Cahiers du Cinma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism Hollywood New Wave (Harvard Film Studies)

About this book

Cahiers du Cinma 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 19511959 when a group of young iconoclasts rocked the world of film criticism with their provocative views on international cinemaAmerican 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 scne 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 journals major contributors and theoristsGodard Truffaut Rohmer Rivette Chabrolwere to become some of Frances most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave. Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute the selections have for the most part never appeared in English until now. Jim Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whole. Together these essays reviews discussions and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative productive often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film.