice in 1973). That tome was among the first systematic attempts to posit what form, on its own (as it were), can do and articulate (usually some kind of screen/spectator relation or dynamic).

Far from the pages of Cahiers, this Formalist push leads, on the one hand, to some of Bordwell & Thompson’s finest work and, on another hand, to a strain in funky, Manny Farber-influenced criticism in which “style is the ultimate and determining force” – too often wielded as a modern myopia or doxa.

From the deathless, unbroken fascination of Cahiers with the polished tombstone surfaces of Huillet & Straub’s cinema, to the mangled, partial understanding in Screen (and related academic journals) of filmic melodrama as the explosion of primary, repressed psychic energies; from Andrew Sarris’ celebration in The American Cinema of the sublime personality and “internal meaning” of a Borzage or Sternberg overcoming all unfortunate vicissitudes of history-industry-politics, to the worst, starry-eyed drivel written today on Robert Bresson or Carl Dreyer … In all these very different cases, the go-for-broke attempt to pinpoint the work, force and value of a film (or a cinema practice) takes fatal recourse to a cluster of abstract, quasi-mystical words like morality, beauty, distance, doubt, regard, lucidity, energy, ethics: and these are precisely the words bequeathed to us, long ago, by Cahiers in the ‘50s, resounding like a mantra in this Volume I under review.

However, the broad types of screen/spectator relation that these analyses posit (or, rather, simply assume) – however historically or generically nuanced they sometimes become – just don’t ever touch the particularities, the singularity, of each important cinematic work. A singularity which is, ultimately, both textural (a matter of the work’s material and historic gesture in its specific time and place) and thematic (theme here understood in its most expanded mode of interconnected internal operation).

A theory of mise en scène as expressive principle was developed (sometimes only fitfully) elsewhere, in another, less well-recognised genealogy. The British Movie team (of which Hillier is an essential part) effectively rewrote the Cahiers creed in the early ‘60s and beyond, guiding the concern with authorship and style more in the direction of articulation, modulation, thematic integration and critical interpretation – as well as aesthetic evaluation, something at all times swung around but rarely self-consciously theorised in Cahiers. (Still today in the ‘80s, an acidic commentary by budding auteur Olivier Assayas on Pauline Kael, in a jaunty “bulletin from USA”, simply relies on a curt dismissal of her “questionable taste” – whereas the Cahiers pantheon of taste is, naturally, assumed to be correct and beyond question!) In 1972, Victor Perkins’ immortal Film as Film caps off the first period of Movie, but the magazine returns a few years later in print with fresh blood including Richard Dyer, Deborah Thomas and Andrew Britton – and a special 1982 issue on Max Ophüls standing among the collective masterpieces of film criticism.

Still in the UK, Monogram in the early to mid ‘70s, via the contributions of Thomas Elsaesser and his comrades, draws from Movie and cross-fertilises that tradition with Positif – another “heritage” French publication (i.e., born in the early ‘50s) that has always presented a formidable alternative to Cahiers. Positif offers a remarkable constellation (shifting over time) of surrealist playfulness and inventiveness (Robert Benayoun, Petr Král) and rigorous analytic precision (Jean-Loup Bourget, Christian Viviani) – a combo evident in those great mavericks of English-language film criticism, Farber and Raymond Durgnat (the latter a sometime collaborator of Positif, and avowedly close to its 1960s positions). This rival to Cahiers is also heir to a healthily cranky and open-minded leftist cultural politics that has led it, on occasion, to ridicule the “right-wing anarchism” of Godard or Chabrol, the wet and fluffy spirituality of Bazin, the modish extremism of the Red Mao years and, in the present ´80s context, the deadly “Bermuda Triangle” of taste persuasion formed by Cahiers and neighbouring general publications (to which chosen members of the CdC set often migrate) such as, most recently, Les Inrockuptibles.

Yet, in a Franco-cine-phile culture like ours in Australia, texts that are, as it happens, saturated in the Cahiers taste – books by Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio – are eagerly awaited, and even previewed hand-to-hand in samizdat pirate translations; while Positif house classics such as Gérard Legrand’s Cinémanie (1979) or Král’s two-volume work on silent burlesque (1984 & 1986) remain completely unknown and untranslated beyond Europe, because they are not on the hot gossip line effectively monopolised by Cahiers in the Francophile Imaginary. At the time of this writing, for instance, the Australian Film Institute library [Note: now absorbed into RMIT University as the AFI Research Collection] no longer subscribes to Positif: discontinued due to lack of consumer interest. Hmmm …

One of many myths that Francophilia foists on Cahiers (or vice versa) is the notion that it still swims – indeed, always swam, from its inception, in an unbroken forge – in the radical waters that came to flood point in May ’68 (write that in neon lights); that it is, in short, an exemplary leftist journal of film criticism. Historically, in fact, that is far from the truth (just look into the connections of Truffaut and the “Hussars”, Douchet with “secret occult societies” or Rohmer with Paul Gégauff). Since around 1980, something quite specific can be observed. Following the Godard/Julia Kristeva/Françoise Dolto trend of the decade, Cahiers has been busy loudly disowning a great deal of what it did back in the balmy aura of ’68 and its aftermath. In an extraordinary “dictionary of the ‘70s” published in 1981, all of the great theoretical avant-gardists (Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard whose essay “Acinema” came “before rock video”, Foucault who “walked out of a Godard film” – oh, the horror!) are trashed; only all-round cinephile Deleuze, hedonist Barthes and tricky-dicky Jean Baudrillard (“He showed us a way out of our ideologist period”) are retained and/or embraced.

Cahiers in the ‘80s – heavily under the influence of the charismatic dandy Serge Daney, and the jaded, seen-it-all, militant-turned-screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer – has come around full circle to a New Idealism, under the guise of a (long overdue) “cinephilia refound”. It champions Rohmer, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Truffaut (after giving him a long spell in Hell); Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon (1985), Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984 – Charles Tesson, après Moullet, is their new B movie connoisseur) and Francis Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983); it is once again in love with a lyricism that is either romantic or violent or both (for Daney, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull [1980] is a “beautiful love story”, an ode to Woman, and for Daney’s teen-era comrade Louis Skorecki, John Cassavetes’ Gloria [1980] is cinema as viewed by an Eternally Orphan boy … ); it is once again chasing essential, pure cinema – especially at the big film festivals, and in what emanates from America (special ‘voyage’ issues take us both to U.S.A. and Hong Kong).

So, popular genres are in, and Great Auteurs are back. More boys-clubbish than ever (if a little more overtly gay), the magazine sprinkles a little fashionable political posturing: the society of spectacle (Guy Debord) and simulacra (Baudrillard) – postmodernism is the incoming mid ‘80s tide – meet an ambiguous, ambivalent disapproval; the “place of the spectator” becomes a feverishly debated slogan (the best of these debaters is Alain Philippon, a true poet); a new aesthetic of the image is sought by Alain Bergala, while composer-musicologist Michel Chion opens the doors of perception to the soundtrack. The magazine, with its re-introduction of a punchy, journalistic aspect (its small-type newspaper-reportage midsection) takes a populist turn, while still holding onto the vestiges of a glamorous, entrenched avant-gardism already well associated with Marguerite Duras, Godard, Ruiz, Robert Kramer …

Cahiers in the ‘50s was a young, naughty, marginal “small magazine” run on modest financial resources, and – initially, at least – a tiny niche audience. Nothing unusual or untoward in any of that; it’s par for the course in any subculture worthy of the name. Today, however, it’s a veritable institution, complete with a publishing house (overseen by Jean Narboni, with admirable projects by Barthes, novelist Claude Ollier and renegade art historian Jean Louis Schefer) and a home video franchise. And, like many cultural institutions, its principal business is the creation of taste, the policing of a canon.

In the ‘80s as in the ‘50s, the Cahiers canon is rigidly exclusive, and its blind spots are defensively elevated into polemical refusals. In other words: contrary to mythological appearances, everything is not in that magazine. Appearing monthly with its handy, pressing alibi of the Now – that scary breach upon which all magazines either rise or die – Cahiers continues to hollow out, according to its own vision, the past, present and future history of cinema. Back then it ignored – or wasn’t even aware of – Preston Sturges, Yasujiro Ozu, John Huston, Boris Barnet … not to mention all those pop genre films that are neither pure in heart nor signed by a designated, work-outside-the-box auteur.

These days, it has dropped virtually any pretence to an old sociological or new Cultural Studies angle – except for the trendy flourish toward the Postmodern Condition, or “innocence in quotes” or Marc Chevrie glosses it in issue 369 (March 1985). Now, the Cahiers badge is European Art Cinema (Australia has never existed for it, for instance, and probably never will) all the way, and its distinction-credentials are – you might say – pretty (but not petty) bourgeois.

Francophila – itself a bourgeois pastime in many respects – never quite gets around to reflecting (before the mirror) on such matters; and Hillier’s BFI monument to it doesn’t manage to bust open any of the problem areas. What was it that Godard said, again? Wise words: Nothing but cinema may not be the whole cinema.

© Adrian Martin March/May 1986