My review of Emilie Bickerton’s A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma is on the 3:AM Magazine site here.
Yet, it seems to me that what the early Cahiers critics did so well was to bridge the gap between commercial concerns and personal visions, and to acknowledge the possibilities of a quick-witted director harnessing the potential of the studio system. In this way, the Cahiers critics were negotiating the contradictions of attempting to produce highly personal cinema in an era of increased consumer capitalism. This image of the director as auteur may have been wishful thinking on the parts of Truffaut and Godard, yet this convenient fiction allowed them to imagine themselves in the role of director, an effort of the imagination that is even more astounding for having actually materialised. Their cinema, in actuality, took a markedly different form from their heroes Hitchcock and Sam Fuller: fewer studio sets, more filming on the street; lower budgets, smaller audiences. Perhaps the lessons about negotiating the commercial aspects of filmmaking were forgotten by Cahiers in later years; when it couldn’t survive as an autonomous concern, it fully embraced commercialism – again, mirroring Toubiana’s leap from Maoist to pillar of the industry (he’s now the Director General of the Cinématheque française).
