Synopses & Reviews
Cahiers du Cinéma was the single most influential project in the history of film. Founded in 1951, it was responsible for establishing film as the ‘seventh art,’ equal to literature, painting or music, and it revolutionized film-making and writing. Its contributors would put their words into action: the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer were to become some of the greatest directors of the age, their films part of the internationally celebrated
nouvelle vague.
In this authoritative new history, Emilie Bickerton explores the evolution and impact of Cahiers du Cinéma, from its early years, to its late-sixties radicalization, its internationalization, and its response to the television age of the seventies and eighties. Showing how the story of Cahiers continues to resonate with critics, practitioners and the film-going public, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma is a testimony to the extraordinary legacy and archive these ‘collected pages of a notebook’ have provided for the world of cinema.
Review
"Has many of the ingredients of a good thriller ... Emilie Bickerton's alert prose manages to convey the drama and passionate confrontation of ideas, and she shows a keen eye for revealing detail." London Review of Books
Review
"It was "the last modernist project," Emilie Bickerton says in this deft account of the real life and virtual death of Cahiers du Cinéma. The cinema itself lived and died in its pages, and it would be hard to imagine a better brief guide to the magazine's positions and polemics than this intelligent and sharply focused book." Michael Wood
Review
"Valuable and highly informative." Philip French
Review
"The French New Wave directors all came from Cahiers du Cinéma, a magazine that turned film criticism upside down in the 1950s. The salvos of its sagacity are finely charted by Bickerton, who also laments the recent slide into dumbed-down mediocrity." The Observer
Review
"What I love is Bickerton's certainty and courage ... Bickerton does a well-told, thoroughly researched job." Nigel Andrews Financial Times - Books of the Year
Review
"Compelling ... a reminder that contemporary film criticism could do with being more unapologetically clever--more ingenious, more argumentative, more French." Nick James Sight & Sound
Review
"This fascinating volume about the world's most famous film journal combines juicily detailed cultural history with rock-hard polemic on the dire state of modern film criticism." Time Out
Review
"Bickerton has done a valuable and highly informative job in locating the historical roots of Cahiers in the cinematic cultural debate that French intellectuals engaged in form the the first World War onwards, and an equally useful one in relating the magazine's decline to the distressing politics of post-1968 France." Philip French
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." The Observer
Review
"Emilie Bickerton's book provides an enjoyable overview of the many individuals and ideas connected with Cahiers over the years, and it is a useful springboard to finding out more." Keith Reader French Studies
Review
"The author masterfully unveils the power and the joy that rose up from the pages during the formative years of Cahiers." David Swanson Socialist Review
Synopsis
An unique account of cinema's most influential journal.
Synopsis
Cahiers du Cinéma was the single most influential project in the history of film. Founded in 1951, its visionary contributors--including the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and Rohmer--would revolutionize filmmaking and writing. In this authoritative history, Emilie Bickerton explores the evolution and impact of Cahiers du Cinéma, from its early years, to its late-sixties radicalization, its internationalization, and eventual decline. A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma is a testimony to the extraordinary legacy and archive it has provided for the world of cinema today.
About the Author
Emilie Bickerton is Assistant Editor for New Left Review. She writes on film, literature and anthropology for a variety of UK and US publications. She lives in London.