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Cahiers du cinéma

Cahiers du cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema; ) is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma (Review of the Cinema) involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 (Objective 49) (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, among others) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (Cinema Club of the Latin Quarter). Initially edited by Éric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer), it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut.

History

Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism and theory. A 1954 article by Truffaut attacked La qualité française (the "the French Quality") and was the manifesto for 'la politique des Auteurs' which Andrew Sarris later termed the auteur theory — resulting in the re-evaluation of Hollywood films and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, and Anthony Mann. Cahiers du Cinema authors also championed the work of directors Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, and Jean Cocteau, by centering their critical evaluations on a film's mise en scène. The magazine also was essential to the creation of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, of French cinema, which centered on films directed by Cahiers authors such as Godard and Truffaut.

Jacques Rivette's editorial replacement of Rohmer in 1963 was a shift to political and social concerns and in paying more attention to non-Hollywood films. The style 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 movie 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 names like Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Ruiz, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Youssef Chahine, and Maurice Pialat. Recent writers have included Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, Vincent Ostria, Charles Tesson and Franck Nouchi, 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.

Due to poor results of the new version of Cahiers, Le Monde took full editorial control of the magazine in 2003. The then editor-in-chief of "Le Monde" film pages, Jean-Michel Frodon became editor-in-chief of Les Cahiers and put together a new writers team which is currently in charge of the magazine.

In April 2008, Le Monde announced its intention to sell "non-profitable or non-strategic" activities, including the Editions de l'Etoile which publishes Cahiers du cinéma.