Кайе дю Синема: История французского киножурнала

French film journal

Cahiers du Cinéma (kaje dy sinema, ) is a French film magazine co founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol Valcroze, and Joseph Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma ( established in 1928) involving members of two Paris film clubsObjectif 49 (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, and Alexandre Astruc, among others; ) and Ciné Club du Quartier Latin
Initially edited by Doniol Valcroze and, after 1957, by Éric Rohmer (aka, Maurice Scherer), it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut,

The first issue of Cahiers appeared in April 1951. Much of its head staff, including Bazin, Doniol Valcroze, Lo Duca, and the various younger, less established critics, had met and shared their beliefs about film through their involvement in the publication of Revue du Cinéma from 1946 until its final issue in 1948; Cahiers was created as a successor to this earlier magazine. Early issues of Cahiers were small journals of thirty pages which bore minimalist covers, distinctive for their lack of headlines in favor of film stills on a distinctive bright yellow background. Each issue contained four or five articles (with at least one piece by Bazin in most issues), most of which were reviews of specific films or appreciations of directors, supplemented on occasion by longer theoretical essays. The first few years of the magazine's publication were dominated by Bazin, who was the de facto head of the editorial board. Bazin intended Cahiers to be a continuation of the intellectual form of criticism that Revue had printed, which prominently featured his articles advocating for realism as the most valuable quality of cinema. As more issues of Cahiers were published, however, Bazin found that a group of young proteges and critics serving as editors underneath him were beginning to disagree with him in the pages of the magazine. Gradually, the tastes of these young critics drifted away from those of Bazin, as members of the group began to write critical appreciations of more commercial American filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks rather than the canonized French and Italian filmmakers that interested Bazin. After the publication of Truffaut's article, Doniol Valcroze and most of the Cahiers editors besides Bazin and Lo Duca rallied behind the rebellious authors; Lo Duca left Cahiers a year later, changed the format of Cahiers somewhat, frequently conducting interviews with directors deemed "auteurs" and voting on films in a "Council" of ten core critics. These critics came to champion non American directors as well, writing on the mise en scène (the "dominant object of study" at the magazine) of such filmmakers as Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, and Jean Cocteau, many of whom Bazin had introduced them to. The films that these critics made were experimental explorations of various theoretical, artistic, and ideological aspects of the film form, and would, along with the films of young French filmmakers outside the Cahiers circle, form the basis for the cinematic movement known as the French New Wave. Meanwhile, Cahiers underwent staff changes, as Rohmer hired new editors such as Jean Douchet to fill the roles of those editors who were now making films, while other existing editors, particularly Jacques Rivette, began to write even more for the magazine. Many of the newer critical voices (except for Rivette) largely ignored the films of the New Wave for Hollywood when they were not outright criticizing them, creating friction between much of the directorial side of the younger critics and the head editor Rohmer. A group of five Cahiers editors, including Godard and Doniol Valcroze and led by Rivette, urged Rohmer to refocus the magazine's content on newer films such as their own. When he refused, the "gang of five" forced Rohmer out and installed Rivette as his replacement in 1963. Rivette shifted political and social concerns farther to the left, and began a trend in the magazine of paying more attention to non Hollywood films. The style of the journal moved through literary modernism in the early 1960s to radicalism and dialectical materialism by 1970. Moreover, during the mid 1970s the magazine was run by a Maoist editorial collective. In the mid 1970s, a review of the American film Jaws marked the magazine's return to more commercial perspectives, and an editorial turnover: (Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, and Charles Tesson). It led to the rehabilitation of some of the old Cahiers favourites, as well as some new film makers like Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Ruiz, Hou Hsiao hsien, Youssef Chahine, and Maurice Pialat. Recent writers have included Daney, André Téchiné, Léos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Danièle Dubroux, and Serge Le Péron. In 1998, the Editions de l'Etoile (the company publishing Cahiers) was acquired by the press group Le Monde. Traditionally losing money, the magazine attempted a make over in 1999 to gain new readers, leading to a first split among writers and resulting in a magazine addressing all visual arts in a post modernist approach. This version of the magazine printed ill received opinion pieces on reality TV or video games that confused the traditional readership of the magazine. The entire editorial staff resigned, saying the change posed a threat to their editorial independence.

The magazine has compiled a list of the top 10 films of each year for much of its existence.