FILM

CULTURE
IN TRANSITION

THE RED YEARS OF

cahiers du

CINEMA
(1968-1973)

VOLUME II

Aesthetics
and
Ontology
daniel fairfax
The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma
(1968-1973)
The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma
(1968-1973)
Volume II: Aesthetics and Ontology

Daniel Fairfax

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Forschungszentrum
historische Geisteswissenschaften at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6372 850 8 (Vol. I)

isbn 978 94 6372 860 7 (Vol. II)
isbn 978 94 6372 101 1 (set)
e-isbn 978 90 4854 390 8 (Vol. I)
e-isbn 978 90 4854 391 5 (Vol. II)
doi 10.5117/9789463728607
nur 674 | 757

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 Table of Contents

Volume I: Ideology and Politics

Acknowledgements 9

A Note on Translations 11

Introduction 13

Part I Theories of Ideology

1. “Cinéma/Idéologie/Critique”: An Epistemological Break? 45

2. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni: Crossed Lives 71

3. Décalages: “Young Mr. Lincoln de John Ford” 95

4. “La Vicariance du Pouvoir” and the Battle of Othon 125

5. “Technique et Idéologie” by Jean-Louis Comolli 149

6. Afterlives of the Apparatus 175

Part II Engagements with Politics

7. The Radicalization of Cahiers:

1963-1969 207

8. Cahiers du cinéma and the Rapprochement with the PCF:

1969-1971 237

9. Cahiers du cinéma’s Turn to Maoism: 1971-1973 269

10. Cahiers du cinéma and Jean-Luc Godard 297

11. Cahiers du cinéma in the “Post-gauchiste” Era: 1973-1981 325

12. Bernard Eisenschitz: Cinema, Communism and History 359

13. Jean-Louis Comolli: A Theoretical Practice of Political Cinema 385

Volume II: Aesthetics and Ontology

Part III Questions of Aesthetics

14. Encounters with Structuralism 431

15. Beyond Structuralism: Film Form and Écriture 463

16. Re-reading Classical Cinema 493

17. The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 517

18. Encountering the World Through Cinema 543

19. The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 571

20. Two Ciné-fils: Pascal Kané and Serge Daney 597

Part IV Encounters with Ontology

21. The Bazinian Legacy 637

22. Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 665

23. Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 695

24. Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 717

25. The Brain is the Screen: Cahiers du cinéma and Gilles Deleuze 749

26. Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 775

Conclusion 803

Index of Names Cited 807

 Part III
Questions of Aesthetics

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_part_03
PART III: QUESTIONS OF AESTHE TICS 423

In the first volume of The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma, my study of the
film journal centered on matters of ideology and politics. With its central
position in the history of film theory, this conceptual terrain has tended
to monopolize considerations of Cahiers’ post-1968 period. In the second
volume, the focus will be expanded to incorporate questions of aesthetics
(Part III) and, finally, the encounter with an ontological real engendered by
the cinematic medium (Part IV), with the aim of producing a more rounded
overview of the entirety of the critical output yielded by the Cahiers critics,
both during and after their time with the journal. These represent the
more neglected areas of Cahiers’ critical praxis, but they are of undeniable
importance for attaining a global understanding of the Cahiers project
in the years 1968-1973. Frequently, too, an exploration of these elements
of the critics’ work produces a picture of their thinking that is far more
conceptually diverse than the received wisdom of Cahiers’ Marxist period
usually allows.
We start, then, with matters of aesthetics. In comparison to the tumultu-
ous nature of Cahiers du cinéma’s political engagements in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, the editorial team’s artistic inclinations—their taste in
f ilms, their goût—remained remarkably stable throughout this period
and to a large degree demonstrated a constancy with Cahiers’ past. The
classical Hollywood films deemed worthy of critical “re-readings” were
invariably drawn from the Cahiers stable of auteurs, while many of the
contemporary filmmakers whose work was championed, such as Godard,
Rivette, Rohmer and Truffaut, had their own history as critics at the journal.
For Daney, he and his colleagues’ dogged defense of films such as Nicht
versöhnt and Vent d’est—even in front of left-wing audiences scornful of
such work—represented a fundamental “fidelity to their taste.”1 Narboni,
too, has emphasized the importance of this goût when defining the journal’s
legacy:

For me the criterion of taste has always been essential, taste in the strong
sense of the term, as a “superior form of intelligence,” in the words of
Lautréamont. And if something was the red thread for Cahiers from its
beginnings, it is that we have had the right taste—not good taste, but
pertinent taste. We made mistakes. We were wrong on certain filmmakers,
we underestimated them, we let them pass us by, but on the whole I think
that, on this level, Cahiers played an interesting role.2

1 Serge Daney, La Rampe (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983), p. 14.

2 Interview with Jean Narboni, March 18, 2014.
424  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

It was an axiom for Cahiers during its Marxist period that aesthetics could
not be divorced from politics and that the ideological nature of a f ilm
stemmed principally from its formal qualities. Experimentation in mise
en scène, in editing, and in the use of sound, color and other technical
properties in ways that departed from the norms of classical cinematic
representation thus came to be seen by Cahiers as the primary guarantor of
a film’s political credentials. Situating themselves within the avant-gardist
tradition of Marxist aesthetics, the journal’s writers frequently had recourse
to historical materialist predecessors to support their perspective. When
discussing L’Aveu, for instance, Comolli invoked Walter Benjamin in a passage
from “The Author as Producer” that is uncannily illustrative of Cahiers’
critical program in the post-1968 period:

The tendency of a literary work can only be politically correct if it is also

literarily correct. That is to say, the correct political tendency includes a
literary tendency. […] Instead of asking, “What is the attitude of a work to
the relations of production of its time? Does it accept them, is it reaction-
ary—or does it aim at overthrowing them, is it revolutionary?”—instead
of this question, or at any rate before it, I should like to propose another.
Rather than ask: “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of produc-
tion of its time?”, I should like to ask: “What is its position in them?” This
question directly concerns the function the work has within the literary
relations of production of its time. It is concerned, in other words, directly
with the literary technique of works.3

More succinctly, Brecht’s maxim that “Lenin did not just say different things
from Bismarck, he also spoke in a different way,” was cited repeatedly by
Cahiers in support of the notion that revolutionary content required the
creation of revolutionary forms. 4 In the case of Straub/Huillet, Godard
and Kramer, or, earlier, the Soviet avant-gardes (the category (b) f ilms

3 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in idem., Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott,
ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), pp. 220-238, here pp. 221-222. Cited in Jean-Louis
Comolli, “Film/Politique (2): L’Aveu: 15 propositions,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970),
pp. 48-51, here p. 48. Translated as “Film/Politics (2): L’Aveu: 15 Propositions,” trans. Nancy Kline
Piore, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation
(London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 163-173.
4 See Bertolt Brecht, “Die Expressionismusdebatte,” cited in Pascal Bonitzer, “Camarades
(suite),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971), pp. 61-62, here p. 62; Groupe Lou Sin
d’intervention idéologique, “Le ‘Groupe Dziga Vertov’: Sur les f ilms du ‘groupe’ (2),” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 240 (July-August 1972), pp. 4-9, here p. 5; and Serge Toubiana, “Le ballon rouge
(Novecento),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 270 (September-October 1976), pp. 58-60, here p. 59.
PART III: QUESTIONS OF AESTHE TICS 425

in “Cinéma/idéologie/critique”), the relationship between revolutionary

politics and radical aesthetics was an explicit, relatively straightforward
one. In the negative sense, too, the inherently conservative nature of the
work of Karmitz or Costa-Gavras could be apodictically proven by their op-
portunistic approach to film form, with these filmmakers’ use of “bourgeois”
cinematic techniques to increase the mass appeal of their work denounced
vociferously on the pages of the journal.
Between these opposing poles, however, a vast, formally and ideologically
variegated field of aesthetic practice lay before the Cahiers critics. The
international explosion of filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s
occurred in tandem with the era’s global outburst of political contestation,
but it was not a straightforward artistic reflection of transformations in
the socio-economic base. During this period, the Cahiers writers had to
contend with the discrepancies and deferrals—the décalages—between
Politics with a capital “P” and formal developments in the cinema, while
also grappling with the question as to how much “fidelity” to the artistic
hierarchies established by earlier incarnations of the review should be
retained. The journal’s critical practice, therefore, was a concrete application
of Badiou’s notion of the “autonomy of the aesthetic process.”5 Frequently,
films deemed to be of interest as works of cinema were discussed at length,
even if the political positions of the filmmakers were remote from those of
Cahiers in the post-1968 period. Although Cahiers rejected formalism—that
is, the discussion of film form at a remove from any and all political implica-
tions—its interest in matters of cinematic form resulted in the journal
critically interrogating a wide range of films that other publications situating
themselves on the revolutionary left (Cinéthique, for instance) disdained
or summarily ignored.
This section therefore looks at those films that were subject to formal/
political readings by the Cahiers writers. The political outlook of the direc-
tors of these films varied from the far-left orientations of Rocha, Oshima
and Jancsó to the more conservative or apolitical sympathies of Fellini and
Lewis. But these are all films that, as the “Cinéma/idéologique/critique”
editorial termed it, were capable of resisting—“against the grain”—the
dominant system of representation. In this line of reasoning, form and
content were not to be seen as a straightforward binary but entered into
a dynamic interplay with each other, one where form could dialectically
become political content. Such a process, however, does not take place

5 See Alain Badiou, “L’autonomie du processus esthétique,” Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes

no. 12-13 (July-October 1966), pp. 77-89.
426  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

unaided in the film itself. Rather, it only fully comes about through the act
of critical analysis, through the way in which the films are read. In their
October 1969 editorial, Comolli and Narboni stress the importance of the
“critical work” carried out on a film—that is, their own activity as film
critics.6 By elevating the critic to the status of creator, this standpoint is also
in line with Barthes’ 1968 article “La mort de l’auteur,” where the theorist
argues that the “birth of the reader” comes at the expense of the “death of
the author.”7 Although, as far as the cinema is concerned, Cahiers was the
birthplace of the politique des auteurs in the 1950s, its editors in the late
1960s followed Barthes’ lead, arguing that the defense of the “problematic
of expressivity, of ‘visionary’ creation” was incompatible with historical
materialism and that the concept of “signifying practice” had destroyed
“the notion of an ineffable kernel of genius within creative subjectivity.”8
Daney, indeed, would later characterize their viewpoint as a politique des
ôteurs (an untranslatable pun that we could render as “stripper theory”). He
and his fellow critics, after all, tended to promote filmmakers who sought to
strip (ôter) the public of its illusions in the powers of the cinema.9 And yet
in spite of this Barthes-inspired critique of authorial subjectivity, Cahiers
in many ways remained rooted in an underlying auteurist approach. Even
at the height of the journal’s Marxist-Leninist orientation, films were still
almost exclusively understood as the work of a director rather than the
output of a nation, a genre, an industry or a filmmaking team, and the
careers of the journal’s preferred filmmakers were loyally followed, with
the “name of the author” guaranteeing a sense of continuity from one film
to the next.
Of course, Cahiers was interested in more than the mere critical evalu-
ation of individual films. Since its foundation by Bazin in 1951, the journal
had also been concerned with theoretical inquiries into the nature of the
cinema as an art form, and this project continued under Comolli/Narboni’s
editorship. The post-1968 Cahiers continued to ask the fundamental question

6 Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du cinéma

no. 216 (October 1969), pp. 11-15, here p. 14. Translated as “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” trans.
Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 251-259, here pp. 256-257.
7 Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” Manteia no. 5 (1968). Translated as “The Death of the
Author,” in idem., Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), pp. 142-149, here p. 149.
8 La Rédaction, “Réponses à Politique Hebdo,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May-June 1971),
pp. 61-64, here p. 62.
9 Daney, La Rampe, p. 13.
PART III: QUESTIONS OF AESTHE TICS 427

posed by Bazin: what is cinema? Increasingly, they turned to semiological

and structuralist theories to assist them in devising answers.10 The period
between 1963 and 1969 was marked by a prolonged association between
Cahiers and the proponents of film semiology—including Metz, Pasolini,
Barthes and Raymond Bellour. Although this dialogue had a profound
influence on the journal, Cahiers never unequivocally adopted a semiological
approach to the analysis of cinema. As the decade came to a close, Saus-
surean vocabulary—including pairs of terms such as “signifier/signified,”
“denotation/connotation” and “enunciation/énoncé (utterance),” as well as the
“langue/langage/parole (language system/ language/speech)” triad—began
to preponderate on the pages of Cahiers, but this was also the moment
when literary theory in France began pushing against the limitations of
the semiological approach, and Cahiers, with its close ties to Tel Quel, was
immediately affected by this conceptual fault line. Under the influence of
Sollers, Kristeva, Derrida and the later writings of Barthes, the journal came
to see the cinema as a form of écriture (writing), or “signifying practice,”
in which the very act of signification was to be radically interrogated, its
structural binaries deconstructed.
The high point of the structuralist/post-structuralist influence on
Cahiers came in the two to three years immediately following publication
of “Cinéma/idéologie/critique.” This brief but critically fecund period in
the history of Cahiers also saw it respond to a wide range of f ilms and
filmmakers: from revisiting key works from the silent era such as Intolerance
to championing the early efforts of young directors such as Bene and Garrel.
Thereafter, as was outlined in part II, the radicalization of the journal saw
the progressive phasing out of theoretical and aesthetic concerns in favor of a
purely political consideration of the cinema and a rarefaction in the number
and aesthetic variety of films discussed by the journal. In the following
chapters, a familiar chronological pattern emerges. A filmmaker’s work is
stridently advocated in the years 1969-1971, only to be largely abandoned in
the years 1972-1973 either as the result of a vocal denunciation or a silent but
no less definitive rejection. As Cahiers recovered its “critical function” by
the mid-1970s, however, interest in many (but not all) of these œuvres was
revived, and the work of the filmmaker in question was once more subject
to impassioned discussion by the journal.

10 French practice usually operates a distinction between la sémiotique and la sémiologie, with
the latter more closely aligned with the tradition of Saussurean linguistics. I have retained this
usage, using “semiology” to refer to the work of Barthes, Metz, Bellour and Pasolini in order to
highlight this specific theoretical lineage.
428  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

The ensuing seven chapters in this section can be broken down into
three distinct groupings. The first two chapters (14 and 15) take a look at
the general theoretical questions that concerned Cahiers’ aesthetic project:
here, the influence of structuralism and semiology in the early to late 1960s
will be outlined before the effects that the theoretical tumult of the end
of the decade had on the journal are closely examined as it grappled with
questions of montage, filmic space, duration and cinematic écriture in
general. Chapters 16 to 18 look at the key films and filmmakers discussed
by Cahiers in the years 1969-1972—beyond the totemic figures of Godard,
Straub and Eisenstein, whose work has been dealt with in Parts I and II.
Re-readings of classical Hollywood films such as Morocco, Sylvia Scarlett and
Intolerance, modeled on the Young Mr. Lincoln analysis, were accompanied
by a defense and critique of cinematic modernism as found in the work of,
among others, Buñuel, Lewis, Bene, Garrel, Fellini, the Taviani brothers and
Visconti. This period also represented an increasing geographical openness
in Cahiers’ interests as it took in work from Eastern Europe (Skolimowski,
Chytilová, Jancsó), Latin America (Solanas, Rocha) and Japan (Yoshida,
Masamura, Oshima). The last two chapters, meanwhile, look at the continu-
ation of film aesthetics in the work of three former Cahiers writers. Aumont
(Chapter 19) made the transition towards the university at a moment when
film studies was being established as an academic field, and he sought to
inscribe the study of the cinema within a broader tradition of aesthetic
theory. In contrast, Daney and Kané (Chapter 20) eschewed an academic
career and instead chose to question the cinema and their own cinephilia
through the means of journalism and filmmaking respectively.

Works Cited

Alain Badiou, “L’autonomie du processus esthétique,” Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes

no. 12-13 (July-October 1966), pp. 77-89.
Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” Manteia no. 5 (1968). Translated as “The
Death of the Author,” in idem., Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 142-149.
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in idem., Reflections, trans. Edmund
Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), pp. 220-238.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Camarades (suite),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971),
pp. 61-62
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Film/Politique (2): L’Aveu: 15 propositions,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 224 (October 1970), pp. 48-51, here p. 48. Translated as “Film/Politics (2):
PART III: QUESTIONS OF AESTHE TICS 429

L’Aveu: 15 Propositions,” trans. Nancy Kline Piore, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers
du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation (London: Routledge,
1990), pp. 163-173.
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 216 (October 1969), pp. 11-15, here p. 14. Translated as “Cinema/
Ideology/Criticism,” trans. Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinema against
Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2015), pp. 251-259.
———, La Rampe (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983).
Groupe Lou Sin d’intervention idéologique, “Le ‘Groupe Dziga Vertov’: Sur les films
du ‘groupe’ (2),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 240 (July-August 1972), pp. 4-9.
La Rédaction, “Réponses à Politique Hebdo,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May-
June 1971), pp. 61-64.
Serge Toubiana, “Le ballon rouge (Novecento),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 270 (September-
October 1976), pp. 58-60.
14. Encounters with Structuralism

Abstract
This chapter outlines Cahiers du cinéma’s relationship with structuralist
theory in the 1960s and 1970s. The journal’s encounter with structuralism
first manifested itself in 1963, when then-editor Jacques Rivette arranged
for a series of interviews with Roland Barthes, Pierre Boulez and Claude
Lévi-Strauss. The dialogue with Barthes was by far the most stimulating of
these interviews and initiated a relationship that lasted until the literary
theorist’s death in 1980. But fruitful exchanges were also had with the
pioneer of film semiology, Christian Metz, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who
combined filmmaking with his own take on Saussurean linguistics. And
yet, although Cahiers was often a venue for debates between different
structuralist thinkers, its critics were never entirely satisfied with the
semiological approach to f ilm analysis and in the post-1968 era were
concerned more with how a film’s formal structures could subvert the
cinema’s status as a signifying practice.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, structuralism, Roland Barthes, Christian

Metz, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Three Interviews: Barthes, Boulez, Lévi-Strauss

Rivette’s assumption to the position of editor-in-chief of Cahiers in the

summer of 1963 marked the beginning of an openness towards new currents
in critical theory and avant-garde artistic practice, after the conservative
classicism and autarkic cinephilia of the Rohmer period. The most spec-
tacular immediate result of this turn was a series of interviews with three
“noteworthy witnesses of contemporary culture”: Roland Barthes, Pierre
Boulez and Claude Lévi-Strauss. A note at the beginning of the Barthes
interview encapsulated the spirit in which these interviews were undertaken:
“the cinema, always present, sometimes in the background, sometimes in
the foreground, will, we hope, be situated in a broader perspective, one that

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch14
432  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

archivism and idolatry (which also have their role to play) sometimes risk
forgetting.”1 The interviews with Boulez and Lévi-Strauss, however, were
of only limited value for the journal. Boulez was expansive on his musical
activity but barely touched on the cinema.2 Lévi-Strauss, meanwhile, spoke
at length about film, but the dialogue was marked by a near total divergence
between his cinematic proclivities and those of Cahiers. Expressing distaste
for the modernism of Godard as well as most of Resnais, and Demy’s films,
the anthropologist was disconcerted by “the manner in which the cinema is
being ‘politicized’” and reproached Rouch’s ethnographic films for introduc-
ing fictional elements into Moi, un noir and La Pyramide humaine, facetiously
noting that his ethnographic films would have been “better realized with
professionals, a script and staging.”3
The Barthes interview, by contrast, was far more theoretically fecund
and established an intermittent collaboration between the literary theorist
and the film journal that lasted up to the former’s death in 1980. Barthes’
work had been cursorily referred to by Cahiers writers since 1958, when
Truffaut used his notion of “neither-nor criticism” (la critique ni-ni) and his
condemnation of poujadisme in Mythologies to attack Positif.4 In a round table
on Hiroshima mon amour the following year, Godard evoked the opening line
of Barthes’ review of Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge in which he had dispiritingly
judged that “here in France, talent is with the right and truth with the left.”5
But it was with Rivette’s brief yet incisive text “Revoir Verdoux”—published
a month before the interview with the theorist—that Barthes’ structuralism

1 Roland Barthes, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien avec
Roland Barthes,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 147 (September 1963), pp. 20-30, here p. 21. This note is
not included in the English translation of the interview.
2 While he regularly went to the cinémathèque in the years 1947-1949 and was impressed with
films such as October, Broken Blossoms and L’Espoir, the composer admitted that his “‘cinematic
culture’ was full of lacunae,” and he had been unable to watch the more recent films of Resnais
and other nouvelle vague filmmakers. Pierre Boulez, interviewed by Jacques Rivette and François
Weyergans, “Entretien avec Pierre Boulez,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 152 (February 1964), pp. 19-29,
here p. 27.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien avec
Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 156 (June 1964), pp. 19-29, here pp. 20-21, 26.
4 François Truffaut, “Positif: copie 0,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 79 (January 1958), pp. 60-62, here
p. 61. Poujadisme was an anti-intellectual, right-wing populist movement active in France in
the 1950s, named after its founder Pierre Poujade.
5 Roland Barthes, “Cinéma, droit et gauche,” Les Lettres nouvelles no. 2 (March 1959). Translated
as “Cinema Right and Left,” trans. Deborah Glassman, in Philip Watts, Roland Barthes’ Cinema
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 121-124, here p. 121. See also Jean-Luc Godard, in
Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette and
Éric Rohmer, “Hiroshima, notre amour,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 97 (July 1959), pp. 1-18, here p. 14.
Encounters with Structuralism 433

became a methodological touchstone for Cahiers’ own critical practice.

The piece was a response to a note by Comolli reporting on the opening
of the Cinémathèque française at a new facility in the Palais de Chaillot,
an event crowned by the projection of Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. For
Comolli, the much anticipated screening of a long-unavailable masterpiece
was a disappointment: Chaplin’s film, it turned out, was little more than
a “sterile game of a hero who refers to nothing other than himself or his
double.”6 Rivette felt compelled to respond to this severe judgement, but
the eight short paragraphs of his rejoinder do more than rebut Comolli on
the subject of Monsieur Verdoux, a film which the elder critic defended as
the creation of a “free man.” Shifting to the broader question of the cinema
itself, “Revoir Verdoux” lucidly encapsulates a way of conceptualizing the
contradictory, dialectical relationship between the cinema and the world
that represents the essence of Cahiers’ critical project. Here, Rivette argues
that the goal of the cinema is that “the real world, such as it is offered on the
screen, should also be an idea of the world.”7 Two paths, then, are available
for filmmakers, but both have their attendant risks: beginning with “the
world” poses the danger of the filmmaker remaining content with a “pure
gaze” that is little different from cows watching trains pass by—in thrall to
their color and movement, but without any deeper understanding of what
they have seen. Beginning with “the idea,” meanwhile, tends to result in
schematic works that do not allow the dense, confusing reality of the world
to interfere with the initial conception.
Rivette insists, however, that there are filmmakers who are capable of
achieving a dialectical balance between these two approaches. Here, the
pre-existing idea of the film must not be a “skeleton” but a “dynamic figure”
in which “the justness of its movement, of its internal dialectic, progressively
recreates, before our eyes, a concrete world” that is “both an incarnated idea
and the real penetrated with meaning.”8 For Rivette, the “idea is already an
idea of the world;” it is an “image-idea.” With this notion, he combines two
philosophical heritages: the film theory of Bazin, with its concern for the
relationship between the cinema and the reality of the world it depicts, and
the Hegelian conception of the relationship between the idea and concrete
reality. Rivette treats the ontological realism of the cinema not as a frozen

6 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Coup double,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 146 (August 1963), pp. 41-42, here
p. 42.
7 Jacques Rivette, “Revoir Verdoux,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 146 (August 1963), pp. 42-43, here
p. 42.
8 Ibid., p. 43.
434  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

dogma but as a bidirectional dynamic, and in doing so retains the dialectical

thrust inherent to Bazin’s original ideas. Chaplin’s value—and, indeed, his
“genius”—is that he manifests “in clear light” a dialectic that was merely
implicit in the work of other filmmakers. From this point, Rivette shifts the
conceptual terrain towards the structuralist theory of Barthes. Assenting to
Barthes’ view that structuralist activity is the “reconstitution of an object ‘in
such a way as to manifest the functions of this object,’” Rivette sees Monsieur
Verdoux through a Barthesian lens as a “simulacrum, rigorously non-symbolic
and without depth, but formal: ‘neither the real, nor the rational, but the
functional’.”9 Chaplin is therefore something of an unwitting structuralist:
the “multiplicity of significations” in Monsieur Verdoux is generated by the
distanced, almost Brechtian relationship between his extra-filmic persona
and the role he plays in the film.
The groundwork was laid, therefore, for a productive dialogue between
Barthes and Cahiers, which first emerged in his September 1963 encounter
with Rivette and Delahaye. As Narboni observes, this conversation has the
distinction of being the “first important interview in the French language”
given by Barthes.10 The discussion here focuses on the vexed question as to
whether cinema constitutes a language: while the Cahiers interviewers are
distinctly skeptical about the linguistic properties of cinematic signification,
Barthes offers a nuanced view of the potential of a linguistic model for film
analysis. This model should firstly discern “whether, in the filmic continuum,
there are elements which are not analogical, or whose analogical character
has been deformed, transposed or codified; elements which are structured
in such a way that they can be treated as fragments of language.” Applying
a structuralist methodology would then allow us to isolate filmic elements
in order to pinpoint “linguistic units” from which “you could construct
‘classes,’ systems and declensions.”11
But such an effort would still come up against the obstacle that “cinematic
expression probably also belongs to this order of large-scale signifying units,
corresponding to global, diffuse, latent signifieds, which are not in the
same category as the isolated and discontinuous signifieds of articulated

9 Ibid. The quoted passage is from Roland Barthes’ text “The Structuralist Activity,” published
earlier that year.
10 Jean Narboni, La nuit sera noire et blanche: Barthes, La Chambre claire, le cinéma (Paris:
Capricci, 2015), p. 21.
11 Barthes, “Entretien avec Roland Barthes,” p. 22. Translated as “Roland Barthes: ‘Towards
a Semiotics of Cinema,’” trans. Annwyl Williams, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. II:
The 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 276-285,
here pp. 277-278.
Encounters with Structuralism 435

language.” Referring to Jakobsonian categories, Barthes therefore contends

that the cinema can be considered a language only if it abandons the level of
denotation and shifts to the level of connotation. While a common objection
to such a position, and one raised by the interviewers, is that formal devices
in the cinema (the high-angle shot, for instance) possess an inescapable
semantic ambiguity, this does not pose a problem for Barthes, who claims
that “Ambiguity of that kind is normal. […] Signifiers are all ambiguous;
the number of signifieds always exceeds the number of signifiers.”12 Fur-
thermore, Barthes insists that, in the cinema, “the story, the anecdote,
the argument (with its major consequence, suspense) is never absent.”
This results in cinematic narrative resembling a series of “syntagmatic
dispatchings,” leading Barthes to the conclusion that “exchanges between
linguistics and cinema are possible, provided you choose a linguistics of
the syntagma rather than a linguistics of the sign.”13
From this general discussion, Barthes moves on to a more specific dis-
cussion of artistic modes and their political possibilities. The cinema, for
Barthes, is closer to literature than it is to the theater. Whereas the latter is
capable of polemical agitation for politically radical purposes, a “literature of
the left” is impossible; instead, Barthes advocates a “problematic literature,”
which “provokes answers, but which does not give them.”14 In the cinema,
this can take the form of a “suspension of meaning,” which Barthes locates in
Buñuel’s El angel exterminador. While the Spanish director famously issued
a disclaimer that “this film has no meaning,” Barthes refuses to see it as an
absurd or nonsensical film. El angel exterminador is a film “full of meaning,”
but this is to be associated with the Lacanian notion of signifiance—that
is, a signifying process that has a subversion or evacuation of meaning at
its core. For Barthes, the future of the cinema thus lies in the direction of
Buñuel’s film, which exemplifies a variant of cinematic modernism that
would consist of “syntagmatic films, narrative films, ‘psychological’ films.”15
The recent deposit of Rivette’s archives at the Cinémathèque française
has shed new light on the genesis of this landmark discussion, as three
successive versions of the interview have been preserved, allowing us to
closely chart the evolution of its content.16 In the published interview,

12 Ibid. [pp. 278-279].

13 Ibid., p. 26 [p. 280].
14 Ibid., p. 28 [p. 282].
15 Ibid., p. 30 [p. 284].
16 Of the three versions, the first and the second only have minor differences—the product,
most likely, of a light revision of the transcript by Rivette and Delahaye themselves. The third
version, by contrast, is the result of Barthes’ substantial revisions and was published without
436  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Rivette and Delahaye thanked Barthes for “attentively reread[ing] the text
of this conversation,”17 but this is a euphemistic description. In fact, Barthes
discarded the majority of his interview, retaining only the questions and
completely re-writing his answers, gluing the new, handwritten passages into
place on top of the typed sheets of the transcript. In light of this discovery,
the “dialogue” between Cahiers and Barthes takes on a surreal allure: a
question posed orally receives a written response, before a new question,
responding to a markedly different answer given by Barthes during the
spoken interview, takes up the thread. The revisions also attest to the fluid,
only partially thought-out conception that Barthes had of the cinema in
1963. In an excised passage, he confesses that “if I have not written anything
on the cinema, this is because [I] have always been prevented by the senti-
ment that I do not possess sufficient culture, at the precise moment when
culture appears to me not only as knowledge but as a refinement of analysis,
necessary for embarking on criticism.”18
Whereas Barthes unambiguously insists in the final version of the inter-
view that “the cinema is a metonymic art,” in the earlier transcription he
divides the medium into a “cinema of metaphor and a cinema of metonymy,
or, on the one hand a cinema that would invent symbolic substitutions for a
signified, […] and on the other hand a cinema of narrative and montage.”19
Discussions of the “Yale school” of syntagmatic linguistics and critical
remarks on Antonioni are excised,20 while lengthy passages on Brecht in
the final version were post factum additions. In the initial interview, the
German dramatist is treated in a markedly different manner but one that
contains fascinating resonances for Cahiers’ critical practice in the late 1960s
and 1970s. Here Barthes asks: “Have film critics tried to analyze film on a
level equivalent, for example, to that of the scene in Brecht? What would
this cinematic Brechtism produce? Why does the cinema seem incapable

any further changes. It is therefore the differences between the second and third versions of the
text that are of interest for present scholarship. See Fonds Jacques Rivette, Espace chercheurs
de la Cinémathèque française, RIVETTE86-B19.
17 Ibid., p. 21.
18 Roland Barthes, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien avec
Roland Barthes [second version],” Fonds Jacques Rivette, Espace chercheurs de la Cinémathèque
française, RIVETTE86-B19, p. 2.
19 Ibid., p. 7.
20 This step perhaps represented prudence on Barthes’ part. He evidently later warmed to
the Italian filmmaker, as the final text he wrote was an appreciative letter to Antonioni, left
unf inished but published by Cahiers after his death. See Roland Barthes, “Cher Antonioni,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 311 (May 1980), pp. 9-11.
Encounters with Structuralism 437

of permitting an integral Brechtism?”21 Although Barthes is ambivalent

about the likely results of such an endeavor, his answer appears to sketch
out the later Cahiers’ program half-a-decade in advance: “All this leads
to the desire for a general aesthetics of the cinema; aesthetics not in the
humanistic sense of the term, but in a polemical, or even Kantian sense
(that is, discerning categories), perhaps by confronting the cinema with
Brechtism and structuralism.”22

Christian Metz and Film Semiology

Alongside Barthes, Christian Metz represented the other wing of a pro-

longed dialogue between Cahiers and semiology in the 1960s. Whereas
Barthes analyzed cultural discourse in a broad sense, Metz focused more
singularly on the project of developing a semiological understanding of
the cinema grounded in the work of Saussure and Hjemslev. Metz’s judi-
cious, methodical approach is evident from his first published text on film
semiology, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?.” Rejecting more grandiose
attempts to elaborate the “language of cinema,” he insisted that it could not
be considered a langue (language system) analogous to spoken languages
such as English and French but was better understood as a looser system of
signification, a langage (language) that obeys the fundamental principles
of general linguistics.23 The Cahiers critics, for their part, never adopted
Metz’s outlook on the cinema outright. Indeed, once the journal was under
the sway of Althusserian Marxism, the linguistic foundations of Metz’s
method were judged as too “empiricist,” and he was critiqued for not taking
the ideological aspect of signification into account. Metz was nonetheless
a privileged interlocutor of Cahiers for more than a decade, and his work
would have a lasting influence on the later writings of Aumont, Comolli
and Bonitzer in particular. The dialogue with Metz was a product both of
Cahiers’ openness to new tendencies in film theory in the mid-1960s and
of close personal ties, as Narboni grants. Metz, he notes, “was an adorable
fellow, and extremely kind. I read his texts, they spoke to me less. The grande

21 Barthes, “Entretien avec Barthes [second version],” p. 16.

22 Ibid.
23 See Christian Metz, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?,” in idem. Essais sur la signification au
cinéma (Paris: Klincksieck, 2013 [1968]), pp. 41-92. Translated as “Cinema: Language or Language
System?,” in idem. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 31-91.
438  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

syntagmatique was not as close to me as Barthes and Pasolini were.”24 This

attitude notwithstanding, it is curious that unlike Barthes, Metz was never
interviewed by Cahiers—even more so given that he did conduct interviews
with other film journals at the time, including Cinéthique and La Nouvelle
Critique in 1970 and Ça-cinéma in 1975.25 Instead, Metz’s interventions in
Cahiers took more varied forms and included letters to the editor, articles
and excerpts from forthcoming books.
Metz’s f irst appearance on the pages of Cahiers was an inauspicious
one. In February 1965, a review of Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme mariée by
Gérard Guégan had accused the semiologist of committing a “regrettable
misconception” in “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” by ostensibly refus-
ing montage and “assimilating it with the manipulation of the real that
Rossellini was so wary of.”26 Metz hastily issued a retort published in the
journal’s April issue, which insisted that Guégan had misunderstood his
text. Metz had only intended to condemn “a certain form of montage (and
‘film syntax’) which the cinema has, in any case, already left behind,” and
he specified that this montage-roi consisted of “the abuse of non-diegetic
metaphors, superimpositions, rapid editing, etc.” In the work of Welles,
Resnais and Godard, by contrast, a new form of montage has arisen, one
which is no longer “a caricature of verbal structures,” and Metz concludes
his missive with the statement that “only a certain form of montage is
dead…”27
This exchange may not have augured a propitious relationship between
Metz and the journal—the theorist bluntly states that he has “very few
opinions in common with Cahiers.”28 Nonetheless, the next month the
editors of Cahiers elected to publish a major article by Metz that would
be of considerable importance for the journal’s later development, “À
propos de l’impression de la réalité au cinéma.” Borrowing the concept
of the “impression of reality” from Barthes’ discussion of photography in
his article “Rhétorique de l’image,” Metz argues that it is thanks to the
movement of images that the cinema is able to furnish “a higher degree of
reality and the corporality of objects” than photography and thus impart a

24 Interview with Jean Narboni, March 18, 2014.

25 See Christian Metz, Conversations with Christian Metz: Selected Interviews on Film Theory
(1970-1991), eds. Warren Buckland and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2017).
26 Gérard Guégan, “Décollages,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 163 (February 1965), pp. 81-82.
27 Christian Metz, “Godard et le montage,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 165 (April 1965), p. 5.
28 Ibid.
Encounters with Structuralism 439

sense of “presence” to the events depicted.29 For Metz, moving images are not
merely analogous to motion in real life; rather, they genuinely provide the
spectator with the “real presence of movement.” The “secret” of the cinema
therefore consists of “injecting in the irreality of the image the reality of
movement, and thus making the imaginary real to an extent never before
attained.”30 A year later, Metz would publish a second major article with
Cahiers, this time on the occasion of a special issue on “cinema and the
novel.” “Le cinéma moderne et la narrativité” applauded the effervescence
of cinematic modernism in the 1960s—with the rise of filmmakers such as
Resnais, Godard and Antonioni—but claimed that, in contrast to Pasolini’s
notion of the “cinema of poetry,” these films are marked above all by a
tendency towards the novelistic and away from the abstractly poetic imagery
of the silent era. Rather than a sweeping rejection of narrative, spectacle or
drama, the specificity of modern cinema resides, for Metz, in “a vast and
complex movement of renewal and enrichment” of film syntax.31
In the period after these texts appeared, Cahiers was divided between
harnessing Metz’s theories for its own purposes and subjecting them to
critique. In a 1969 intervention, Narboni broadly adhered to Metz’s position
in “Problèmes de dénotation dans le film de fiction” that a shot in the cinema
corresponds to a lexical sentence rather than a word (or, as in Metz’s famous
example, to the phrase “Here is a revolver!” rather than the word “revolver”),
but he noted that the film Méditerranée strives precisely to transform its
constituent shots into lexical units approximating words by diminishing
the oppositions Metz had established and by “effecting a perversion […]
of the actualization of shots and their quality of assertiveness.”32 From
this point on, the sporadic critiques Cahiers made of Metzian semiology
centered chiefly on the question of ideology, or, more precisely, the lack
thereof in Metz’s theories. In 1971-1972, both Pascal Bonitzer (in “‘Réalité’ de
la dénotation”) and Jean-Louis Comolli (in “Technique et idéologie) offered
harsh critiques of Jean Mitry, contrasting markedly with Metz’s favorable

29 Christian Metz, “À propos de l’impression de la réalité au cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma

no. 166-167 (May-June 1965), pp. 75-82, here pp. 76, 79. Translated as “On the Impression of Reality
in the Cinema,” in idem., Film Language, pp. 3-15, here pp. 6-8.
30 Ibid., p. 82.
31 Christian Metz, “Le cinéma moderne et la narrativité,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 185 (Decem-
ber 1966), pp. 43-68, here p. 63.
32 Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette, “Montage,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 210
(March 1969), pp. 17-34, here p. 24. Translated as “Montage,” trans. Tom Milne, in Jonathan
Rosenbaum (ed.), Rivette: Texts and Interviews (London: BFI, 1977), pp. 69-88, here p. 77. This
text is further discussed in Chapter 15.
440  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

stance towards him.33 Bonitzer’s text, for example, begins by insisting on

the ideological nature of the “technical classification regarding the scale
of the shot,” which fundamentally rests, in the Cahiers critic’s view, on a
“metaphysical ordering from the part to the whole.”34 In adopting the system
of shot categories established by Mitry, Metz’s grande syntagmatique thus
has an openly empiricist foundation, which “reaffirms the illusion of the
text’s autonomy by privileging linearity, ‘lived experience,’ the ‘flow.’”35 Metz’s
broader distinction between filmic denotation and connotation is similarly
critiqued: denotation has the effect of “constraining the film and its reading
to a transcendental semantic level that would be ‘film language’” at the
same time as condemning connotation “to the role of ‘artistic’ supplement,
expressive redundancy.”36 Bonitzer is careful to clarify, however, that he is
referring to arguments made in Metz’s earlier works, which, he foreshadows,
will be addressed in the semiologist’s “upcoming book.” The “upcoming
book,” which did indeed seek to integrate the question of ideology into Metz’s
film semiology, was Langage et cinéma, published later in the year, and the
affinities between Metz’s newer thinking and Cahiers were highlighted
not only in Comolli’s more positive comments towards Metz in the third
installment of “Technique et idéologie”37 but also in the journal’s willingness
to print Chapter 6 of Section XI of the book (“Cinéma et idéographie”) in their
March-April 1971 issue as well as the essay “Ponctuations et démarcations
dans le film de diégèse” (included in vol. II of Essais sur la signification au
cinéma) in early 1972.38
This period also saw a more pointed intervention by Metz. In “Les enfants
du paradigme,” the Positif critic Robert Benayoun had counterposed the
semiologist to Cahiers, praising him for avoiding the journal’s “frivolous,

33 Metz writes at length on Mitry in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, pp. 241-362.
34 Pascal Bonitzer, “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May 1971), pp. 39-41,
here p. 39. Translated as “‘Reality’ of Denotation,” trans. Lindley Hanlon, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers
du Cinéma vol. III, pp. 248-253, here p. 249.
35 Ibid., p. 40.
36 Ibid.
37 See Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique et idéologie (4),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (Novem-
ber 1971), pp. 39-45, here p. 40. Translated as “Technique and Ideology,” in Cinema against
Spectacle, p. 211. In this passage, Comolli foreshadows a planned deeper analysis of Metz’s ideas
in a later installment of “Technique et idéologie,” but this never materializes.
38 See Christian Metz, “Cinéma et idéographie,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971),
pp. 6-11; and Christian Metz, “Ponctuations et démarcations dans le film de diégèse,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 234-235 (December 1971, January-February 1972), pp. 63-78. Both texts are reprinted
in Langage et cinéma (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1971). Translated as Language and Cinema, trans.
by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).
Encounters with Structuralism 441

autocratic and threatening attitude” and adopting a semiological lexicon

that is “natural, restrained, devoid of coquetry and fatuity.”39 As part of
Comolli/Narboni’s vociferous reaction to Benayoun’s charges, Metz himself
responded with a letter to Positif that attested to the fraternal relations
between himself and Cahiers, writing:

It happens that I am in relations of work and discussion, more or less close

depending on the case, with all those whom your collaborator assails,
beginning with Cahiers du cinéma. […] On the subject of cinema, the most
serious effort at theoretical reflection, today, is located in my opinion on
the side of those whom your journal attacks. To this extent—and beyond
all the complex details one would like—I feel that I am on their side
far more than on the side of Positif, in spite of the compliments Robert
Benayon addresses to me. 40

A postscript to Metz’ collaboration with Cahiers came in 1977, in the wake

of his shift towards a psychoanalytic paradigm of film theory in Le Signifi-
ant imaginaire. Not only did this new allegiance bring Metz in yet closer
proximity to the thinking of Cahiers, it also came at a moment when Cahiers
had rejected its earlier political rigidity and was returning to a spirit of
intellectual curiosity. Drawing significantly on Metz, Bonitzer’s 1977 text
“Voici (La notion de plan et le sujet du cinéma)” attests to this alignment.
The article is concerned with what Bonitzer dubs the “effet de voici”: if a
close-up of a revolver conveys the message “here is a revolver,” then this
“here is…” is not only an “actualization effect” (as Metz argues), it is also
an effect produced by the cinematic gaze and is thus an “index of fiction”
allowing the audience to grasp their own position as film spectators. 41
Metz responded to this renewed interest by publishing an extract from Le
Signifiant imaginaire (titled “L’incandescence et le code”) in the journal’s
following issue (March 1977), despite the fact that the text barely touches on
specifically cinematic questions.42 This was the last of Metz’s texts published
in Cahiers, but a final, touching, epilogue to the relationship between the
semiologist and the film journal came in 1994, when the former’s suicide

39 Robert Benayoun, “Les enfants du paradigme,” Positif no. 122 (December 1970), pp. 7-26, here
p. 11.
40 Christian Metz, “Une lettre de Christian Metz,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227 (January-
February 1971), pp. 120-121, here p. 121. The letter is dated January 9, 1971.
41 Pascal Bonitzer, “Voici (La notion de plan et le sujet du cinéma),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 273
(January-February 1977), pp. 5-18, here p. 18.
42 Christian Metz, “L’incandescence et le code,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 274 (March 1977), pp. 5-22.
442  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

prompted Aumont to pen an éloge to a figure with whom he had had a long
and productive relationship. “It is perhaps strange,” he wrote:

that, having never been his pupil, having been his protégé a little (he
helped every time he could), and having finally become his friend, I should
now feel myself invested with the task of transmitting his thought. It’s
not that Christian Metz was my master (I’m not sure he wished to be a
master). It’s that deep down I believe less in the importance of individuals
than in that of values, and from Christian I acquired many. 43

Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Cinema of Poetry

Pasolini was the third key figure of film semiology to entertain relations
with Cahiers. His status as a filmmaker, however, meant that these ties
were of a dual nature: the journal not only conducted a theoretical dialogue
with Pasolini; its critics also responded to and appraised his films. Pasolini
did not have an academic background, and his semiology-inspired texts
represent the standpoint of a practicing artist, with both the strengths and
weaknesses that this entails. Helped by former Cahiers critic Jean-Claude
Biette in understanding the finer points of French semiology, Pasolini’s
experience as a filmmaker allowed him to have insights into the process
of cinematic signification that had eluded the likes of Metz and Barthes. At
the same time, his theoretical notions often attested to a dilettantish streak.
While possessing a provocative value, they were incapable of yielding the
kind of systematic application desired by his fellow semiologists.
Cahiers was early in identifying the exceptional nature of Pasolini’s
cinema: Labarthe lauded Accatone, seen out of competition at Venice in 1961,
as evoking “the best of Visconti, the best of Fellini, perhaps the best of the
Italian cinema.”44 Venice ’64 saw Comolli treat Il vangelo secondo Matteo as
the “remake” of “a film that has unfolded for the last two millennia on our
inner screens and those screens at the altar.”45 It was in 1965, however, that
Cahiers’ interest in Pasolini exploded: in August, the journal ran reviews of
four unreleased Pasolini films (Mamma Roma, Comizi d’amore, La ricotta

43 Jacques Aumont, “Christian Metz et l’amitié,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 472 (October 1993), p. 6.
44 André S. Labarthe, “La boîte à surprises,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 124 (October 1961), pp. 47-48,
here p. 48.
45 Jean-Louis Comolli and François Weyergans, “Venise 64,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 159 (Octo-
ber 1964), pp. 16-31, here p. 24.
Encounters with Structuralism 443

and Sopraluoghi in Palestine) as well as an interview with the filmmaker

conducted by Comolli and Bertolucci; two months later, it published a
French translation of his paper “Il cinema di poesia” (its first appearance
in any language). 46 “Il cinema di poesia” differentiates the im-sign (the
building block of “the world of meaningful images”) from its linguistic
equivalent, the lin-sign, and it is the former’s “pregrammatical and even
premorphological” nature that, for Pasolini, determines the “deeply oneiric
quality of the cinema.”47 If the dreamlike, pre-verbal nature of visual imagery
suggests an innately poetic nature to cinematic language, Pasolini observes
that film production has been dominated by a “specific and surreptitious”
prosaic language—namely, the narrative conventions of the commercial film
industry. The recent work of Antonioni, Bertolucci and Godard, however,
saw the development of techniques such as the “free indirect point-of-view
shot” (an image whose expressive qualities align with the psychology of a
character in the film) and the broader practice of “making the camera felt”
(Pasolini’s term for modernist self-reflexivity), which have recovered the
cinema’s fundamentally oneiric, poetic nature. Pasolini insists that this is a
purely modernist phenomenon: while the films of Chaplin and Mizoguchi
had a poetic aspect to them, this did not derive from their cinematic tech-
nique, which resolutely remained “transparent.” He concludes, however, by
conceding that the distinction between prose and poetry in the cinema is
merely “a useful terminology, which is meaningless unless one proceeds
subsequently to a comparative examination of this phenomenon in a vaster
cultural, social and political context.”48
Comolli and Bertolucci’s interview with Pasolini gave him the opportunity
to expand on some of the key points of this seminal article: from the very
start, he insists that his text poses a purely linguistic division, not one of
value or content. Intriguingly, he applies the prose/poetry dichotomy to his
own films. While his earliest films are “made according to classical syntax,”
Il Vangelo belongs more to the poetic tendency of the cinema. “We feel the

46 See Pier Paolo Pasolini, interviewed by Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le
cinéma selon Pasolini: Entretien avec Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 169 (August 1965),
pp. 20-25, 76-77; and Jean-Louis Comolli, Maurizio Ponzi, Adriano Aprà and Eduardo Bruno,
“Quatre films inédits de Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 169 (August 1965), pp. 27-29.
47 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le cinéma de poésie,” translated into French by Jacques Bontemps and
Marianne di Vettimo, Cahiers du cinéma no. 171 (October 1965), pp. 55-64, here p. 55. Translated
into English as “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Louise
K. Barnett and Ben Lawton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 167-186, here
p. 169.
48 Ibid. [p. 184].
444  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

camera tremendously, there are a lot of zooms, deliberate jump-cuts; if

you want, its technique is somewhat close to that of certain Godard films.”
Moreover, Pasolini divulges that it was his experience making Il Vangelo—
and more specifically, relating the story of Christ from the standpoint of
a believer, in spite of his own atheism—that led to his conceptualization
of “free indirect discourse” as a stylistic technique in the cinema. In the
introduction to his interview with Pasolini, Comolli announced that the
Italian’s communiqué at Pesaro in 1965, the source for the published version
of “Il cinema di poesia,” discussed the problems of contemporary cinema
“at such a level of lucidity and reflection” that it was “no longer possible for
us to only interrogate the filmmaker in Pasolini; we have to reckon with
the theorist.”49 Indeed, a dialectic between filmmaker and theorist also
marked the reception of Pasolini’s work in Cahiers. Another treatise, “Le
scénario comme structure tendant vers une autre structure,” draws from
the filmmaker’s own experience in transforming his written scripts into
works of cinema. In discussing the relationship between the screenplay and
the finished film, Pasolini’s taste for semiologically inspired neologisms is
exacerbated: here the im-sign is reconceived as a kineme. Kinemes are the
almost inexistent “visual monads” obeying semantic laws that are distinct
from the habitual rules of linguistic discourse. The sceno-text (Pasolini’s term
for film script), meanwhile, is defined by its dual, schizophrenic quality: it
represents “two different languages characterized by different structures,”
and the lin-signs that comprise it are marked by being a “form endowed with
the will to become another structure”—that is, they seek to be transformed
into im-signs.50
The final text of Pasolini’s to appear in Cahiers, “Discours sur le plan
séquence ou le cinéma comme sémiologie de la réalité,” sought to bring se-
miology into contact with questions of ontology by focusing on the question
of the sequence-shot and in doing so brought Pasolini’s thinking into a close
dialogue with the Cahiers tradition of reflection on cinema. In developing
his notion of cinema as “the written language of reality,” Pasolini’s article
draws a broad parallel between the long-take in a film and human life itself,
which only obtains full meaning at the point of its completion—that is, the
moment of one’s own death. In a celebrated turn of phrase, Pasolini thus

49 Comolli, “Le cinéma selon Pasolini,” p. 25.

50 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le scénario comme structure tendant vers une autre structure,”
translated into French by Marianne di Vettimo, Cahiers du cinéma no. 185 (December 1966),
pp. 77-82, here p. 82. Translated into English as “The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants to
be Another Structure,” in Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, pp. 187-196, here p. 196.
Encounters with Structuralism 445

remarks that “death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives” and

elaborates on this point by explaining that “editing therefore performs on
the material of the film […] the operations that death performs on life.”51
Narboni’s introduction to the article points to “multiple affinities” between
Pasolini’s ideas and those of Jean Cocteau, noting that “all of Cocteau’s films
[…] could illustrate Pasolini’s description of film as a form of ‘putting to
death’ [mise à mort], where the author would play the role of a conscious,
terrified organizer of his own destruction.”52 Unmentioned by Narboni,
however, is a still more resonant parallel: that between Pasolini’s views
and Bazin’s reflections on the relationship between the machinery of the
cinema and human mortality in texts such as “Mort tous les après-midi”
and his review of Marc Allégret’s Avec André Gide.53
In the same text, Narboni hailed Pasolini as “one of the rare contemporary
filmmakers to attempt to draw from the acquisitions of ‘modern sciences’ in
order to have a better grasp on his own creative activity.”54 In the balance
between Pasolini’s films and his semiological ideas, however, it was the
former that tended to monopolize Cahiers’ interest, particularly as the 1960s
drew to a close. In the space of little more than a year, between April 1969
and July 1970, the journal published no less than six reviews of Pasolini
films. A divided attitude towards Teorema was symptomatic, however, of the
uncertainty that his work now elicited: Bonitzer’s April 1969 response to the
film attempted to square Pasolini’s theory with his aesthetic practice, but
his assessment was an ambivalent one: in depicting the decomposition of
the “bourgeois socio-familial structure,” Pasolini’s overt desire to “‘signify,’ to
metaphorize beyond the constraints of the narrative,” reduces the film to a
set of ideograms or concepts, thereby dooming it to “rigidity and confusion.”55
This judgement was not unanimously shared in Cahiers. Daney, then in Italy
after returning to Europe from a voyage to India, had also submitted a draft
article on the film, handwritten in red capital letters and signed under the

51 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Discours sur le plan séquence ou le cinéma comme sémiologie de
la réalité,” translated into French by Marianne di Vettimo, Cahiers du cinéma no. 192 (July-
August 1967), pp. 26-30, here p. 28. Translated into English as “Observations on the Sequence
Shot,” and “Is Being Natural?,” in Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, pp. 233-243, here pp. 236-237.
The text originated in a lecture given at the third Pesaro film festival in 1967.
52 Jean Narboni, “Situation du nouveau cinéma, 2,” Cahiers du cinéma no 192 (July-August 1967),
p. 26.
53 See André Bazin, “Mort tous les après-midi,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie
et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 65-70; and André Bazin, “Avec André Gide,” in idem.,
Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I, pp. 71-74.
54 Narboni, “Situation du nouveau cinéma, 2,” p. 26.
55 Pascal Bonitzer, “Le carré (Teorema),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), p. 53.
446  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

pseudonym Jean Bave.56 While Bonitzer’s piece was the first to be published,
he later recognized that Daney’s review was patently superior to his own
and possessed “the toughness and translucence that we simply call style.”57
Daney read the film as a tautological proposition that “shows nothing but
the faces of those who watch it, while they are watching it.” The eponymous
theorem of the film is, in his analysis, the following: “The guest (T. Stamp) =
the film (Teorema); the family = the public (you, me, etc.).” As a mirror of the
audience, confronting it with its own voyeurism, Teorema attains a summit
of self-reflexivity. Even the different reactions of the family members to
Terence Stamp’s abrupt departure program in advance the various critical
responses the film will elicit among spectators—including, by implication,
Bonitzer’s unenthused appraisal. It is here, however, that the parallelism
comes to an end. While the family is decisively dispersed at the end of the
film, the film-going public will continue to reconstitute itself before the
cinematic spectacle. Teorema, Daney concludes, “is not the last film,” and in
being “complicit in what he denounces,” Pasolini is “condemned to please,
even (and always) for the last time.”58
Porcile also met with multiple reviews (this time by Eisenschitz and
Daney), while brief notices by Eisenschitz on Uccellacci e uccellini in
April 1970 (released in France five years after its Italian premiere) and Amore
e rabbia three months later were to be the last discussions of Pasolini’s films
in Cahiers during the filmmaker’s lifetime. With his Marxism evidently too
heterodox for Cahiers in its dogmatic period, Medea and the three “trilogy
of life” films were all passed over in silence, and even Pasolini’s spectacular
death in November 1975 initially went unmentioned by the journal. It was
only in the July-August 1976 issue (a dossier on “Images de marque”) that
Cahiers returned to the Italian filmmaker’s work, with Daney penning a
“Note sur Saló.” Invoking Barthes’ judgement that “no one can recuperate”
Pasolini’s Sade adaptation,59 Daney’s text is remote from the semiologi-
cal concerns of the 1960s. Instead, he gives a quasi-Deleuzian take on the
micropolitics of desire operating in Pasolini’s last work: popular resistance
in Saló is embodied not in “radical refusal” or the “demand for another
politics” but in the “collection of little pleasures stolen from the despotic
system of rules.” And yet Pasolini’s film is suffused with an “ultimate despair,”

56 The name is a pun on the idiomatic phrase j’en bave, “I’m having a hard time of it.”
57 Pascal Bonitzer, “Calme bloc,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 458 (July-August 1992), pp. 10-11.
58 Serge Daney, “Le désert rose (Teorema),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 61-62.
59 See Roland Barthes, “Sade-Pasolini,” Le Monde, June 16, 1976. Translated as “Sade–Pasolini
(On Saló),” trans. Deborah Glassman, in Watts, Roland Barthes’ Cinema, pp. 138-140.
Encounters with Structuralism 447

which comes from the generalization of bourgeois attitudes to all sections

of society and which reaches the point that even sex has lost its subversive
energy. For Daney, the Italian filmmaker is therefore a “defamed master”
who is “condemned to a sort of irremediable innocence.”60

Debates over Film Language: Moullet, Burch, Bellour

The ambivalent attitude of Cahiers towards the initial efforts of the film
semiologists was reflected in a series of debates the journal hosted sur-
rounding questions of film analysis and cinematic language. The most
spectacular of these was undoubtedly former Cahiers critic Luc Moullet’s
strident denunciation of the “linguists” at Pesaro in 1966. A round table
during the festival on the theme “Pour une nouvelle conscience critique
du langage cinématographique” saw guests of honor Pasolini, Metz and
Barthes attacked by Moullet in an impromptu intervention. The youngest
member of the nouvelle vague generation of Cahiers critics (he was born in
1937), Moullet had just released his debut film Brigitte et Brigitte, an ode to
Parisian cinephilia which Narboni had greeted in Barthesian terms as the
“degree zero of cinema” for its radical renunciation of stylistic flourishes.61
In a philippic titled “De la nocivité du langage cinématographique, de son
inutilité, ainsi que des moyens de lutter contre lui,” Moullet fulminated, with
his typical sardonic provocation, against the “congenital artistic mediocrity
of cinematic languages past, present and future” and argued that “there
is a complete opposition between cinematic language and cinematic art,
for cinematic language overwhelms art, invades it, stifles it.”62 Indeed, the
perspective and tone of his intervention can be aptly summarized in its
closing peroration: “Down with film language, so that film may live!”63

60 Serge Daney, “Note sur Saló,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 268-269 (July-August 1976), pp. 102-103.
61 “Between Moullet’s film and us,” Narboni explained, “there is no cinema, or rather there
is the empty space left by its disappearance.” Jean Narboni “Notre alpin quotidien (Brigitte et
Brigitte),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 180 (July 1966), pp. 58-60, here p. 60.
62 Long a mythical text known only from second-hand accounts, “De la nocivité” found its
first publication in 2009 in an anthology of Moullet’s critical writings. See Luc Moullet, “De la
nocivité du langage cinématographique, ainsi que des moyens de lutter contre lui,” in idem.,
Piges choisies (de Griffith à Ellroy) (Paris: Capricci, 2009), pp. 233-241, here pp. 235, 236-237. The
same collection gave Moullet’s more recent mordant views on theoretical activity: “I wrote a
few theoretical texts. Not too many. It’s dangerous. Metz, Deleuze, Benjamin and Debord all
committed suicide. Maybe they discovered that theory gets you nowhere, and the shock was
too much (not to mention Althusser).” Ibid., p. 234.
63 Ibid., p. 241.
448  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

The other panelists at the session were scandalized at this caricature of

their project. According to Narboni’s account of the proceedings, Barthes
accused the upstart Moullet of “incessantly confusing language and stereo-
types” as well as pandering to “anti-intellectualism.” Metz offered a more
conciliatory stance, ascribing the difference to that between theorists and
artists and arguing that “our task is not so much to say how films should
be made, but to find out how they manage to be understood.” Narboni, for
his part, proffered the view that Moullet was right to note that “bad films
[…] lend themselves more easily to studies of this type.” He maintained,
however, that his Cahiers colleague was wrong to treat the declarations of
Metz and Barthes as describing a “normative language”: “For them it is a
matter of defining the intelligibility of a given film.” At the same time, he
also posed the question of the ineffability of certain cinematic masterpieces.
Why is the conventional cross-cutting of Strangers on Train “magnificent”
or the simple shot/reverse-shot structure of Vivre sa vie “fascinating,” while
the same techniques used in other films are banal or even ludicrous? This
is a question that, in Narboni’s view, has doggedly eluded film semiology.64
Shortly afterwards, Godard issued a strident defense of Moullet in his
text “Trois mille heures du cinéma,” describing the Pesaro pronunciamento
as “Moullet’s sublime missive, Courtelinesque and Brechtian, screaming,
in the face of the structuralists: ‘language, my good sir, is theft.’ Moullet
is right. We are the children of film language. Our parents are Griffith,
Hawks, Dreyer and Bazin, and Langlois, but not you, and in any case, without
images and sounds, how can you speak of structures?”65 Godard’s 1967
interview with Cahiers extended the polemic. At this point, the director
still retained a broadly phenomenological perspective, which can be seen
in his citations of Merleau-Ponty in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle as
well as his assent to Sartre’s critique of Barthes’ Système de la mode in the
interview itself.66 He continued to express solidarity with Moullet’s outlook,
telling his interviewers, “I view linguistics the way Leclerc might—or,
even worse, Poujade. But I still have to agree with Moullet. At Pesaro he
talked commonsense.” Godard also recounted having spoken with Pasolini
about his recent texts at the Venice film festival but criticized his colleague

64 The quotes from this paragraph are from Narboni, “Notre alpin quotidien,” p. 60.
65 Jean-Luc Godard, “Trois mille heures du cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 184 (November 1966),
pp. 47-48, here p. 48.
66 For more on this, see Marc Cerisuelo, “Pesaro 1966: Les fils aînés de Godard ont les yeux
bleus (Moullet, Eustache, Straub),” in Jacques Aumont (ed.), Pour un cinéma comparé: Influences
et répétitions (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1996), pp. 147-160; and Marc Cerisuelo, “Tu n’as
rien vu (à Pesaro),” CinémAction no. 52 (June 1989), pp. 192-198.
Encounters with Structuralism 449

for falling into the normative errors of the earlier filmology movement.
Persuasively, he contended that Pasolini’s theory was really another form
of poetic expression: “I read it because he’s a poet and it talks about death;
so, it’s got to be beautiful. It’s beautiful like Foucault’s text on Velázquez.
But I don’t see the necessity.” Metz, meanwhile, is judged to be a “peculiar
case. He’s the easiest to like of them all: because he actually goes to watch
movies; he really likes movies. But I can’t understand what he wants to do.
He begins with film, all right. But then he goes off on a tangent.”67
In the same interview, Godard was distinctly more upbeat about the
writings of Noël Burch, then a young American filmmaker and critic residing
in Paris, who is praised for his “practical” approach to questions of film
technique such as the match-on-action cut: “You have a feeling they’re the
views of a man who has done it himself, who’s thought about what is involved
in doing—a man who has come to certain conclusions on the basis of his
physical handling of film.”68 The texts of Burch’s pioneering work of formalist
poetics, Theory of Film Practice, were originally published en feuilleton by
Cahiers in ten installments between March 1966 and January 1968.69 While
distinct from the semiological project of Metz and Pasolini, Burch’s approach
rested on a close formal analysis of film sequences—the original version
of his articles even included storyboard sketches illustrating idealized
assemblages of shots—as he elaborated on notions of découpage, f ilm
space and the use of sound in films such as Renoir’s Nana, L’année dernière
à Marienbad and Nicht versöhnt. For Burch, the cinema’s innately dialectical
quality derives from the interaction between on- and off-screen space. A
certain structuralist imperative can be seen in his attempts to catalogue the
formal properties of the cinema, giving rise, for instance, to claims that there
are precisely fifteen ways in which filmic space-time can be articulated (five
temporal relations multiplied by three spatial relations). This “mathesis,”
however, was to be the target of the author’s notorious self-disavowal of
Theory of Film Practice in his foreword to the 1981 edition of the book, which

67 Jean-Luc Godard, interviewed by Jacques Bontemps, Jean-Louis Comolli, Michel Delahaye,

Jean Narboni, “Lutter sur deux fronts: conversation avec Jean-Luc Godard,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 194 (October 1967), pp. 12-26, 66-70, here pp. 21-22. Translated as “Struggle on Two Fronts:
A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard,” trans. D.C.D., Film Quarterly, vol. 22 no. 2 (Winter
1968-1969), pp. 20-35, here pp. 25-26.
68 Ibid. [p. 27].
69 See Noël Burch, Praxis du cinéma (Paris: Hachette, 1969). Translated as Theory of Film
Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973). Burch also collaborated with Jean-André
Fieschi in establishing an independent film school in 1968, dubbed the Institut de formation
cinématographique, which regularly ran advertisements on the pages of Cahiers.
450  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

acknowledged that the schematic nature of such classificatory systems

was symptomatic of his own lack of a “sound grasp of modern theoretical
disciplines” and a mechanical formalism consisting of a “neurotic rejec-
tion of ‘content.’”70 It is notable that much the same critique had already
been issued by Cahiers. In developing his own theory of the hors-champ,
Bonitzer took umbrage at Burch’s explanation of the concept (the term, in
fact, was originally used by the American) and argued that it emanated
from a standpoint of “idealist phenonemonology.”71 While recognizing that
Burch was the first post-war film theorist to have dynamically conceptual-
ized “spacing, the between-two-shots and the out-of-frame [hors-cadre],”
Bonitzer nonetheless contended that “it is a pity that the empiricism and
formalism of Burch’s method confines his analysis to a rapidly exhausted
description of a few cases of the functioning of the ‘other space,’ to a rather
short study of the effects of break and formal manipulations […] allowed by
the fiction of that latent ‘other space.’”72 Burch’s inadequate understanding
of the ideologically charged nature of film technique is, for Bonitzer, the
chief flaw in his study and is at the root of Theory of Film Practice’s overly
schematic nature.
Raymond Bellour, at the time a pupil of Metz and a researcher at the
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, was the third figure around
whom polemics on questions of semiology and film analysis raged. Bellour
published two articles with Cahiers during this period. The first, a 1967 book
review of Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock, was an early testament to
his interest in “the master of suspense”; in highlighting Hitchcock’s “rarely
equaled expressive autonomy” and lauding Truffaut’s book as “the cinema
in its naked truth,” his text was hardly prone to inciting dissent from the
Cahiers editors.73 The opposite was the case with his celebrated close analysis
of the Bodega Bay sequence from The Birds, published in Cahiers in the same
October 1969 issue in which “Cinéma/idéologie/critique” appeared. In his
prefatory notes to the analysis, Bellour defines his project as an attempt

70 Noël Burch, “Foreword,” in idem., Theory of Film Practice, 2nd ed., trans. Helen R. Lane
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. v-x, here p. vi.
71 This label was initially given in a footnote to Bonitzer’s review of Eros + Massacre, “Un film
en plus,” Cahiers du cinéma (October 1970), pp. 6-9, here p. 9.
72 Pascal Bonitzer, “Hors-champ (un espace en défaut),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 234-235
(December 1971-January-February 1972), pp. 15-26, here p. 18. Translated as “Off-screen Space,”
trans. Lindley Hanlon, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol III: 1969-1972 The Politics of
Representation (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 291-305, here pp. 292-293.
73 Raymond Bellour, “Ce que savait Hitchcock,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 190 (May 1967), pp. 32-36,
here pp. 35, 32.
Encounters with Structuralism 451

at a “systematic analysis” that would “organize, on a limited segment, the

greatest possible number of elements that constitute the cinematic ‘text.’”
He nonetheless affirms the deliberate decision to avoid linguistic or semio-
logical vocabulary in the analysis proper and concedes that any act of film
analysis will be innately incomplete. As Bellour notes, “every temptation
of this kind inevitably enters in the circle whose terms were admirably
defined by Freud: ‘die endliche und die unendliche Analyse.’” Moreover,
although the goal of the project is to show “how meaning is born in the
narrative succession of images through the double constraint of repetition
and variation, hierarchized according to the logical progression of symmetry
and dissymmetry,” Bellour admits that the sequence—as “classical” as it
is—does not conform to any of the eight syntagmatic structures outlined
in Metz’s grande syntagmatique. If it is indeed a scene, Bellour intimates,
then it is perhaps most appropriately viewed in the Freudian sense of the
term, as the “primal scene” experienced in early childhood.74
These gestures towards psychoanalytic theory failed to ingratiate Bellour
with the Cahiers editors. The analysis of the Bodega Bay sequence was so
far removed from Cahiers’ own critical methods—loathe to scrutinize a
sequence of a film in isolation from the textual totality—that Narboni was
moved to append a page-long disclaimer distancing the journal from Bellour’s
approach. Narboni’s postscript, while admitting to the importance of the
Bodega Bay analysis, counterposes Bellour’s procedure to Althusserian and
Lacanian theories of overdetermination, which emphasize the “structural
insufficiency of pulling apart an object and dismembering its elements.”
Whereas Bellour remains ostensiby bound to a “phenomenological attempt
to reduce the visible to the visible,” leaving the unseen as the “provisionally
masked reverse-side” of what can be viewed in the film, Narboni advocates a
method that articulates the visible with the invisible. In Althusserian terms,
what is unseen in a given text is defined “through the visible, as its invisible,
its prohibition from seeing”; it therefore exists as the “inner darkness of
exclusion.” Such an approach would, in Narboni’s eyes, be particularly
germane to studying the work of Hitchcock, given the game of “mirages,
masks and obliterations” that characterizes his filmmaking style.75 Bellour
could not help but take this “correction” to his work as an affront, and he did

74 The above quotes are from Raymond Bellour, “Les Oiseaux: analyse d’une séquence,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 216 (October 1969), pp. 24-38, here pp. 24-25. Translated as “The Birds: Analysis
of a Sequence,” trans. Ben Brewster, Camera Obscura no. 3-4 (Summer 1979), pp. 105-134, here
pp. 105-106.
75 Jean Narboni, “À-propos,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216 (October 1969), p. 39.
452  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

not pursue any further collaboration with Cahiers.76 Indeed, even Narboni
himself, while affirming that “there was something that bothered me in
the extraction of a sequence as a metonym for the whole,” admits that his
response to Bellour was “not the most pertinent thing I have done” and was
“not a text I am proud of.”77

Roland Barthes, Encore

Whereas Cahiers was equivocal about Metz, Pasolini and Bellour, its encoun-
ter with Barthes was—notwithstanding his self-avowed reservations about
the moving image—of a long-lasting and fruitful nature, and the literary
theorist stands alongside Althusser and Lacan in the pantheon of contem-
porary thinkers whose ideas most influenced Cahiers. The high point of this
relationship came in 1970, when Barthes made a second appearance on the
pages of Cahiers, seven years after his interview with Rivette and Delahaye.
Avid attendees of his seminars at the École pratique des hautes études, the
Cahiers editors initially conceived of publishing a second interview with
the theorist, but Barthes found the resulting discussion unsatisfactory, and
rather than repeat the 1963 experience of re-writing his responses, he elected
instead to submit an article of his own to the journal.78 “Le troisième sens,”
published in July 1970, was the result.
Barthes’ text is chiefly framed by the films of Eisenstein, who was a privi-
leged point of intersection between Barthes and Cahiers. The journal had
published its “Russie années vingt” special issue the previous month, while
Barthes had long harbored a fascination for Eisenstein. And yet “Le troisième
sens” is distinguished by the fact that Barthes focuses his analysis not on the
moving image in Eisenstein but on stills (photogrammes) extracted from his
films. Sixteen numbered frame enlargements are reproduced in the margins
of the text: fifteen from Ivan the Terrible and Battleship Potemkin, and one
from Mikhail Romm’s archival film Ordinary Fascism. With particular
reference to the first of these reproductions—a scene where two courtiers
pour gold coins over the head of the newly crowned tsar—Barthes’ article
differentiates between three “levels” of meaning in the filmic image: the
communicative or informational level, the symbolic level and an additional
level, in which Barthes detects the presence of a “third meaning,” one that

76 Interview with Raymond Bellour, May 2, 2014.

77 Interview with Jean Narboni, March 18, 2014.
78 See Narboni, La nuit sera noire et blanche, p. 30.
Encounters with Structuralism 453

is “evident, erratic, obstinate.”79 Barthes recognizes the highly subjective

nature of the “signifying accidents” that produce this third meaning: their
elusiveness results in a difficulty in justifying, let alone generalizing, their
validity. At this point, Barthes adopts new terminology: the difference
between mere symbolism (the second meaning) and the signifiance of
the third meaning is one between an “obvious meaning” and an “obtuse
meaning.” The obvious meaning is “closed in its evidence, held in a complete
system of destination.” The obtuse meaning, meanwhile, is the “one ‘too
many,’ the supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing, at
once persistent and fleeting, smooth and elusive,” and it possesses “a kind of
difficultly prehensible roundness, caus[ing] my reading to slip” and opens
“the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely.”80 It is here, however, that
Barthes changes tack, focusing the rest of his text on why it is that “the filmic”
can only be grasped by means of the photogramme rather than the film itself.
Barthes counterintuitively argues that it is the third meaning rather than
movement that constitutes the specificity of the film image and that this
level of meaning is only accessible by means of stills. The still’s value lies
in the fact that it can discard the constraints of filmic time (the relentless
progression of the reel of film in a projector), and, by “scorn[ing] logical
time,” it institutes “a reading that is at once instantaneous and vertical.”81
While proud of the coup achieved by publishing a Barthes article, Cahiers
could not but be consternated by the implicit rejection of the cinematic
image in favor of its static counterpart, the photogramme.82 Sylvie Pierre
took it upon herself to craft Cahiers’ response, “Éléments pour une théorie
du photogramme.” Rebutting Barthes was doubtless an intimidating task
for a critic who was then only 26 years old, but Pierre was particularly
well-armed for the task, having taken responsibility for Cahiers’ in-house
photothèque. A major source of her dissatisfaction with Barthes’ article was
his conflation of the photogramme and the production still (photographie de
tournage), which in her view stemmed from his inexperience in concretely
handling cinematic images.83 Her article begins with a historical overview
of the utilization of stills in film publicity, including their usage as graphic

79 Roland Barthes, “Le troisième sens,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 12-19, here
p. 12. Translated as “The Third Meaning,” in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed.
Stephen Heath (London: Flamingo, 1984), pp. 52-68, here pp. 52-53.
80 Ibid., p. 13 [pp. 54-55].
81 Ibid., p. 18 [p. 65].
82 Aumont notes that the theorist was considered “a divinity of the Pantheon, so it was good
that he wrote [for Cahiers].” Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 11, 2014.
83 Interview with Sylvie Pierre, March 7, 2014.
454  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

ornamentation in film magazines. Responsible for layout at Cahiers, she

thus theorized her own practice in selecting images to “illustrate” the
articles written by herself and her colleagues.84 The production still, in
Pierre’s analysis, offers an idealist reading of the “‘true’ interior” of the
film, resulting in an “essentialist reduction of the filmic.” The critic argues
that “any unreflected usage of production stills is complicit in a system of
commercial exploitation which wants criticism to be reduced to the role
of a publicity agent.”85 In opposition to this state of affairs, the critic calls
for a materialist deployment of the photogramme, which would marshal
its (usually repressed) ability to unveil the side of “non-meaning” (non-
sens) and “formlessness” (l’informe) in the cinematic image. Noting that “a
gesture which, when in movement, we had believed to be precise becomes
blurred and indistinct in a film still,” Pierre insists that this illegibility
results in a “violently subversive power of the photogrammatic text” that
is “far more radical than Barthes had foreseen.” Relying on testimony from
Jay Leyda, she even insists that Eisenstein himself was dubious about the
use of photogrammes and preferred production stills that represented “not
a shot of the film, but a sort of synthesis of each sequence”; furthermore,
Pierre traces the contradiction between Eisenstein’s fascination for the
image in-itself (which presents the danger of “plastic solipsism”) and the
intently political purposes for which it could be used (its “for-the-other”
quality, or, in Barthes’ terms, its obviation).86 Illustrating her text with a set
of frame enlargements taken from the Odessa steps sequence of Battleship
Potemkin, Pierre elaborates a broad opposition between Eisenstein’s account
of his own films and Barthes’ reading of them in “Le troisième sens”: not
only does she express skepticism towards the idea that the third mean-
ing could arise independently of the articulation of film images through
montage, Pierre also contests the notion that the obtuse meaning would
have a “counter-narrative” effect, signaling instead its ability to constitute
the “most solid foundation of the story.”87 Far from taking offence at this

84 On occasion, her practice bordered on an avant-gardist text-image montage. For instance,

Daney/Oudart’s article “Travail, lecture jouissance” was accompanied by a series of stills from
Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances, despite the fact that Keaton’s film is never mentioned in the
text. These images are not included in the article’s English translation. See Serge Daney and
Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 39-46.
Translated as, “Work, Reading Pleasure,” trans. Diana Matias, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du
Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 115-136.
85 Sylvie Pierre, “Éléments pour une théorie du photogramme,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227
(January-February 1971), pp. 75-83, here p. 76.
86 Ibid., pp. 77-78.
87 Ibid., p. 83.
Encounters with Structuralism 455

rebuttal, Barthes sent the critic a note congratulating her on giving “a truly
theoretical dimension to the problem.” And yet, while proud of having
“resisted Barthes a little bit, in order to say that he did not know what a film
still was,” Pierre now regrets that the article gave her what she considers to
be an unearned reputation for being a theorist.88
In spite of their differences with “Le troisième sens,” the Cahiers critics
continued to be influenced by Barthes, even well into their Maoist phase.
In an article written for the journal’s February-March 1974 issue, when
Cahiers was still recovering from the Avignon debacle, Kané could affirm
that, alongside Brechtian cinema, Barthes’ seminars form part of “the
aesthetic and theoretical conjuncture that is important to us.”89 Barthes’
short text “Opération Astra” from Mythologies, in which he used a margarine
commercial as a metaphor for the political strategy of making a specific
critique of the established order in order to produce a “paradoxical but
incontrovertible means of exalting it,” was repeatedly invoked by Cahiers to
attack fictions de gauche such as Z and Jacques Fansten’s Le Petit Marcel.90
More broadly, the journal’s dialogue with Barthes had led it towards the
critique of structuralist theory found in Kristeva and Derrida, which would
be crucially important to Cahiers in the years 1970-71.
A decade after “Le troisième sens,” Barthes returned to a discussion of
the visual image. La chambre claire, the theorist’s final book before his
untimely death, was the first release in Cahiers du cinéma’s publishing arm,
an endeavor spearheaded by Narboni.91 Resisting entreaties for a book on the
cinema, Barthes oriented his work towards the subject of photography, and
in the resulting text he even, infamously, confesses to liking photography “in
opposition to the cinema.”92 La Chambre claire introduces Barthes’ concepts

88 Interview with Sylvie Pierre, March 7, 2014.

89 Pascal Kané, “Encore sur le naturalisme,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 249 (February-March 1974),
pp. 34-38, here p. 34. Kané relates having wanted to make a f ilm for the Institut national de
l’audiovisuel centering on an interview with Barthes, but the project was canceled after a change
of administration. Interview with Pascal Kané, March 12, 2014.
90 See, respectively, Pascal Bonitzer, “Film/politique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970),
pp. 33-37, here p. 34; and Pascal Kané, “‘The legal eagle’ (Le Petit Marcel),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 266-267 (May 1976), pp. 58-60, here p. 59. For the Barthes passage, see Roland Barthes,
Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), p. 42. Translated as Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 41.
91 Narboni had, in fact, proposed the project to Barthes as early as the autumn of 1977. Narboni,
La nuit sera noire at blanche, p. 37.
92 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/
Seuil/Gallimard, 1980), p. 13. Translated as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 3.
456  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

of the studium (the consciously produced and generally received aesthetic

impact of a photograph) and the punctum, a more individualized response to
certain inscrutable, unpredictable details in the photographic image, whose
impact lies beyond the intentions of the image-producer. The punctum shares
a number of characteristics with the “third meaning” earlier elucidated by
Barthes, but it is notable that, between Barthes’ 1970 Cahiers article and La
Chambre claire, the theorist had inverted the spatial dynamics of his chosen
metaphor: whereas the obtuse meaning is blunted, rounded in comparison
with the obvious meaning, the punctum has a sharp, penetrating quality.
The punctum, according to Barthes, “rises from the scene, shoots out of it
like an arrow, and pierces me.”93
Part of a broader nexus posited between mortality and the mechanically
reproduced image, the writing of La Chambre claire is haunted by the recent
passing of Barthes’ mother. Encountering a photograph of her taken in a
winter garden, which he treats as an example of pure punctum, Barthes
evokes the dictum commonly ascribed to Godard, “Not a just image, just
an image” but retorts that “my grief wanted a just image, an image which
would be both justice and accuracy [ justesse]: just an image, but a just
image. Such, for me, was the Winter Garden Photograph.”94 The pall of
morbidity enshrouding La Chambre claire was inspissated when, a few
weeks after the book’s publication in 1980, Barthes died after being struck
by a laundry van. Cahiers opened its following issue with a tribute to the
theorist, printing a letter Barthes had penned to Antonioni, as well as the
Italian filmmaker’s moving response and a review of La Chambre claire
by Pascal Bonitzer.95 Thirty-six years later, Narboni returned to Barthes’
work with the short volume La Nuit sera noire et blanche. While much of
the book gives a first-hand account of the process of editing La Chambre
claire, its final section is dominated by the affinity between Barthes and
Bazin. The founder of Cahiers is described as “the great absence of the
book” who “haunts La Chambre claire like a specter,”96 and the parallels
between Bazin and Barthes’ ideas are sketched out at length by Narboni.
His focus falls particularly on a question that had already been posed in
Joubert-Laurencin’s Le Sommeil paradoxal: if Barthes has no reason to
hide the influence of Bazin on his thinking, why does he give only a single

93 Ibid., p. 48 [p. 26].

94 Ibid., p. 109 [p. 70].
95 Barthes, “Cher Antonioni”; and Pascal Bonitzer, “Le hors-champ subtil,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 311 (May 1980), pp. 5-7.
96 Narboni, La nuit sera noire et blanche, p. 129.
Encounters with Structuralism 457

mention of Bazin by name, without even granting him the privilege of

an “elegant bibliographic signal” in the left-hand margin of the page? Is it
because, as Joubert-Laurencin states, “Bazin is not legendary for Barthes”?97
It is worth reproducing the Barthes passage in question here: “The cinema
has a power which at first glance the Photograph does not have: the screen
(as Bazin has remarked) is not a frame but a hideout [cache]; the man or
woman who emerges from it continues living: a ‘blind field’ [champ aveugle]
constantly doubles our partial vision.”98 The cadre/cache dichotomy derives
from Bazin’s article “Peinture et cinéma,” and Narboni expresses his regret
at not having asked Barthes directly whether he had read this text or not.99
Both Narboni and Philip Watts, meanwhile, suggest that the notion may
have come via an indirect source, namely, Pascal Bonitzer.100 Watts even
produces a compelling piece of evidence for this surmise: the term champ
aveugle is never pronounced as such by Bazin but is repeatedly deployed
by Bonitzer in texts from the late 1970s and is used as the title for a 1982
anthology of his writings.
On this matter, it is possible to be more precise than the recent conjectures
of Narboni and Watts: Barthes did indeed derive this segment of his text
from Bonitzer and not directly from Bazin. This is the reason why Bazin is
granted neither a mention of his name in the margin of the page in which
he is cited nor a listing in the index of Camera Lucida. The Bonitzer paper
that Barthes drew from, tellingly titled “La vision partielle,” was published
in Cahiers in June 1979. In a key passage in this article, Bonitzer not only
discusses his notion of the champ aveugle, he also quotes the cadre/cache
passage from Bazin at length, albeit giving the text a loose citation.101 We
can be confident that Barthes was familiar with Bonitzer’s text because,
as a brief note at the beginning of the article informs us, it was originally
delivered as a lecture in January 1979, at Roland Barthes’ own seminar in the
Collège de France, a couple of months before the writing of Camera Lucida.
Barthes was in the audience for Bonitzer’s address and in all likelihood
discussed the subject matter with him. In a further twist, Bonitzer’s 1980

97 Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil paradoxal (Paris: Éditions de l’œil, 2014), pp. 40-41.
98 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, p. 90 [pp. 55, 57]. In translations of Bazin, the word cache
is usually given as “mask.”
99 Narboni, La Nuit sera noire et blanche, p. 135.
100 See ibid., pp. 135-136; Watts, Roland Barthes’ Cinema, p. 47.
101 Pascal Bonitzer, “La vision partielle,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 301 (June 1979), pp. 35-43, here
p. 37. The extract is given as being from Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, but no page number or even
volume is specif ied, and Barthes evidently did not take the trouble to track down an exact
reference.
458  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

review of Barthes’ book for Cahiers quotes the passage on Bazin in its entirety,
without making reference to his own role in the citation.102 Modesty, one
assumes, prevents the critic from taking credit as an important conduit
between two theorists who, in different ways, were of vital importance to
the Cahiers project.

Works Cited

Jacques Aumont, “Christian Metz et l’amitié,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 472 (Octo-
ber 1993), p. 6.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Translated as Mythologies, trans.
Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).
———, “Cinéma, droit et gauche,” Les Lettres nouvelles no. 2 (March 1959). Translated
as “Cinema Right and Left,” trans. Deborah Glassman, in Philip Watts, Roland
Barthes’ Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 121-124.
———, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien avec Roland
Barthes,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 147 (September 1963), pp. 20-30. Translated as
“Roland Barthes: ‘Towards a Semiotics of Cinema,’” trans. Annwyl Williams,
in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. II: The 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema,
Reevaluating Hollywood (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 276-285.
———, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien avec
Roland Barthes [second version],” Fonds Jacques Rivette, Espace chercheurs
de la Cinémathèque française, RIVETTE86-B19.
———, “Le troisième sens,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 12-19. Trans-
lated as “The Third Meaning,” in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. and
ed. Stephen Heath (London: Flamingo, 1984), pp. 52-68.
———, “Sade-Pasolini,” Le Monde, June 16, 1976. Translated as “Sade-Pasolini
(On Saló),” trans. Deborah Glassman, in Philip Watts, Roland Barthes’ Cinema
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 138-140.
———, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma-
Seuil-Gallimard, 1980). Translated as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
———, “Cher Antonioni,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 311 (May 1980), pp. 9-11.
André Bazin, “Mort tous les après-midi,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I:
Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 65-70.
———, “Avec André Gide,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie et
langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 71-74.

102 Pascal Bonitzer, “Le hors-champ subtil,” p. 6.

Encounters with Structuralism 459

Raymond Bellour, “Ce que savait Hitchcock,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 190 (May 1967),
pp. 32-36.
Robert Benayoun, “Les enfants du paradigme,” Positif no. 122 (December 1970),
pp. 7-26.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Le carré (Teorema),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), p. 53.
———, “Film/politique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 33-37.
———, “Un film en plus (Eros + Massacre),” Cahiers du cinéma (October 1970),
pp. 6-9.
———, “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 229 (May 1971), pp. 39-41.
Translated as “‘Reality’ of Denotation,” trans. Lindley Hanlon, in Nick Browne
(ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation (London:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 248-253. Hereafter CDC III.
———, “Hors-champ (un espace en défaut),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 234-235 (De-
cember 1971-January-February 1972), pp. 15-26. Translated as “Off-screen Space,”
trans. Lindley Hanlon, in CDC III, pp. 291-305.
———, “La vision partielle,” Cahiers du cinéma 301 (June 1979), pp. 35-43.
———, “Le hors-champ subtil,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 311 (May 1980), pp. 5-7.
———, “Calme bloc,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 458 (July-August 1992), pp. 10-11.
Pierre Boulez, interviewed by Jacques Rivette and François Weyergans, “Entretien
avec Pierre Boulez,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 152 (February 1964), pp. 19-29.
Noël Burch, Praxis du cinéma (Paris: Hachette, 1969). Translated as Theory of Film
Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973).
———, “Foreword,” in idem., Theory of Film Practice, 2nd ed., trans. Helen R. Lane
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. v-x.
Marc Cerisuelo, “Tu n’as rien vu (à Pesaro),” CinémAction no. 52 (June 1989),
pp. 192-198.
———, “Pesaro 1966: Les fils aînés de Godard ont les yeux bleus (Moullet, Eustache,
Straub),” in Jacques Aumont (ed.), Pour un cinéma comparé: Influences et répéti-
tions (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1996), pp. 147-160.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Coup double,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 146 (August 1963),
pp. 41-42.
———, “Technique et idéologie (4),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (November 1971),
pp. 39-45. Translated as “Technique and Ideology,” in Cinema against Spectacle:
Technique and Ideology Revisited, trans. Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2015), pp. 209-221.
——— and François Weyergans, “Venise 64,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 159 (Octo-
ber 1964), pp. 16-31.
———, Maurizio Ponzi, Adriano Aprà and Eduardo Bruno, “Quatre films inédits
de Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 169 (August 1965), pp. 27-29.
460  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Serge Daney, “Le désert rose (Teorema),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969),
pp. 61-62.
———, “Note sur Saló,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 268-269 (July-August 1976), pp. 102-103.
——— and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 43-46.
Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques
Rivette and Éric Rohmer, “Hiroshima, notre amour,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 97
(July 1959), pp. 1-18.
Jean-Luc Godard, “Trois mille heures du cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 184
(November 1966), pp. 47-48.
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil paradoxal (Paris: Éditions de l’œil, 2014).
Pascal Kané, “Encore sur le naturalisme,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 249 (February-
March 1974), pp. 34-38.
———, “‘The legal eagle’ (Le Petit Marcel),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 266-267 (May 1976),
pp. 58-60.
André S. Labarthe, “La boîte à surprises,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 124 (October 1961),
pp. 47-48.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien
avec Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 156 (June 1964), pp. 19-29.
Christian Metz, “Godard et le montage,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 165 (April 1965), p. 5.
———, “À propos de l’impression de la réalité au cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 166-167 (May-June 1965), pp. 75-82. Translated as “On the Impression of
Reality in the Cinema,” in idem. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans.
Michael Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 3-15.
———, “Le cinéma moderne et la narrativité,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 185 (Decem-
ber 1966), pp. 43-68. Translated as “The Modern Cinema and Narrativity,” in
idem., Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 185-227.
———, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?,” in idem. Essais sur la signification au cinéma
(Paris: Klincksieck, 2013 [1968]), pp. 41-92. Translated as “Cinema: Language or
Language System?,” in idem. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans.
Michael Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 31-91.
———, Langage et cinéma (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1971). Translated as Language
and Cinema, trans. by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).
———, “Une lettre de Christian Metz,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227 (January-
February 1971), pp. 120-121.
———, “Cinéma et idéographie,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971),
pp. 6-11.
———, “Ponctuations et démarcations dans le film de diégèse,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 234-235 (December 1971, January-February 1972), pp. 63-78.
Encounters with Structuralism 461

———, “L’incandescence et le code,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 274 (March 1977),

pp. 5-22.
———, Conversations with Christian Metz: Selected Interviews on Film Theory
(1970-1991), eds. Warren Buckland and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2017).
Luc Moullet, “De la nocivité du langage cinématographique, ainsi que des moyens
de lutter contre lui,” in idem., Piges choisies (de Griffith à Ellroy) (Paris: Capricci,
2009), pp. 233-241.
Jean Narboni, “Situation du nouveau cinéma, 2,” Cahiers du cinéma no 192 (July-
August 1967), p. 26.
———, “À-propos,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216 (October 1969), p. 39.
———, La nuit sera noire et blanche: Barthes, La Chambre claire, le cinéma (Paris:
Capricci, 2015).
———, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette, “Montage,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 210
(March 1969), pp. 17-34. Translated as “Montage,” trans. Tom Milne, in Jonathan
Rosenbaum (ed.), Rivette: Texts and Interviews (London: BFI, 1977), pp. 69-88.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, interviewed by Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean-Louis Comolli,
“Le cinéma selon Pasolini: Entretien avec Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 169 (August 1965), pp. 20-25, 76-77.
———, “Le cinéma de poésie,” translated into French by Jacques Bontemps and
Marianne di Vettimo, Cahiers du cinéma no. 171 (October 1965), pp. 55-64. Trans-
lated into English as “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical
Empiricism, trans. Louise K. Barnett and Ben Lawton (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), pp. 167-186.
———, “Le scénario comme structure tendant vers une autre structure,” translated
into French by Marianne di Vettimo, Cahiers du cinéma no. 185 (December 1966),
pp. 77-82. Translated into English as “The Screenplay as a Structure that Wants to
be Another Structure,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Louise K.
Barnett and Ben Lawton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 187-196.
———, “Discours sur le plan séquence ou le cinéma comme sémiologie de la
réalité,” translated into French by Marianne di Vettimo, Cahiers du cinéma
no. 192 (July-August 1967), pp. 26-30. Translated into English as “Observations
on the Sequence Shot,” and “Is Being Natural?,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical
Empiricism, trans. Louise K. Barnett and Ben Lawton (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), pp. 233-243.
Sylvie Pierre, “Éléments pour une théorie du photogramme,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 226-227 (January-February 1971), pp. 75-83.
Jacques Rivette, “Revoir Verdoux,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 146 (August 1963), pp. 42-43.
François Truffaut, “Positif: copie 0,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 79 (January 1958),
pp. 60-62.
15. Beyond Structuralism: Film Form and
Écriture

Abstract
Dissatisfied with a purely semiological approach to the cinema, which
would attempt to understand filmic signification using linguistic catego-
ries, Cahiers du cinéma instead drew on the notion of écriture developed by
Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva as the theoretical touchstone for their
response to films. This chapter highlights round-table discussions on ele-
ments of filmic writing—montage and film space (the latter unpublished
until the 2010s)—before making a brief excursus looking at the criticism
written by Jacques Rivette at the end of the 1960s. Finally, it broaches the
relationship between Cahiers and the deconstructionist tradition of Tel
Quel and Derrida, which sought to transcend the binaries of structuralist
semiotics through a critical method that saw writing as an act not of
creating meaning but of undoing signification itself.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, écriture, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva,

montage, Jacques Rivette

Montage

Shortly after Barthes’ death in 1981, Bonitzer’s entry on him in Cahiers’

“Dictionnaire sans foi ni loi” succinctly stated: “R.B. structured our desire.”1
Barthes’ shift away from the dispassionate aridity of structuralist semiology
in the late 1960s was indeed a vital influence on Cahiers’ own distancing from
this paradigm and its turn towards the ideas of theorists associated with Tel
Quel: in particular, Derrida, Kristeva and Sollers. These figures are now often
labelled with the term “post-structuralism,” but this suggests a clear-cut

1 Pascal Bonitzer, “Barthes (Roland)” in “Dictionnaire sans foi ni loi,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 325 (June 1981), p. 114.

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch15
464  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

conceptual opposition which, at least in this early stage, was not in place.
François Dosse’s term “ultra-structuralism” thus seems more applicable to
the critical work carried out by Cahiers in the years 1969-1972: the limits of
structuralist theory were reached and, indeed, transcended, but a degree
of continuity with the earlier mode of thinking was still apparent.2 In the
case of Cahiers, two central factors were at work in this movement beyond
the parameters of the structuralist method. The first was the journal’s
interrogation, under the auspices of Rivette, of some of the key aspects of
film poetics—namely, questions of montage, duration and filmic space.
The second was the deconstructionist influence of the Tel Quel theorists,
with their notions of écriture and signifying practice. Symptomatically, this
influence could be felt not only on a conceptual level but also on the very
style of the Cahiers critics’ own writing.
We turn first, then, to the question of montage. The venue, in 1956, for
Bazin’s “prohibition” of editing in “Montage interdit” and a young Godard’s
response to him in “Montage, mon beau souci,” Cahiers had long been as-
sociated with polemics over the articulation of cinematic images.3 In 1969,
the inauguration of Cahiers’ project to translate the writings of Eisenstein,
combined with its attraction to the montage practices of modernist film-
makers such as Godard and Resnais, impelled the editorial team to return
to the issue. An opportunity was provided in February when Antoine
Bourseiller invited Cahiers to organize a thematic weekend at the Centre
Dramatique du Sud-Est in Aix-en-Provence, where they screened films
such as Eisenstein’s The General Line, Godard’s Made in USA, Pollet/Sollers’
Méditerranée, Garrel’s Marie pour mémoire and Solanas/Gettino’s La Hora
de los hornos. The discussions between screenings gave rise to a collective
text simply titled “Montage,” with contributions from Rivette, Narboni and
Pierre. Specifying that the form of this piece was “neither a debate, nor a
round-table, nor a collection of articles, nor a single discourse with several
voices,” introductory remarks defined the text itself as a “montage” of critical
fragments: hence the body of the text was interspersed with shorter notes
printed in adjacent columns, which expanded upon or clarified points

2 See François Dosse, History of Structuralism vol. II: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, trans. Deborah
Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 17-31.
3 See André Bazin, “Montage interdit,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 65 (December 1956), pp. 32-41,
repr. in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I, pp. 117-130. Translated as “Editing prohibited,” in
idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2011), pp. 73-86.
Jean-Luc Godard, “Montage mon beau souci,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 65 (December 1956), pp. 30-31.
Translated as “Montage, my fine care,” in idem., Godard on Godard, trans. and ed. Tom Milne
(New York: Da Capo, 1972), pp. 39-41.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 465

brought up in the discussion, a layout that was adopted in order to encourage

the reader to take “Montage” as an open, non-linear, unfinished document.4
Despite its avowedly fragmentary nature, a detailed argument about
cinematic montage is articulated in Narboni/Pierre/Rivette’s text. Pointing
to its resurgence in the decade leading up to 1969, the Cahiers critics suggest
that this phenomenon is linked to the rise of “direct cinema” and has also
spread into other art forms, with Sollers’ involvement in Méditerranée and
the inaugural issue of the literary journal Change attesting to the interest in
montage from literary currents. As Pierre puts it, this tendency represents
the “metaphorical extension of cinematic montage into extra-cinematic
domains.”5 She and her colleagues thus distinguish between “the idea of
montage” and montage as a mere technique or effect. Montage is not to
be confused with rapid cutting (le montage court), and in fact both “over-
edited” (hypermontés) films, such as those of Eisenstein and Pollet, and
“under-edited” (hypomontés) films, as with Dreyer and Mizoguchi, are seen
as sites of montage practice—only those whose editing rhythms conform
to the norms of what Bazin dubs “analytic découpage” appear not to find
the Cahiers critics’ favor.
As a form of écriture, montage is seen as a signifying practice on par
with—albeit distinct from—written language. Indeed, Rivette is adamant
that montage can be understood as a form of “critical thinking.” In the case
of the collage-style editing practiced by Godard in films such as Made in
USA, the technique functions as the critique of a pre-existing work anterior
to the film. For Rivette, the film results from the director experimenting
with what happens if “one combines some lousy série noire novel with the
Ben Barka affair […] hence, a montage of two ‘texts’ (but also, shredding of
the pre-texts).”6 Despite the fact that Rivette openly comes out against the
“theological mentality” implied in the “rejection or disregard of montage”
by certain film theorists7 and aligns montage practices in the arts with
critical theory, Douglas Morrey is nonetheless justified in pointing out the
“residual transcendentalism” embodied in comments of his that Godard’s
film “leaves the impression of an earlier film, rejected, contested, defaced,
torn to shreds: destroyed as such, but still ‘subjacent.’”8 At no point, Morrey

4 Narboni et al., “Montage,” p. 17. [p. 21.]

5 Pierre, in ibid., p. 18 [p. 22].
6 Rivette, in ibid., p. 22 [pp. 25-26]. The Ben Barka affair concerned the abduction of left-wing
Moroccan politician Mohammed Ben Barka by the French secret service on the streets of Paris
in 1965.
7 Ibid., p. 27 [p. 31].
8 Ibid., p. 21 [p. 25].
466  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

argues, does Rivette “seem able to get past this idea of the ‘pre-existing
text’ to admit the possibility that the text only comes into being through
montage, that it has no existence prior to its assembly at the editing desk.”9
Rivette’s younger colleagues, by contrast, offer a more radical vision of
montage. Narboni argues, for instance, that La Chinoise comprises “narra-
tive fragments which themselves seem to search and designate the place
suited to them within the global economy of the film,” a place where “no
definitive intention pre-existed the disposition of the parts, where the logic
of the narrative imposes its power more than it is imposed by the ‘author.’”
Montage, in this case, is not “work on a pre-existing material, but the work
of this material.”10 Registering his dissatisfaction with the ability of Metz’s
grande syntagmatique to account for the montage structures of Godard
or Pollet, Narboni finds it more profitable to turn to Lacan’s idea that “the
unconscious is structured like a language.” Because film itself, in Narboni’s
argument, is “structured like a language,” it, too, “acts like (mimes the action
of) the unconscious.”11
Having expounded a generalized theory of the “idea of montage,” Cahiers
proceeds to elaborate a historical overview of the practical use of montage
in the cinema. Adopting a dialectical schema, Rivette enumerates four
“moments” in the evolution of montage: the initial period of its invention by
Griffith and Eisenstein, its deviation towards propagandistic purposes by
Pudovkin and in Hollywood, the refusal of propaganda through techniques
such as the long-take, depth of field and direct sound, and, finally, the
recuperation of montage in the 1960s, which consists of the attempt to
“re-inject the spirit and theory of the first stage into contemporary practices,
without rejecting the gains of the third stage, by trying to nourish the one
with the other, by dialecticizing them, and, in a certain sense, by editing
them together.”12 Rivette, however, draws a key distinction between the
first and fourth phases in this historical schema: whereas for Eisenstein
the production of meaning has a progressive quality and is the goal of his
montage activity, for Pollet (and by extension Cahiers itself), the production
of meaning has become “reactionary” and must therefore be undermined,
détourné or destroyed.13 Indeed, this distinction between an earlier moment
of revolutionary cinema and contemporary avant-garde practice will play

9 Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith, Jacques Rivette (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2009), p. 20.
10 Narboni, in Narboni et al., “Montage,” p. 19 [p. 39].
11 Ibid., p. 32 [p. 43].
12 Rivette, in ibid., p. 29 [pp. 32-33].
13 Ibid., p. 25 [p. 29].
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 467

a key role not only in Cahiers’ considerations of montage but also, more
broadly, in the modernist poetics pursued by the journal in the post-1968
period.
Aumont was inadvertently absent from the discussion on montage, but the
critic contributed an article on the matter in the following issue of Cahiers,
which he now drolly views as “the start of a beginning of a prolegomenon of
a prologue of an introduction to a theoretical enterprise.”14 In “Le concept
de montage,” he attempts to establish the rough outline of a typology of the
different forms of cinematic montage. Contrasting with the fragmentary,
avowedly non-linear discussion coming out of the Aix-en-Provence event,
Aumont adopts a more “scientific” discursive style, structuring his thoughts
on montage around sets of opposed terms such as Space (Juxtaposition),
Order (Succession-Enchainment), and Time (Duration). But he recognizes
that his text has an “essentially and knowingly peremptory, fragmentary and
cursory character,”15 and while he glosses a series of conceptual approaches
to montage, Aumont largely refrains from adopting a decisive standpoint on
the issues raised. “Le concept de montage” thus comes across as a collection of
questions to be answered rather than offering a perspective in its own right,
although Aumont is firm on one matter in particular, and in this he was in-
dicative of a more general stance at Cahiers: “an immediate temptation must
undeniably be put aside: that of borrowing without remorse the concepts
and vocabulary of semiology—that is, on a practical level, linguistics—even
if such an appropriation may appear licit and advantageous.”16 Aumont
closes “Le concept de montage” by phlegmatically pointing to the dearth
of examples, insufficient rigor and residual errors of his text, insisting that
they will be “subject to rectification.”17 Although a mooted follow-up text
does not materialize on the pages of Cahiers, questions relating to montage
in the cinema would be pursued by Aumont throughout his career as a
film scholar. His doctoral dissertation, published as Montage Eisenstein in
1979, centered on the Soviet filmmaker’s montage practice, and as recently
as 2013, Aumont returned to the subject, composing a booklet dedicated
to montage on a commission from the Canadian publisher Caboose. As
these texts attest, the genealogy of Aumont’s ideas on montage, which will

14 Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 11, 2014. Narboni recalls that Aumont was traveling
at the time and thus was unable to participate in the original round table. See Interview with
Jean Narboni, March 18, 2014.
15 Jacques Aumont, “Le concept de montage,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), pp. 46-51,
here p. 46.
16 Ibid., p. 49.
17 Ibid., p. 51.
468  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

be further discussed in Chapter 19, can be conclusively traced back to the

discussions held at Cahiers at the end of the 1960s.

The Space of the Film

The montage round table was judged to be fruitful enough that Cahiers
sought to pursue the same practice in other domains of film technique,
beginning with filmic space. At the initiative of Jacques Rivette, a “weekend
of theoretical reflection” was organized with the title “L’Espace du film,” with
film screenings and discussions taking place in the Maison de la Culture in
Le Havre on December 13-14, 1969. The program devised by Cahiers consisted
of a selection of films treating cinematic space, with examples from classical
cinema (Sunrise, Two Rode Together, Le Carrosse d’or), modernist f ilms
(Muriel, El angel exterminador) and more recent experimental work (Le
Gai Savoir, Le Lit de la vierge). In a brochure publicizing the event, Rivette
provided an outline of the questions to be treated at Le Havre. Avowing
that it was a “complementary reflection” to that already attempted on
montage, he writes:

Every film, in a way, poses or postulates a place, of which it is subsequently

the more or less systematic “exploration.” […] For, at the same time as it
effectuates this work of surveying and discovery, the film, by its very
unfolding, creates its own space. […] Space in the film / space through the
film: the conjunction-confrontation of these two notions will permit us to
approach that which these four words try to formulate: space of the film.18

Intended for publication in Cahiers, a round table on “L’espace” took place

shortly after the weekend at Le Havre, in which Rivette was accompanied by
Aumont, Bonitzer, Kané, Narboni and Pierre. The discussion was recorded
and transcribed in preparation for its appearance in the journal, but this
never materialized. The reasons for this absence can, today, only be specu-
lated upon, but the fact that the journal was on a hiatus imposed by the
ownership dispute with Filipacchi between November 1969 and March 1970
undoubtedly played a role. By the time Cahiers returned to the shelves, three
months had elapsed since the round table, and the decision was made not to
publish the transcription. For more than four decades, this discussion thus

18 Jacques Rivette, “L’espace du film,” brochure of the Maison de la Culture du Havre, Fonds
Jacques Rivette, Espace chercheurs de la Cinémathèque française, dossier RIVETTE26-B10.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 469

remained inaccessible and largely forgotten. Having re-emerged thanks to

the deposit of Rivette’s personal archives to the Cinémathèque française,
the transcription was recently published by the film history journal 1895.19
Although conceived as a complement to the discussion on montage,
the round table on space nonetheless saw the Cahiers critics relativize the
space-time dichotomy that this would imply. As Bonitzer observed, “the
question of space […] traverses the question of montage; montage articulates
space, but it can also define it.”20 Beyond this, however, the discussion also
attested to a certain difficulty the critics have in focusing on their chosen
object. The question of space in the cinema is decidedly more diffuse, more
indistinct and more delicate to articulate than that of montage. Whereas
montage is almost inevitably the product of the conscious decision-making of
the filmmaker, cinematic space is determined by external factors: on the one
hand, the technical specifications of the camera, and on the other hand, the
relationship with the pro-filmic referent. Indeed, as Kané noted, the “specific
problem” addressed by the round table is the “passage from a real referent
to an ideological space that would be the scene,” while Narboni warned
that “it is only ever on the basis of a reading of the film that we manage to
reconstitute this ‘denoted space,’ and the referential space, which is that
of the shoot, belongs to a fundamentally different order of knowledge.”21
The round-table discussion proceeded to take in a range of issues relating
to space, mobilizing structuralist terminology but in a way that interrogates
some of its binaries. In this vein, Rivette affirmed that filmic space “functions
through a system of décalages and differences” through which “the infinite
succession of connotations […] permits the spectator to construct in his own
imaginary […] a global dénoté with respect to which he will read the following
connotations.”22 Emphasizing the role of “reading” in the signif ication
of a cinematic space, the Cahiers critics sprinkled their discussion with
charged metaphors such as the “mythic space” of the Western and the
“primal scene” proposed by Freud. In general, however, the round-table
participants bemoaned the distinct lack of theorization of this aspect of film

19 See Jacques Aumont, Pascal Bonitzer, Pascal Kané, Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques
Rivette, “L’espace: table ronde autour de Jacques Rivette,” 1895: revue de l’histoire du cinéma
no. 79 (Summer 2016), pp. 105-136. The original document can be found in the Fonds Jacques
Rivette, Espace chercheurs de la Cinémathèque française, dossier RIVETTE91-B21. For a deeper
discussion of this text, see Daniel Fairfax, “L’Espace: présentation,” 1895: revue de l’histoire du
cinéma no. 79 (Summer 2016), pp. 95-103.
20 Bonitzer, in Aumont et al, “L’Espace,” p. 107.
21 Kané and Narboni, in ibid.
22 Rivette, in ibid., p. 111
470  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

form. Only Burch’s Theory of Film Practice and a handful of recent articles
by the novelist and occasional Cahiers writer Claude Ollier were productive
precursors to their discussion, while the theories of Bazin and, drawing
on him, Rohmer were also referred to.23 It is perhaps not surprising, then,
that conceptual differences arose among the Cahiers critics themselves. In
particular, Rivette and Narboni were often at loggerheads. While Rivette
insisted on a link between the space in the film and the site denoted by
the film, Narboni was equally adamant that “there is not a pure level of
denotation in the image; the analogical vocation does not exist.”24 Later, the
two clashed over the relationship between filmic space and its temporal
equivalent. Rivette maintained that the same problem is operative in both
of these dimensions of film form: films that conform to classical convention
depict a time that is “extremely discontinuous, but subjected to the rules of
novelistic narration, that is, roughly speaking, to the rules of chronology and
causality,” while their spatial fields, even if they may be “extremely diverse,
extremely rich,” are “only connected with each other by following relations
given in every case as being rational, causal and consequential.”25 Narboni,
by contrast, insisted that “as much as time, in this cinema of continuity,
is indeed as blank and as neutral as possible, this is false for space, which
is very charged.” For the critic, the crucial point of difference is between
“films where the space is semantically very charged, and films where the
space would be structurally determinant.”26
In discussing the use of space in classical cinema, Cahiers aff irmed
a distinction between the films of auteur-directors like Ford and more
conventional work by lesser-known filmmakers. In an argument that an-
ticipates the “re-readings” of Hollywood films such as Young Mr. Lincoln, the
round-table participants maintained that, in the case of the former, there is
a constant “play” ( jeu) with formal characteristics of the Hollywood system
such as framing and shot construction. Rivette, for instance, claimed that
“mise en scène, for Ford, involves thinking about the interplay [ jeu] of the
elements of his film (characters, objects, etc.) in a concrete space, and, at
the same time, rethinking them […] in the successive fields determined by
the different places of the camera-apparatus.” For this reason, the former
Cahiers editor took his distance from the claims made by Pleynet in his

23 This is prescient given that Rohmer would devote a doctoral study to the functioning of
space in Murnau’s Faust. See Éric Rohmer, L’Organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau
(Paris: Ramsay, 1997).
24 Narboni, in Aumont et al., “L’Espace,” pp. 110-111.
25 Rivette, in ibid., p. 117.
26 Narboni, in ibid.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 471

interview with Cinéthique concerning the ideological nature of the spatial

system forced on filmmakers by the set-up of the camera. Ford, Renoir and
Hitchcock, in Rivette’s view, are among those filmmakers who “have in
common the fact that they privilege, and, apart from exceptional cases, only
ever utilize, non-deforming lenses, hence they use the camera purely as a
so-called innocent apparatus; which does not mean—and this is Pleynet’s
error—that this ‘transparent’ usage of the camera prevents them from
knowing that this usage determines the filmic fields.”27
From this analysis, the Cahiers critics shifted their focus to modernist
filmmakers, whose play with the possibilities of filmic space is pushed into
the foreground of their work. Whereas Ollier had argued that, in modern
films, it is the place (lieu) that engenders the fiction, Aumont conceived of
cinematic modernism as consisting of a “back-and-forth current between
fiction and place.”28 Cahiers traced the intertwining of scenographic and
thematic closure in a strand of modernist films that includes Muriel, El angel
exterminador and Oshima’s Boy, detecting in them a return of the aesthetic
qualities of theatrical staging. The round table concluded with a discussion
of Godard’s Le Gai Savoir, made for television but shelved by the broadcaster.
Filmed on a studio sound stage, the film’s radical use of a black backdrop
suggests a zero point of cinematic space, but the round table insisted on the
“very complex space” at work in the film, which Narboni sees as deriving
from the “presence of the absent field, which is what [Jean-Pierre Léaud
and Juliet Berto] are watching, a television set which is left on all day.”29
Over the course of the discussion, Cahiers evince a tendency to equate
Bazin with the notion of “transparency,” thereby counterposing his ideas
with the larvatus prodeo of Barthes’ notion of “degree zero” writing (that is,
the writer’s self-designation through the very act of writing).30 But Narboni
provided an important nuance to this perspective: Bazin, he argued, “was
very sensitive to the presence of the cinema, maybe not as a form of signifying
opacity, but through the presence of the frame as a mask [cache], which
leads not to ‘I am here as a shot,’ but ‘I am here with four edges.’”31 It is this
quality that is exercised by Godard’s film, even with its radical scenographic
emptiness and absolute negation of depth of field. For Narboni, the black
backdrop is “truly the hyper-scene” and Le Gai Savoir is therefore “one of the

27 Rivette, in ibid., p. 119.

28 Aumont, in ibid., p. 126.
29 Narboni, in ibid., p. 131.
30 See Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), p. 33. Translated as Writing
Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 40.
31 Narboni, in Aumont et al., “L’Espace,” p. 131.
472  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

films that most produces a sense of scenic representation.”32 Furthermore, it

is linked to the nascent theory of the hors-champ, which is seen by Rivette
as coursing through the journal’s entire discussion of film space. Narboni,
for his part, distinguished between two types of hors-champ, “a neutral,
inert hors-champ, which is everything that is excluded from the f ilm,”
and another, more significant form of off-screen space, “the functional
hors-champ, which is simply a possible future field.”33 In introducing an
analysis of the hors-champ into the theoretical framework employed by
Cahiers, the round table on “L’Espace du film” is thus a crucial precursor
to the later detailed theoretical exploration of this aspect of film form,
particularly in Bonitzer’s “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation” series, which will be
treated in Chapter 24.

A Second Wind: Jacques Rivette at Cahiers du cinéma in the late

1960s

Rivette’s importance for the theoretical direction of Cahiers in the late 1960s
can hardly be overstated and goes well beyond his interventions in the two
discussions on “Montage” and “L’Espace.” Having left his position as editor-
in-chief in 1965 in order to film La Religieuse, Rivette enacted a subtle but
important return to Cahiers in the years 1968 and 1969, which, as Bonitzer
revealed, occurred after a “grave depression” suffered by the filmmaker.34
His influence during this time took on multiple guises: as a director whose
work was avidly discussed by his younger colleagues; as a critic in his own
right, in a number of interventions on the pages of Cahiers, which took the
form of his participation in the aforementioned round tables, dialogues
with filmmakers and film reviews; and, more generally, as an interlocutor
who discussed cinema with the cohort of Cahiers critics after cinémathèque
screenings or other events and whose opinion was still crucial for shaping
the journal’s tastes. Rivette’s influence reached a high point in 1968, a year
in which one of Cahiers’ talismanic films was Rivette’s own L’Amour fou.
Coverage of the film dominated the journal’s September issue, with Sylvie
Pierre penning two notable texts dedicated to it. “Le film sans maître”
focuses on the role of arbitrary chance in L’Amour fou and its subversion of

32 Ibid., p. 134.
33 Ibid.
34 Pascal Bonitzer, “L’authenticité était la marque et l’esprit de la Nouvelle Vague,” in Aldo
Tassone (ed.), Que reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? (Paris: Stock, 2003), pp. 35-41, here p. 38.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 473

demiurgic notions of auteurism. L’Amour fou was, for Pierre, “a film where,
for once, the director tried not to be god” and Rivette instead aimed to keep
what the critic, citing Ponge, calls a “respectful distance” from the pro-filmic
action, where “anything can emerge, and any gaze is permitted.” This respect
for the reality of the signified did not derive, however, from an abstention
from all acts of interventionist editing; rather it arose from the montage
itself, which is seen as “a means to operate the only living conservation of
life: a process of loving selection analogous to that of memory.”35 Pierre’s
second text, “Le dur désir de durer,” focused on the chief question that
brought attention to L’Amour fou: its extended duration. Pierre had already
insisted that the inordinate length of the film’s original version was justified
by its concern for realism: “it does, in fact, take a long time to stage a play,
or, when you love each other, to break up.” Against the identification of the
“filmic object” with the “object of spectacle,” which mandates durational
limitations primarily for economic reasons, the critic stridently calls for “the
respect, for all films, of their proper duration,” which she understands as
“one of the necessary conditions for demolishing the notion of the film as a
pure object of consumption and spectacle.”36 Labarthe’s statement on Adieu
Philippine that “the length of the film is its very substance” therefore applies
a fortiori to Rivette’s work, and Pierre could trumpet a small victory against
the system of the spectacle when the 4-hour edit of L’Amour fou became a
modest box office success, thus giving hope that films of an unconventional
duration could find viable exhibition strategies.37
Cahiers’ reception of L’Amour fou also included an interview Rivette gave
to the journal for its September issue, aptly titled “Le temps déborde,” a long
and fertile discussion between the filmmaker and his younger colleagues.38 It
is only natural that the film’s length should form a key part of the discussion,
but more intriguing is the invocation of modernist music, with Rivette
considering L’Amour fou to be a homage to Stravinsky and Stockhausen.
He claims that “formally the great ambition of the f ilm was to seek an
equivalent, in the cinema, of Stockhausen’s recent research: this mixture of
what is constructed and what is by chance, which also necessarily implies
time and duration.” Cahiers questions Rivette on the possible existence of
a “revolutionary cinema,” and his response would be of crucial importance

35 Sylvie Pierre, “Le film sans maître,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968), p. 22.
36 Sylvie Pierre, “Le dur désir de durer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968), p. 55.
37 Sylvie Pierre, “L’Amour fou,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 209 (February 1969), p. 62.
38 Curiously, Rivette has the singular honor of being both an interviewer and interviewee in
the same issue of Cahiers, as he also conducted an interview with Philippe Garrel.
474  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

for the journal’s subsequent political evolution. Speaking a few months after
May ’68, Rivette saw the need for overturning the “bourgeois aesthetic” which
would conceive of the cinema as the expression of an auteur-figure, as a form
of “personal creation.” Citing Jacques Tati’s Playtime as an example of a film
that has “completely overshadowed the creator,” Rivette contends that “what
is important is the point where the film no longer has an auteur, where it
has no more actors, no more story even, no more subject, nothing left but
the film itself speaking and saying something that can’t be translated: the
point where it becomes the discourse of someone or something else, which
cannot be said, precisely because it is beyond expression.”39
Pressed, however, on films with an explicitly political content, Rivette
parries that “the role of the cinema is to destroy myths, to demobilize, to
be pessimistic. It is to take people out of their cocoons and to plunge them
into horror.” In spite of his admiration for La Reprise du travail aux usines
Wonder, Rivette concedes that it fails to mobilize people, arguing that “the
only role for the cinema is to upset people, to contradict all preconceived
ideas, and the mental schemas that pre-exist these ideas.” Finally, he attacks
militant films that are “depressingly comfortable” and contends that the
political substance of films derives primarily from formal choices such as
the use of direct sound and the duration of scenes. In a line of argumentation
that directly stems from the logic of the article on Kapò, Rivette states: “I
maintain that L’Amour fou is a deeply political film. It is political because
the attitude we all had during the filming, and then during the editing,
corresponds to moral choices, to ideas on human relationships, and therefore
to political choices.”40
Interviews or discussions with Rivette were not his only forum for expres-
sion on the pages of Cahiers. He also returned to reviewing films, writing
critical notes on several releases over the course of 1969. Curiously, despite
Rivette’s undisputed status as the journal’s éminence grise, none of these
articles were lengthy, conceptually deep essays on the key films of the era.
Instead, they were short notules in the back section of the journal and were
mostly written on obscure, instantly forgettable works that became the
object of Rivette’s caustic wit. Readers were advised, for instance, to watch
the Czechoslovak film Private Torment in order to “better measure the abyss

39 Jacques Rivette, interviewed by Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni and
Sylvie Pierre, “Le temps déborde: Entretien avec Jacques Rivette,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204
(September 1968), pp. 6-21, here p. 15. Translated as “Time Overflowing,” trans. Amy Gateff, in
Rosenbaum (ed.), Rivette: Texts and Interviews, pp. 9-38, here p. 26.
40 Ibid., p. 20 [p. 35].
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 475

that separates Forman and Chytilová from their national production.”41

Forman’s own Audition was better received, with Rivette appreciating the
filmmaker’s “perverse genius” and comparing him to Lubitsch for making a
film in which “each sequence changes the pre-conceived judgement created
by its predecessor.”42 Strangely, his longest review was reserved for Dieu
a choisi Paris, a gimmicky compilation of fin-de-siècle archival footage:
although the film itself is derided for its “incoherence” and “mental confu-
sion,” Rivette nonetheless highlights the presence of a “good hundred shots
that we must call admirable, […] where the old word photogènie recovers
its mysterious sense (a ‘mystery’ which remains to be elucidated—but that
is another story…).”43
The close of the 1960s marked the end of Rivette’s presence on the pages
of Cahiers. Although he officially remained a member of the editorial com-
mittee until 1972, the interview with Marguerite Duras he and Narboni
conducted for the November 1969 issue represented the last time Rivette’s
name was attached to an article in the journal. Work on Out 1 no doubt
monopolized his time from this point on, and Rivette may have felt the
need to foster the self-suff iciency of the younger critics once they had
gained financial independence. Certainly there was no violent, explicit
rupture between Rivette and the journal, even as it turned towards an
intransigently Maoist perspective. A fundamental difference in outlook,
however, is suggested by the fact that, in its politicized period, Cahiers was
categorically silent on Rivette’s films. Out 1, Céline et Julie vont en bateau,
Noroît and Duelle all screened during the 1970s, but none received any
mention in Cahiers. In 1977, Serge Daney confessed that “We have been very
unfair to Rivette,” but he did not expand on this gnomic statement.44 Even
after reconciliations took place with other Cahiers alumni such as Truffaut
and Rohmer, Rivette seemed to remain in something of a critical purgatory.
Aside from the occasional cursory reference from 1978 onwards, it was not
until the completion of Pont du nord in 1981 that Rivette would truly return
to the pages of Cahiers with the appearance of two long interviews with the

41 Jacques Rivette, “Tempête sous les draps,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 208 (January 1969), p. 65.
42 Jacques Rivette, “Concours,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 208 (January 1969), p. 66.
43 Jacques Rivette, “Dieu a choisi Paris,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216 (October 1969), p. 63.
44 Serge Daney, interviewed by Bill Krohn, “Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977: Entretien avec
Serge Daney par Bill Krohn,” in Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. I: Les temps des
Cahiers 1962-1981, ed. Patrice Rollet (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), pp. 17-31, here p. 30. Translated as T.L.
French [Bill Krohn], “Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968-1977: Interview with Serge Daney,” The Thousand
Eyes no. 2 (1977), pp. 18-32, here p. 30.
476  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

filmmaker printed in the May and September issues. 45 In his introduction

to the second of these dialogues, Narboni notes that even though Rivette
remained suspicious of “forced injections of politics in the cinema and the
facile endorsement that they provide,” his films have always been imprinted
by the historical moment in which they were made. Paris nous appartient, for
instance, was filmed at the dawn of the Fifth Republic, and Out 1 explored
the confused aftermath of May 1968. As for Pont du nord, it was in Narboni’s
view a striking depiction of the capital at a point in time when the left had
assumed political power for the first time since the Popular Front. 46
Despite the decade-long period of alienation, Rivette’s influence on his
Cahiers colleagues was profound and enduring and extended well beyond
the texts written in his own name. The fundamental importance he at-
tached to the political nature of film form, its moral force, is most evident
in the 1980s and 1990s, when Daney repeatedly evoked the “tracking shot
in Kapò” in his critical writings. The affinity between Daney and Rivette
is palpably on display in the Claire Denis documentary Jacques Rivette: le
veilleur (1990), which consists of a long series of filmed dialogues between
the two shortly before Daney’s death. Bonitzer, meanwhile, became a co-
screenwriter for Rivette’s films from the early 1980s onwards and read a
eulogy at his funeral in 2016. 47 Sylvie Pierre thus reflects a generalized
sentiment when she states: “I can say that the greatest film teacher that
I had, in the spontaneous discussions I had with him, was Rivette. It was
Rivette who taught me to see. […] Rivette was an extraordinary master for
me.”48 Indeed, it was Rivette’s presence in the Cahiers offices, and the fact
that he regularly accompanied his younger colleagues to film viewings
throughout the late 1960s, magisterially conducting long discussions after
the screenings, that perhaps most determined the Cahiers line during this
period, particularly when it came to its presiding taste in films. Kané recalls
an example of Rivette’s legendary “intellectual terrorism” when a group of
critics took in a viewing of Mouchette: “We left the screening overawed, in
total silence, and then Jacques said ‘Oh, this film is intolerable! It’s odious!’
Everyone backed down completely. […] Nobody said anything good about
Mouchette. For Cahiers, it became Bresson’s film maudit, so greatly had

45 See Jacques Rivette, interviewed by Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, “Entretien avec Jacques
Rivette,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 323-324 (May 1981), pp. 42-49; and “Entretien avec Jacques Rivette,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 327 (September 1981), pp. 8-21.
46 Ibid., p. 8.
47 See Pascal Bonitzer, “On écrivait sur le fil, sans filet,” Le Monde, January 30, 2016.
48 Interview with Sylvie Pierre, May 26, 2014.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 477

Rivette marked us.”49 Beyond his written film criticism in the late 1960s,
it is therefore Rivette’s personal association with the Cahiers team during
this period, his orally transmitted critical thinking, that forms the essence
of his influence on their direction. This influence may be more covert than
the landmark articles he wrote in the 1950s and early 1960s or the significant
corpus of films he directed between the 1950s and the 2000s, but it is no
less important an aspect of Rivette’s legacy for Cahiers.

Écriture and Signification

Cahiers’ interest in questions of montage, filmic space and duration was

accompanied by the near-disappearance from the journal’s pages of two
terms that had marked its development of film aesthetics in the 1950s and
early 1960s: mise en scène and découpage. As early as November 1967, André
S. Labarthe unabashedly announced the “death” of mise en scène. Once
ubiquitous in the critical tradition to which Cahiers belonged, the word, in
Labarthe’s view, had lost its utility when dealing with the work of young
filmmakers such as Godard, Eustache and Skolimowski. Rather than try to
twist its meaning by arguing that “mise en scène is not only mise en scène,
but also the opposite of what we thought,” it is preferable to “rid ourselves
of this word, much as painting has rid itself of the figurative.”50 The term
découpage similarly lost its pertinence for the journal: while Burch used
it extensively in the series of articles that would become Theory of Film
Practice, by 1970 découpage was of little interest to the Cahiers critics, and
a re-printed article by Luis Buñuel from 1928 defending the French term
was judged in an introductory note merely to “mirror the state of reflection
on the cinema among French critics and intellectuals at the time,” being of
limited application for an understanding of Buñuel’s later work.51
Whereas mise en scène and découpage had fallen out of use by the end
of the 1960s, the concept of écriture became prominent during this period.
Used in French to refer to the process of writing as opposed to the result of

49 Interview with Pascal Kané, March 12, 2014. A review of the f ilm by André S. Labarthe
reflected this line, concluding with the judgement: “It will be understood that I do not like
Mouchette (the f ilm).” André S. Labarthe, “La cybernétique de Robert Bresson,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 189 (April 1967), pp. 63-64, here p. 64.
50 André S. Labarthe, “Mort d’un mot,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 195 (November 1967), p. 66.
51 “Luis Buñuel: Textes 1927-1928,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (August-September 1970), p. 18. A
deeper history of the term découpage in French film criticism can be found in Timothy Barnard
(ed.), What is Cinema?, pp. 261-281.
478  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

this proces (écrit), the multiple resonances of the word in the theoretical
genealogy of Cahiers made it a particularly fertile concept for the critics of
the post-1968 era. The term écriture has a venerable heritage in French film
criticism: as early as the 1910s, it was deployed by Louis Delluc to refer to
the capacity for films to generate meaning through the formal techniques
of the director as opposed to the narrative devices of the screenwriter, and
it was also used in this sense in the “classical” tradition of film theory from
the 1930s-1950s, stretching from Jean-George Auriol to Rohmer via Roger
Leenhardt and Bazin. In 1948, Alexandre Astruc had already called for a
cinema of the caméra-stylo, in which “the author writes with his camera like
a writer writes with a pen.”52 The following decade, the term became crucial
for the development of the politique des auteurs: here, écriture represented
an auteur-director’s individual style, their specific handwriting, and as such
could even be detected in films made within the studio system, where the
filmmaker had a limited command over the script or casting but could exert
control over the film’s mise en scène, its formal system. Alongside its usage in
film criticism, the notion of écriture had been taken up by critical theorists
working within—and beyond—the framework of structuralist semiology.
Barthes had already used the word in his seminal 1953 work, Le degré zéro
de l’écriture, to posit a third term of literary production distinct from both
the raw communication of language and the rhetorical embellishment of
style, a zone in which the writer’s specific commitments are played out
and which can be located in the radically neutral mode of writing found
in modernist novelists such as Flaubert and Camus.53
By the late 1960s, the framework in which terms such as language, style
and writing were deployed had been sweepingly recast through a radical
counter-reading of Saussurean semiology. Tel Quel was at the heart of this
process. In addition to publishing the theoretical texts of Barthes and Der-
rida, members of the journal’s editorial board were engaged in their own
project of constructing a revolutionary poetics of the sign. The importance of
Tel Quel for Cahiers’ political evolution has already been discussed in Part II;
here the focus will be on the influence its “ultra-structuralist” literary theory
had on the film journal. Contact between the two periodicals initially came
via the film Méditerranée. Cahiers was first exposed to Sollers’ collaboration
with Jean-Daniel Pollet in 1964, when François Weyergans—present for its

52 Alexandre Astruc, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde,” L’Écran français no. 144, March 30,
1948. Translated as “The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Caméra-stylo,” in Peter Graham (ed.),
The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 17-23.
53 Roland Barthes, L’Écriture degré zéro, p. 19 [p. 15].
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 479

projection at the Knokke-le-zoute experimental festival—defined Méditer-

ranée as a “film where taste, the imagination and the unconscious have their
roles” and forecast that “Cahiers will speak about it again, when a Parisian
cinema is willing to program a Pollet show.”54 Readers would have to wait
some time for this promise to be fulfilled: it was not until February 1967
that Cahiers returned to Méditerranée, upon the film’s belated commercial
release. The journal made up for lost time by publishing four texts on Pollet’s
film, by Jean Ricardou, Jean-Pierre Faye, Sollers and Godard. Sollers himself
cast the project in explicitly theoretical terms, referring to Méditerranée as a
form of “writing [écriture] on the screen” and arguing that the film is founded
on “a law of general analogy that appears to me to exactly overlap with
certain contemporary literary experiments.”55 In September 1968, Pollet was
interviewed alongside Tel Quel editor Jean Thibaudeau for their collaboration
on Tu imagines, Robinson, a film that coaxed the Cahiers critics into writing
some of their most deliberately abstruse criticism.56 Reviewing the film for
Cahiers, Comolli linked it with Méditerranée as representing an attempt at
“pure cinema” that could be drawn from the “materiality of the film or the
text.” For Comolli, Pollet’s film “can no longer pass for the simple vehicle of
a discourse that would exceed it, having come, in some original place, from
the filmmaker, and reaching an illusory ‘later,’ the spectator.”57 In the same
issue, Aumont argued that the work of Pollet, Rivette and Garrel—all of them
interviewed by Cahiers that month—exemplified the radically de-subjected
quality of contemporary cinema. With the “purely functional” framing of
Pollet’s films, or the “passivity” of Rivette’s camera, the author has become
“absent from the work,” but this is not due to a surrealist-inspired faith in
“chance.” Rather, such techniques constitute formal strategies for “coming
as close as possible to a speech that is not mastered by us, that ceaselessly
escapes from us.” They thus present the possibility for an encounter with
the “unknown text that wants to be said: the text ‘enclosed in the secret of
places’ that must be delivered.”58

54 François Weyergans, “Knkk xprmntl,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 152 (February 1964), pp. 49-50,
here p. 49.
55 Philippe Sollers, “Une autre logique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 187 (February 1967), pp. 37-38,
here p. 38.
56 Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jean Thibaudeau, interviewed by Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli,
André S. Labarthe and Jean Narboni, “La terre intérieure: entretien avec Jean-Daniel Pollet et
Jean Thibaudeau,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968), pp. 25-39.
57 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Objet parmi d’autres,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968),
p. 40.
58 Jacques Aumont, “Le caractère inépuisable du murmure,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (Sep-
tember 1968), pp. 56-57, here p. 57. The citation is a reference to L’espace littéraire by Maurice
480  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

It was by dint of both his literary output and his editorial role at Tel Quel—
not to mention his political positioning—that Sollers was an instrumental
figure for Cahiers. His organizational proficiency and personal charisma
drew the Cahiers editors towards the discussion circles of Tel Quel’s “Groupe
d’études théoriques” in the late 1960s, which had a decisive influence on the
journal’s film theory. As a theorist, however, Sollers’ influence was surpassed
by that of his wife and co-editor at Tel Quel, the young Bulgarian exile Julia
Kristeva. In Kristeva’s writings during this period, a radical interpretation
of Saussure’s semiology was combined with a Marxist understanding of
ideology. As Kristeva wrote in the anthology Théorie d’ensemble, “semiol-
ogy can only be performed as a critique of semiology which leads towards
something other than semiology: namely, ideology.”59 In her first book-length
work, Sémiotikè, Kristeva baptized her approach “semanalysis.” Semanalysis
redeploys the psychoanalytic method to focus on “signifying practices”
such as writing and art, and Kristeva sees the radically open, polyvalent
nature of textual work in certain privileged modernist texts (Mallarmé,
Lautréamont, Joyce) as being capable of dismantling the unity between
signifier and signified (what Kristeva calls “A Meaning”), creating instead
a network of textual differences that produces signifiance, the very undoing
of signification. Semanalysis, therefore, must “traverse the signifier with
the subject and the sign, as well as the grammatical organization of the
discourse, in order to attain this zone where the germs of what will signify
are assembled in the presence of language.”60 Here, Kristeva advocates the
use of the term écriture to describe “a text seen as production, in order to
differentiate it from the concepts of ‘literature’ and ‘speech.’”61
With its brew of semiology, psychoanalysis and Althusserian Marxism,
Kristeva’s notion of semanalysis could not fail to attract Cahiers. Already
in late 1969, the second part of “Cinéma/idéologie/critique” stressed the
importance of her work,62 and soon the cinema came to be invariably
referred to as a “signifying practice” rather than an art form. Analysis of
the écriture of modernist films—such as those of Buñuel, Jancsó and the

Blanchot, who along with Kristeva is the most important reference point for Aumont in this text.
59 Julia Kristeva, “La sémiologie: science critique et/ou critique de la science,” in Philippe
Sollers (ed.), Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 80-93, here p. 83.
60 Julia Kristeva, Sémiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 9.
61 Julia Kristeva, “La sémiologie,” p. 92.
62 Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique (2): D’une critique à son
point critique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 217 (November 1969), pp. 7-13, here p. 11. Translated as
“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism (II): On Criticism at Its Critical Point,” trans. Daniel Fairfax, in
Comolli, Cinema against Spectacle, pp. 261-280, here p. 275.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 481

Taviani brothers—was largely modeled on Kristeva’s conceptualization

of the process of signifiance in literary modernism. The influence of the
Russian formalists on her theories also contributed to Cahiers’ own interest
in this movement, which emerged in tandem with the journal’s work on
1920s Soviet cinema. The “Russie années 20” special issue included French
translations of Yuri Tynyanov’s “The Fundamentals of Cinema” and Boris
Eikhenbaum’s “Problems of Cine-stylistics,” which were early attempts
to develop a formalist poetics of the cinema (both were written in 1927).
Published in the same dossier, Narboni’s article “Introduction à Poetika Kino,”
outlined the broader context for this theoretical movement’s relations with
the cinema. Presenting the texts written by Eikhenbaum and Tynyanov as
a major precursor to the film semiology of Metz, Narboni evaluated their
pertinence for contemporary cinema. In Narboni’s argument, the encounter
between the formalist critics and montage-practitioners such as Eisenstein
and Vertov represented the first time that the cinema was grasped as a
“signifying practice aware of its materiality.”63 Such an approach could be
profitably retained, Narboni claims, in the critical analysis of filmmakers
such as Godard, Straub and Kramer. But he also warns against a mechanistic
revival of the formalist school and notes that modern critical theory has
integrated its conceptual acquisitions while tending to “surpass them and
deconstruct their philosophical presuppositions,” pointing specifically to
the work of Derrida and Kristeva as central to this project.64 As Rodowick
has cogently argued, this text represents something of a breakthrough
moment for Cahiers, as the line of argument adopted by Narboni marks the
point that the journal “opens out centrifugally to the external genetic ribbon
where contemporary film theory rapidly takes shape in the context of a
more general discursive transformation,” one in which the work of Derrida
and Kristeva “displaces and refashions structuralism.”65 In this sense, then,
it represents a significant milestone in Cahiers’ theoretical development.
On a more polemical level, Kristeva’s interview in issue no. 9-10 of Ciné-
thique provided the occasion for Cahiers and Cinéthique to sustain their
debates on film theory and politics. Although the latter was, at this point,
organizationally closer to Tel Quel, Cahiers averred that Kristeva’s remarks
were at odds with its rival journal’s more rigid perspectives. Most pointedly,
the literary theorist doggedly maintained a distinction between ideology

63 Jean Narboni, “Introduction à Poetika Kino,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 220-221 (May-June 1970),
pp. 52-57, here p. 57.
64 Ibid., p. 52.
65 D.N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 214.
482  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

and signifying practice. Considering art forms as signifying practices was

purposefully undertaken to “allow them to be envisaged as socio-historical
formations, at the same time as designating the specificity of the functioning
of meaning and of the subject in them.” This also served to avoid the twin
pitfalls of “reducing them to ideology” and “alienating them […] as aesthetic
experiences (sites of the pure imaginary and narcissistic jouissance).”66
Moreover, Kristeva insisted that the “theoretical error” of substituting ideol-
ogy for the signifier leads to a “blockage of the work specific to the cinema,
which sees itself replaced by discourses on its ideological function.”67 Comolli,
having avowed the centrality of Kristeva’s concept of signifying practice
for his history of film technology in “Technique et idéologie,” sees these
comments as a tacit rebuke to Cinéthique, whose editors precisely did commit
the error targeted by Kristeva of conflating ideology and signification.68

Deconstruction in Theory and Practice

As Chapters 16 and 17 outline, Cahiers’ broader critical project consisted

precisely of finding the ways in which the écriture of the films they discussed
produced points of rupture with the dominant ideology, even when this was
not entirely the conscious work of the filmmaker. As Daney later recognized,
one of the key hallmarks of Cahiers’ methodology was its concern for locating
the gaps between écriture and ideology: “We were very conscious then of the
danger […] of confounding ideology and writing [écriture]. Now, it’s quite simple,
the cinema loved by Cahiers—from the beginning—is a cinema haunted by
writing. This is the key which makes it possible to understand our successive
tastes and choices.”69 In the same interview, Daney further pursues the idea
that Cahiers is interested in a cinema “haunted” by writing. He explains:

Writing implies spacing [espacement], a void between two words, two

letters, a void that permits the breaching [ frayage] of meaning. […] So,

66 Julia Kristeva, “Cinéma: pratique analytique, pratique révolutionnaire,” Cinéthique no. 9-10
(c. early 1971), pp. 71-79, here p. 74
67 Ibid., p. 72.
68 As Comolli wrote: “It seems that this remark [by Kristeva], which appeared in Cinéthique,
no. 9-10, is also aimed at Cinéthique, no. 9-10, where the conflation of the signifier with ideology
takes the form of a law. We can be assured that, on this precise point, our position is not new,
as a re-reading of the programmatic text ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ […] attests.” Comolli,
“Technique et idéologie (3),” p. 44 [p. 196].
69 Daney, “Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977: Entretien avec Serge Daney,” p. 19 [p. 20].
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 483

how does all this happen in film? There, too, there is spacing, but it isn’t the
invisible bond between frames; it’s the hors-champ. Each frame secretes
its hors-champ. […] Today it may well be the case that with people like
Godard and Straub we have reached an extreme limit of writing. These are
filmmakers for whom the image is closer to an inscription on a tombstone
than to an advertising billboard. And the cinema has no other choice
than to be a billboard or an epitaph.70

Bill Krohn has recognized that, in linking the notion of writing with espace-
ment, this passage has resonances with the notion of différance developed
by Derrida in the late 1960s: “crudely put, what Daney did was to graft this
philosophical idea of writing onto the old idea of writing with images.”71
Indeed, in his contribution to Théorie d’ensemble, Derrida speaks of différance
as having both a temporal aspect and a spatial aspect, which would be linked
to “repetition, the interval, distance, spacing [espacement].”72 In the wake of
his annus mirabilis in 1967, which saw the near-simultaneous publication of
L’Écriture et la différence, De la grammatologie and La Voix et le phénomène,
Derrida’s intellectual prominence was such that it was difficult for Cahiers
to avoid his influence, and, alongside Kristeva, the journal regularly men-
tioned his role in having “deconstructed” the formalist tradition “to its very
foundations.”73 The fact that “Cinéma/idéologie/critique” inscribed Derrida’s
notion of deconstruction into its program—defending films that operate
a “critical de-construction of the system of representation”—would seem
to confirm the centrality of Derrida’s ideas to the journal.74 We should
not, however, exaggerate this influence. As of 1969, deconstructionism
was still in a nascent state and had not yet congealed into the fixed set
of “post-structuralist” ideas that would later characterize the method,
especially in Anglo-American humanities departments. Comolli/Narboni
thus employed the word in a looser sense than its later usage would suggest,
a trait that is indicated by the telltale retention of the hyphen in their chosen
orthography. “De-construction” was evidently still felt to be a neologism
with which the Cahiers critics were not entirely at ease, and the term was
incorporated into a text that was otherwise dominated by an Althusserian

70 Ibid., p. 20 [p. 21].

71 T.L. French [Bill Krohn], “The Tinkerers,” The Thousand Eyes no. 2 (1977), pp. 4-17, here p. 12.
72 Jacques Derrida, “La différance,” in Sollers (ed.), Théorie d’ensemble, pp. 41-66. Translated
as “Différance,” in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. and ed. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-27.
73 Comolli/Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique (II),” p. 11 [p. 275].
74 Comolli/Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” p. 13 [p. 256].
484  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

perspective. In 1969, while Derrida was collaborating with Tel Quel (which
considered itself a Marxist journal, maintaining a détente with the PCF
and party-aligned intellectuals such as Althusser at this time), these two
hermeneutic frameworks could still be conceived of as complementary to
one another. Within the space of a couple of years, however, this tenuous
coalition would break apart.
Although the theories of Derrida were less central to the Cahiers project
than those of Althusser, Barthes and Lacan and were only rarely mentioned
on the pages of the journal after 1972, the years 1970 and 1971 saw a prolifera-
tion of texts making reference to the philosopher’s ideas. The Derridean
inspiration of Narboni’s review of Othon, “La vicariance du pouvoir” from
October 1970 has already been discussed at length in Chapter 4. A few
months later, Narboni responded to Positif ’s attack on Cahiers’ defense of
Straub/Huillet by denouncing its “regression” to the “vulgar sociologism” of
Sartre, Lukàcs and Goldmann. Defining Cahiers’ own critical practice as “a
work of subversion and displacement” that could transform the “symbolic
economy” of films by shedding light on their “unconsciously or knowingly
dissimulated ideological determinations,” Narboni facetiously remarked,
“we urgently advise Positif to read the texts of Jacques Derrida.”75 Earlier,
in “Sur Salador,” a July 1970 text which Martin Jay has linked to Derrida’s
critique of “ocularcentrism,” Daney specifically took aim at the “ideology
of visibility.”76 While noting that recent film theory had begun to focus on
the ideological status of the camera, Daney argues for the need to go even
further in this direction by interrogating the hegemonic status of vision in
Western metaphysics. In making this claim, he openly draws inspiration
from Derrida’s notion of photology in L’Écriture et la différence. For Daney,
the cinema is “connected to the Western metaphysical tradition, a tradi-
tion of seeing and sight for which it fulfills the photological vocation.”77
Following Derrida, for whom “the entire history of our philosophy is a
photology, the name given to a history of, or treatise on, light,”78 Daney
defines “photology” as “that obstinate will to confuse vision and cognition
[connaissance], making the latter the compensation of the former and the

75 Jean Narboni, “Sur quelques contresens,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227 (January-Febru-
ary 1971), pp. 116-118, here pp. 118, 116.
76 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 470.
77 “Sur Salador” was Daney’s contribution to the text jointly authored with Jean-Pierre Oudart,
“Travail, lecture, jouissance,” p. 39 [p. 116].
78 Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 45. Translated as Writing
and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 27.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 485

former the guarantee of the latter, seeing in directness of vision [immédia-

tion] a model of cognition.”79
In the same issue of Cahiers, Daney and Oudart penned a binomial review
of Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage, in which Derrida’s ideas on writing and
language are never far from their concerns.80 It was Bonitzer, however, whose
criticism most palpably bore traces of Derrida’s deconstructionist method.
He even recalls attending Derrida’s seminar with the former Cahiers writer
Jacques Bontemps, who was then studying under the philosopher at the
École normale supérieure.81 Part of a mix of theoretical influences on the
critic that also included Lacan, Bataille, Barthes and Deleuze, the impact
of Derrida’s ideas on Bonitzer’s writing could be felt from the start of his
involvement with Cahiers: Bonitzer’s February 1969 review of Sembene’s
Le Mandat, his first article for the journal, already argued that money in
the film “functions exactly like the ‘pharmakon’ that Derrida describes in
‘La pharmacie de Platon.’”82 Many of the critic’s subsequent allusions to
Derridean deconstruction surfaced in his reception of Japanese new wave
cinema, particularly the films of Oshima and Yoshida. This work will be
discussed in greater detail in Chapter 18; here it will suffice to note that an
early capsule review of Eros + Massacre in March 1970 (preceding by seven
months the longer text Bonitzer devoted to the film) previews this critical
approach by asserting that the “deconstruction of consistency (meaning as
a monument) by the critical redoubling of the process of production is the
modern rule of writing.”83 For Bonitzer, this rule finds its counterpart in
Yoshida’s cinema through the “‘oblique’ inscription” of the film’s ideological
background—namely, its articulation of contemporary social and sexual
revolutions with the “historico-mythical” scenes tracing the life of the early
twentieth-century Japanese anarchist Osugi.
If deconstruction played a significant role in the development of Cahiers’
theory of cinematic écriture, it also had a more practical effect on the very

79 Daney/Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” p. 39 [p. 116].

80 See Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Les aveux maîtrisés,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 27-31;
and Serge Daney, “Amphisbetesis,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 31-32.
81 Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014.
82 Pascal Bonitzer, “L’argent-fantôme (Le Mandat),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 209 (February 1969),
pp. 57-58, here p. 58. The immediacy with which the Cahiers critics were receiving and absorbing
these texts is evident from the fact that Derrida’s article on the pharmakon only appeared in
Tel Quel a few months before Bonitzer’s review. See Jacques Derrida, “La pharmacie de Platon,”
Tel Quel no. 32 (Winter 1968), pp. 17-59, and no. 33 (Spring 1968), pp. 4-48. Translated as “Plato’s
Pharmacy,” in Idem., Dissemination, trans. and ed. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61-171.
83 Pascal Bonitzer, “Eros + Gyakusatsu,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218 (March 1970), pp. 66-67.
486  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

writing style of the critics. Derrida, of course, is legendary for the challenging,
opaque nature of his writing, practically demonstrating the deconstruction-
ist method by deploying a dense rhetorical patchwork of wordplay, allusion
and the etymological unpacking of key terms and in the process achieving a
stylistic register that at times approaches the symbolist poetry of Mallarmé
or Lautréamont. In this sense, his writing technique parallels those of
contemporary figures such as Foucault, Deleuze, Barthes and Lacan, all of
whose texts possess profoundly literary qualities, which have enchanted
their supporters and infuriated their antagonists in equal measure. This
admixture of the writerly and the theoretical proved irresistible to the
Cahiers critics, who sought to craft texts that were commensurable in
style with those of their maîtres à penser. As Comolli later noted: “[What]
differentiated us was the fact that we wanted written texts. This demand
for writing was essential for us, above all to radically distinguish ourselves
from Positif. They always had a manner of writing which we did not like.
The great thinkers […] cared about writing, they thought about writing. We
labored on this: our texts had to be written.”84 Bonitzer, in particular, was
highly regarded within the journal for displaying considerable literary flair
(modeled to a certain extent on the writings of Georges Bataille), although his
texts were also menaced by the danger of sliding into a rhetorical simulation
of the intellectual luminaries he admired.
A more serious issue was the very legibility of the texts that were produced
during this period. Together with their conceptual density and lexical
specialization, the articles written by the Cahiers critics were impregnated
by the journal’s theoretical leanings even on the level of their syntactic
construction. The pages of Cahiers, during this period, were populated
with labyrinthine sentences woven out of a multiplicity of parenthetical
remarks and dependent clauses. Oudart’s contributions were particularly
notorious for their hermetic inscrutability, but all the writers at Cahiers
flirted with forms of writing that markedly departed from the norms of
compositional limpidity.85 Given that the journal championed modernist
films that interrogated and subverted the very basis of communicability, the

84 Jean-Louis Comolli, interviewed by Daniel Fairfax, “‘Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I

still am…’: An Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 1),” Senses of Cinema no. 62 (April 2012),
sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/yes-we-were-utopians-in-a-way-i-still-am-an-
interview-with-jean-louis-comolli-part-1/ (accessed January 1, 2021).
85 Oudart’s texts posed challenges of comprehension even to his own colleagues. Pierre, for
instance, has stated that “We always had a lot of trouble, when he wrote on a film, in understand-
ing the literal relationship of the analysis that he had woven with the film.” Interview with Sylvie
Pierre, May 26, 2014.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 487

écriture of their own texts was of great importance for the Cahiers critics.
The act of writing became a conscious component of their attempts to break
with the dominant system of representation—even if this carried the risk
of the journal becoming mired in unreadable obscurity.
Reynaud has noted that “the opacity of the écriture at Cahiers was an
accurate rendering of the murky political climate, the social impasses, the
muted anxiety of the time.”86 In retrospect, Aumont is harsher still in his
judgement of this aspect of their criticism:

The truth is that we did not clearly know what we thought, neither politi-
cally nor theoretically. And so there was a bit of a smokescreen. If we
said things in a confused and rather obscure manner, then at least they
remained ambiguous—we could always say that we hadn’t said what we
said. If we had very clear ideas we would have expressed them in a much
more didactic fashion.87

At the time, however, the difficult nature of the journal’s writing style was
doggedly defended by the editorial team. In the face of mockery from Positif
and other journals, Cahiers responded by appealing to Barthes’ rebuttal of
the opponents of contemporary literary theory in Critique et vérité, labeling
the attacks from their rivals the “return of the Picards.”88 Words of cau-
tion, however, also came from more sympathetic quarters. As the sliding
subscription numbers demonstrated, many readers simply abandoned the
journal in the face of its unfamiliar vocabulary and contorted syntax. Others
corresponded with Cahiers in order to voice their concern. In May 1971, for
instance, a subscriber by the name of Christian Oddos wrote to express
his solidarity with Cahiers over their stance on Othon, noting, “I think you
are right to wish to continue in the line that Cahiers had traced for itself,
and to present a cinematic thinking, instead of a bundle of articles strung
together.” And yet, he warned, “I subscribe to the rumor circulating that
finds Cahiers to be unreadable; alongside articles that are complex but

86 Bérénice Reynaud, “Introduction: Cahiers du Cinéma 1973-1978,” in David Wilson (ed.),

Cahiers du Cinéma vol. IV: 1973-1978 History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle (London: Routledge,
2000), pp. 1-44, here p. 12.
87 Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 11, 2014.
88 La Rédaction, “Notes sur un feu de bengale (rose),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227 (January-
February 1971), pp. 119-120, here p. 119. See also Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
Translated as Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pillcher Keuneman and Charles Stivale (New
York: Continuum, 2004). This text was a polemic against the Racine scholar Raymond Picard,
who had earlier criticized Barthes’ method for its supposedly pseudoscientific obscurantism.
488  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

quite well written, the result of a clarity of thought, one can find others
whose muddled, recondite aspect is such that it is difficult to read past
the first column.”89 In their response to Oddos, the editors showed their
appreciation for the reader’s “serenity and precision” and admitted that
there were certain texts (particularly Oudart’s) “on which the good will of
certain readers falters.” But they also insisted that “reading Cahiers requires
work” and that the difficulty of these texts, their “refusal of a certain ‘fine
style,’” was also a testament to their “theoretical contribution to the field of
signifying practices.”90 In response to a similar question from an interview
with the magazine Politique Hebdo printed in the same issue of Cahiers, the
editors were even more adamant in the defense of their textual methodology:

Firstly, there is no question of us ceding to the bourgeois conception of a

reading that could be done without work. Reading is work. The accusations
of “hermeticism,” “illegibility,” “jargon,” and so on have always been the
weapons of obscurantist reaction when confronted with productive
theoretical work. […] Without losing sight of the specificity of each signify-
ing practice, it is possible to think of the problem of a general materialist
writing capable of articulating these practices and reflecting on their
interpenetration, their interdependence.91

As a summation of the links between Cahiers’ writing style, the journal’s

political perspective, and the influence of Kristeva and Derrida on its
conceptualization of écriture, this passage can hardly be improved upon.

Works Cited

Alexandre Astruc, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde,” L’Écran français no. 144,
March 30, 1948. Translated as “The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Caméra-
stylo,” in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1968), pp. 17-23.
Jacques Aumont, “Le caractère inépuisable du murmure,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204
(September 1968), pp. 56-57.
———, “Le concept de montage,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), pp. 46-51.

89 Christian Oddos, “Lettre de lecteur,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May 1971), pp. 54-57, here
p. 54.
90 Ibid., p. 55.
91 “Réponses à Politique Hebdo,” p. 64.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 489

Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953). Translated as Writing
Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968).
———, Critique et vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966). Translated as Criticism and Truth, trans.
Katrine Pillcher Keuneman and Charles Stivale (New York: Continuum, 2004).
André Bazin, “Montage interdit,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 65 (December 1956),
pp. 32-41, repr. in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie et langage
(Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 117-130. Translated as “Editing prohibited,” in
idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose,
2011), pp. 73-86.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Barthes (Roland)” in “Dictionnaire sans foi ni loi,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 325 (June 1981), p. 114.
———, “L’authenticité était la marque et l’esprit de la Nouvelle Vague,” in Aldo
Tassone (ed.), Que reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? (Paris: Stock, 2003), pp. 35-41.
———, “On écrivait sur le fil, sans filet,” Le Monde, January 30, 2016.
[Cahiers du cinéma], “Luis Buñuel: Textes 1927-1928,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223
(August-September 1970), p. 18.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Objet parmi d’autres,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (Septem-
ber 1968), p. 40.
———, “Technique et idéologie (3),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 231 (August-Septem-
ber 1971), pp. 42-50. Translated as “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective,
Depth of Field,” trans. Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinema against
Spectacle, Technique and Ideology Revisited (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2015), pp. 194-207.
———, interviewed by Daniel Fairfax, “‘Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still
am…’: An Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 1),” Senses of Cinema no. 62
(April 2012), sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/yes-we-were-utopians-
in-a-way-i-still-am-an-interview-with-jean-louis-comolli-part-1/ (accessed
January 1, 2021).
——— and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216
(October 1969), pp. 11-15. Translated as “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” trans.
Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and
Ideology Revisited (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 251-259.
———, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique (II): D’une critique à son point critique,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 217 (November 1969), pp. 7-13. Translated as “Cinema/Ideology/
Criticism (II): On Criticism at Its Critical Point,” trans. Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-
Louis Comolli, Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 261-280.
Serge Daney, “Amphisbetesis,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 31-32.
———, interviewed by Bill Krohn, “Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977: Entretien
avec Serge Daney par Bill Krohn,” in idem., La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. I:
490  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Les temps des Cahiers 1962-1981 (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), pp. 17-31. Translated as T.L.
French [Bill Krohn], “Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968-1977: Interview with Serge
Daney,” The Thousand Eyes no. 2 (1977), pp. 18-32.
Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Translated as Writing
and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
———, “La pharmacie de Platon,” Tel Quel no. 32 (Winter 1968), pp. 17-59, and no. 33
(Spring 1968), pp. 4-48. Translated as “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in idem., Dissemination,
trans. and ed. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
pp. 61-171.
François Dosse, History of Structuralism vol. II: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, trans.
Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Daniel Fairfax, “L’Espace: présentation,” 1895: revue de l’histoire du cinéma no. 79
(Summer 2016), pp. 95-103.
Jean-Luc Godard, “Montage mon beau souci,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 65 (Decem-
ber 1956), pp. 30-31. Translated as “Montage, my fine care,” in idem., Godard on
Godard, trans. and ed. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1972), pp. 39-41.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Julia Kristeva, “La sémiologie: science critique et/ou critique de la science,” in
Philippe Sollers (ed.), Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 80-93.
———, Sémiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
———, “Cinéma: pratique analytique, pratique révolutionnaire,” Cinéthique no. 9-10
(c. early 1971), pp. 71-79.
André S. Labarthe, “La cybernétique de Robert Bresson,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 189
(April 1967), pp. 63-64.
———, “Mort d’un mot,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 195 (November 1967), p. 66.
Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith, Jacques Rivette (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2009).
Jean Narboni, “Introduction à Poetika Kino,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 220-221 (May-
June 1970), pp. 52-57.
———, “Sur quelques contresens,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227 (January-
February 1971), pp. 116-118.
———, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette, “Montage,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 210
(March 1969), pp. 17-34. Translated as “Montage,” trans. Tom Milne, in Jonathan
Rosenbaum (ed.), Rivette: Texts and Interviews (London: BFI, 1977), pp. 69-88.
Christian Oddos, “Lettre de lecteur,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May 1971), pp. 54-57.
Sylvie Pierre, “Le film sans maître,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968),
p. 22.
———, “Le dur désir de durer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968), p. 55.
———, “L’Amour fou,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 209 (February 1969), p. 62.
BEYOND STRUC TUR ALISM: FILM FORM AND ÉCRITURE 491

Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jean Thibaudeau, interviewed by Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis

Comolli, André S. Labarthe and Jean Narboni, “La terre intérieure: entretien
avec Jean-Daniel Pollet et Jean Thibaudeau,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (Sep-
tember 1968), pp. 25-39.
La Rédaction, “Notes sur un feu de bengale (rose),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227
(January-February 1971), pp. 119-120.
———, “Réponses à Politique Hebdo,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May-June 1971),
pp. 61-64.
Bérénice Reynaud, “Introduction: Cahiers du Cinéma 1973-1978,” in David Wilson
(ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. IV: 1973-1978 History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle
(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-44.
Jacques Rivette, interviewed by Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni
and Sylvie Pierre, “Le temps déborde: Entretien avec Jacques Rivette,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968), pp. 6-21. Translated as “Time Overflowing,”
trans. Amy Gateff, in Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), Rivette: Texts and Interviews
(London: BFI, 1977), pp. 9-38.
———, “L’espace du film,” brochure of the Maison de la Culture du Havre, Fonds
Jacques Rivette, Espace chercheurs de la Cinémathèque française, dossier
RIVETTE26-B10.
———, “Tempête sous les draps,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 208 (January 1969), p. 65.
———, “Concours,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 208 (January 1969), p. 66.
———, “Dieu a choisi Paris,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216 (October 1969), p. 63.
———, interviewed by Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, “Entretien avec Jacques
Rivette,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 323-324 (May 1981), pp. 42-49.
———, interviewed by Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, “Entretien avec Jacques
Rivette,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 327 (September 1981), pp. 8-21.
D.N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Éric Rohmer, L’Organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Ramsay,
1997).
Philippe Sollers, “Une autre logique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 187 (February 1967),
pp. 37-38.
François Weyergans, “Knkk xprmntl,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 152 (February 1964),
pp. 49-50.
16. Re-reading Classical Cinema

Abstract
As the Young Mr. Lincoln article discussed in Chapter 3 has already shown,
an integral part of Cahiers du cinéma’s core project in the post-1968 era
involved the act of re-reading works of classical cinema using the new
tools of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory to which the Cahiers critics
had been exposed. This chapter looks at four such undertakings: a dos-
sier on Dreyer and analyses of the American films Morocco (Josef von
Sternberg), Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor) and Intolerance (D.W. Griffith),
before focusing on the journal’s increasingly jaundiced view of the latter
output of Hollywood’s old guard, including Howard Hawks, Joseph Losey
and Elia Kazan.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, classical cinema, Carl Theodor Dreyer,

Morocco, Sylvia Scarlett, Intolerance

The Dreyer Dossier

Conceiving, as Cahiers did, of signification in the cinema as a form of écriture

logically entails understanding the analysis of film as a process of reading,
or lecture. In the case of works coming within the classical mode of film
production—made under studio-based conditions between the 1910s and
the beginning of the 1960s, in both Europe and the US—such analysis
entailed a process of re-reading (relecture). It involved returning to the
earlier critical consensus on the film under discussion—one marked, in
the eyes of the Cahiers critics, by a predominantly metaphysical, idealist
outlook—and transforming it, undoing it through an examination of the
ideological fault lines created by the film’s own formal structures. Looking
back from the standpoint of 1981 at the approach adopted during the journal’s
Marxist phase, Narboni has stated that the concept of “re-reading” was
“truly a dream term (that is to say both oneiric and ideal)” owing to the
fact that “it allowed us to continue to mark our love for these films, and

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch16
494  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

to apply to them the ‘symptomatic’ distancing of an analysis that we saw

as materialist.”1 The traditional Cahiers taste, its goût, thus continued to
be transmitted, albeit now by means of a critical reading of films that had
once been revered. The Young Mr. Lincoln analysis—discussed at length in
Chapter 3—was the tutor text for this critical method and was followed by
similar endeavors on historical works such as Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco,
D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett, as well as
contemporary Hollywood releases such as Howard Hawks’ Rio Lobo. All of
these critical readings will be examined below, but the initial focus of this
chapter will be on a set of texts that significntly contributed to laying the
foundations for this approach.
The December 1968 issue of Cahiers was dominated by a dossier dedicated
to Carl Theodor Dreyer. Although at the time, the collection of texts on
Dreyer was not conceived as a symptomatic re-reading of classical cinema,
its status as a forerunner to this project was made clear ten months after its
publication: when discussing the category (e) films in “Cinéma/idéologie/
critique,” Comolli and Narboni explicitly point to Dreyer, alongside Ford and
Rossellini, as a definitive example of directors whose films produce “effects
of discrepancy [décalage] and rupture, which shatter, not the ideology which
presides over the film (of course), but its reflection in the film, and the image
which it gives of itself.”2 Coming at the end of a year marked by the radical
contestation of the political status quo by popular uprisings on multiple
continents, the decision to devote so much of the review to a classical,
even “archaic” filmmaker appears counter-intuitive to say the least. But
Dreyer had long been the source of pitched battles within French critical
circles, and Cahiers had steadfastly defended the Danish director since its
founding: as early as issue no. 9 (from 1952), Joseph-Marie Lo Duca penned
a tribute to “Dreyer’s mystic trilogy” (discussing La Passion de Jeanne d’arc,
Vampyr and Vredens Dag).3 The metaphysical interpretation of Dreyer in
Lo Duca’s and Rohmer’s texts, however, ceded in the mid-1960s to articles
by Delahaye and Téchiné making the polemical case for Dreyer’s status as
a modernist filmmaker. 4 These were prompted by the release of Gertrud

1 Jean Narboni, “Relecture,” in “Dictionnaire sans foi ni loi,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 325
(June 1981), p. 119.
2 Comolli/Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” p. 14 [p. 257].
3 Lo Duca, “Trilogie mystique de Dreyer (La passion de Jean d’Arc),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 9
(February 1952), pp. 60-63. A selection of Dreyer’s critical writings was also published over the
course of six installments in 1963-1964.
4 See Michel Delahaye, “Circulaire (Gertrud),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 164 (March 1965), p. 72;
André Téchiné, “La parole de la fin (Gertrud),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 164 (March 1965), pp. 72-73;
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 495

in 1964, which incited a renewal of critical hostilities over Dreyer’s work,

as Cahiers’ continued defense of the director vied with the ridicule his
final film received from other quarters. As a result, the 1968 dossier had
a broadly militant tone to it—appropriate, after all, to the political mood
at the time—but this was not enough to mask the heterogeneity of the
texts it included. In arguing that Dreyer’s genius derived from the “simple
presence, the simple relationship, calculated as precisely and as accurately
as possible, between beings and things,” Delahaye’s introduction to the
dossier, “Un phare pilote,” evinced his growing alienation from the rest of
the journal, which would lead to his departure in 1970, while former director
of the Algiers cinémathèque Barthélémy Amengual, writing a guest article
for Cahiers, provided a lengthy account of Dreyer’s work from a Marxist
humanist perspective in “Les nuits blanches de l’âme.”5
Another guest writer, Jean-Marie Straub, gave a more agitational view
of Dreyer’s work, stridently declaiming, “What I particularly admire in the
films of Dreyer that I have been able to watch or re-watch these last years, is
their ferocity with respect to the bourgeois world,” and indeed the rigorous
asceticism of the Dane’s filmmaking style has been an evident influence
on Straub/Huillet’s own practice.6 It was in the articles contributed by
Comolli, Narboni and Aumont to the dossier, however, that the germs of
Cahiers’ new approach to the critical understanding of cinematic écriture
when tackling the work of the masters of classical cinema made its ap-
pearance. Comolli begins his piece, aptly titled “Rhétorique de la terreur,”
by contesting the very idea of Dreyer as a classicist—“Dreyer a modern
filmmaker? Absolutely”—and rejecting the “outdated hodgepodge of the
discourse on the soul” that characterizes traditional spiritualist analyses
of his work.7 Dreyer’s career, in Comolli’s understanding, is animated by a
presiding tension between form and content in his films: late works such
as Gertrud and Vredens Dag depict both “the repressive condition of every
society” and the attempts by the main characters (“perfectly representative
of all the banality of humanity”) to resist these mechanisms of power. But

and André Téchiné, “L’archaïsme nordique de Dreyer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 170 (September 1965),
pp. 36-37. The last text makes the paradoxical case that Dreyer’s modernity is precisely due to
his “rudimentary” and “archaic” qualities.
5 Michel Delahaye, “Un phare pilote,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968), p. 10; and
Barthélémy Amengual, “Les nuits blanches de l’âme,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968),
pp. 52-62.
6 Jean-Marie Straub, “Féroce,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968), p. 35.
7 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Rhétorique de la terreur,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968),
pp. 42-44, here p. 42.
496  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

they also come up against the “totalitarian writing” of Dreyer’s formal

system, which requires a “necessarily synthetic reading.” For Comolli, the
signifying totality of Dreyer’s films materializes their thematic content:
his films “bring into play a formal mechanism just as repressive, just as
rigorously governed, with a functioning that is just as implacable, as that
of the social orders denounced.”8
In highlighting the anachronism and “relative degree of illegibility” in
Dreyer’s work, and taking umbrage at the “obscurantist” readings his films
have aroused, Narboni followed in the logic of Comolli’s text, and he set out
his argument by stating that, “among all filmmakers, even more so than
Bergman, Dreyer today appears as the one whose feigned capacity to receive
retrograde ideologies is the greatest, as the refuge of dubious, hackneyed
metaphysical notions, […] the pretext for all kinds of confusionism and verbal
intemperance.”9 Narboni uses the lateral, reversing camera movements of
Gertrud as a synecdoche for Dreyer’s cinema as a whole—with the pretext
that his filmmaking has become an “asymptote of itself, as with every great
œuvre”—and argues that the boustrophedon-like approach to écriture in his
films illustrates a greater contradiction coursing through his work. Dreyer’s
“limpid writing,” for Narboni, is in fact marked by a contrast between its
component parts, which are “legible at every instant,” and the “abnormal
whole”: “once a certain threshold of precision and clarity has been breached,
the most assured self-evidence always engenders the densest mystery, the
significations fall, literally, below the meaning.”10 As such, Narboni argues
for a reinterpretation of Dreyer’s oft-cited phrase that “we must use the
camera to drive away the camera.” Rather than suggesting that the cinema
has a vocation towards “discretion, transparency, effacement before the
themes, subjects and characters,” Narboni gives an alternative reading of
the statement: “‘Using the camera to drive away the camera’ means […]
showing the medium whose presence we expected to be dissimulated by
the figures that it animates.” The supreme example of this approach comes,
in the Cahiers critic’s view, in those moments in Gertrud when there is a
momentary pause in the movement of the camera, and when the gaze of
the characters, neither crossing each other’s lines of sight nor meeting that
of the spectator, coincide with our own gaze, so as to “stare at a blank fabric

8 Ibid., p. 44.
9 Jean Narboni, “La Mise en demeure,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968), pp. 38-41,
here p. 38.
10 Ibid., p. 41.
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 497

between them and us that, by dint of this ultimately emptied out work, has
become visible, and almost palpable.”11
Aumont rounded out the dossier with a shorter text, which inflected the
readings of Dreyer’s work proffered by Comolli and Narboni with an aesthetic
analysis of the spatial dynamics governing his films. Aumont’s discussion
of the “space-limit” in Dreyer draws on the French art historian Henri
Focillon’s discussion of Roman sculpture, and he claims that “Dreyerian
perspective” is comparable to that of Gothic art by virtue of “plac[ing] the
human figure in the foreground.” It is noteworthy that Aumont’s discus-
sion does not proceed as radically as those of Comolli and Narboni in the
direction of rejecting a humanist account of Dreyer’s œuvre: here, he even
accepts that the concentrated abstraction of Dreyer’s style means that
“everything, here, is related to what we indeed have to call ‘man.’”12 As an
archetypal filmmaker straddling the classical/modern divide in film history,
Dreyer would remain a central reference point in Aumont’s later endeavor
to develop an aesthetic theory of the cinema. As such, it was logical that
he should return to the Danish auteur’s work with a 1993 monograph on
Vampyr, proferring a close analysis that reads the film through the prism
of its notoriously labyrinthine form.13

Morocco by Josef von Sternberg

After the re-reading of Young Mr. Lincoln in August 1970, Morocco was the
second product of the Hollywood studio system to be subject to Cahiers’
new mode of film analysis, with an article on Sternberg’s early talkie ap-
pearing at the end of the year. In the opening paragraph of this text, it was
avowedly presented as a successor to the reading of Ford’s film. Whereas
Young Mr. Lincoln represented “the ethical-political face of the capital-
ist and theological field of Hollywood cinema,” Morocco highlighted the
“erotic face” of Hollywood and was a work produced by “the major site of
production of the erotic (fetishistic) myths of bourgeois society.”14 Like its
predecessor, “Morocco de Josef von Sternberg” was billed as a “collective
text” for which the entire editorial team took responsibility. In reality, as

11 Ibid., pp. 38, 41.

12 Jacques Aumont, “L’amour du foyer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968), p. 36.
13 Jacques Aumont, Vampyr de Carl Th. Dreyer (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 1993).
14 Texte collectif, “Morocco de Josef von Sternberg,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 225 (November-
December 1970), pp. 5-13, here p. 6. Translated as “Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco,” trans. Diana
Matias, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III, pp. 174-188, here p. 174.
498  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Aumont has divulged, the communal nature of the article’s composition

was more attenuated than that of its predecessor: “For Morocco, Oudart had
written a text at the beginning, and this can be felt very strongly. In the
end, it remains a text by Oudart. Corrected by the others a little, Bonitzer
among others, who was very interested in Lacan.”15 In comparison, then,
with the predominantly political/ideological reading of Ford’s film, Cahiers’
analysis of Sternberg’s collaboration with Marlene Dietrich was marked by
an interpretative framework drawing primarily on psychoanalytic theory.
Alongside Lacan, Kristeva’s semanalysis is also a key component of the
methodological approach adopted for Morocco: the opening section of the
text, titled “Method,” includes an extensive discussion of Kristeva’s article
“Narration et transformation,” in which the Bulgarian theorist mapped the
passage from a “civilization of the symbol” to a “civilization of the sign”
onto the historical transition from the epic poem to the novel in the late
Middle Ages.16 For Cahiers, novelistic narrative is particularly dominant
in Hollywood at the time that Morocco was made (1930). The film thus
substantially conforms to the system of the sign ascribed by Kristeva to the
literary model of the novel, which is structured by the opposition between
“the Same” (the author, the man) and “the Other” (the woman) and marked
by an exclusion of the latter and thus a non-recognition of sexual and social
oppositions. Here, woman is a “pseudo-center, a mystificatory center, a
blind spot whose value is invested in the Same, who gives himself the Other
(the center) in order to live as one, single and unique.”17 The devaluation of
woman in this narrative schema is particularly apparent in the mythology
of the classical Hollywood system, in which female roles are reduced to
stereotypes such as the ingénue, the vamp or the femme fatale. Sternberg’s
film, meanwhile, is dominated by the role of the fetish, which the Cahiers
critics equate with both the “pseudo-center” described by Kristeva and the
functioning of the phallus as the unattainable object of desire in Lacanian
theory.18 For Cahiers, the “reciprocal absorption of the Same and the Other
(the Author and the Woman), within an effacement of sexual difference
accounts for (and implies) the fact that the Masquerade, Virile Display and
Inversion are the erotic paradigms of Morocco.”19 Instantiated by Marlene
Dietrich’s notorious dance number wearing a suit and top hat, the notion of

15 Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 11, 2014.

16 See Julia Kristeva, “Narration et transformation,” Semiotica vol. 1 no. 4 (1969), pp. 422-448.
17 Ibid., p. 437. Cited in “Morocco,” p. 6 [p. 175].
18 See Jacques Lacan, “La signification du phallus,” in idem., Écrits vol. II, pp. 685-695. Translated
as “The Signification of the Phallus,” in idem., Écrits, trans. and ed. Bruce Fink, pp. 575-584.
19 “Morocco,” p. 6 [p. 175].
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 499

masquerade is drawn from the work of Joan Rivière and Michèle Montrelay.20
Here we have evidence, then, of an influence of contemporary feminist
theory on the Cahiers writers. Along with Kané’s reading of Sylvia Scarlett, the
Morocco article thus constitutes an exception to the otherwise generalized
disregard of a possible feminist approach to the study of cinema in Cahiers
during its Marxist period.
From this outline of the theoretical method adopted for their analysis, the
Cahiers critics proceed to a close reading of the film. Again, a distinction is
drawn with the prior work on Young Mr. Lincoln. The “diegetic process” of
Ford’s film, in which “the fictional structures in it were transformed by the
narration,” called for a diachronic reading that closely followed the film’s own
chronological development. In the case of Morocco, by contrast, a synchronic
reading is more appropriate, by dint of the fact that “the structures of the
fiction” are “programmed from the outset and are simply repeated with
variations in their successive relations.”21 The fiction of Morocco, in Cahiers’
view, is chiefly structured by the reciprocal interaction between the erotic
and social relations of the individual characters. The two homologous
love triangles around which the film is organized (La Bessière-Amy Jolly-
Brown and, secondarily, Caesar-Mme Caesar-Brown) are overdetermined
by the class positions of the film’s main characters, but these in turn find
themselves “perverted” by the erotic bonds the film depicts. Morocco is
distinctive among Hollywood films for including within its narrative the
entire spectrum of class society in a colonized nation: the characters range
from members of the European haute-bourgeoisie (La Bessière), through
intermediate layers to the lower strata: the working-class legionnaires (who
are Western but miserably paid) and, beneath them, the sub-proletarian
crowds of anonymous Moroccan “natives,” cabaret singers and prostitutes.
Cahiers makes a distinction, however, between the male characters, whose
class status remains relatively fixed throughout the film, and their female
counterparts, who are typified by the fluidity of their social position. The
lives of both Amy Jolly and Mme Caesar are marked by precipitous rises
and falls on the social ladder, determined principally by the class status of
the men with whom they become sexually involved. Furthermore, Cahiers
points out that in all of the erotic relations shown in the film, “the object of
desire is of an inferior rank to the desiring subject,” or, in other words, the

20 The Cahiers writers make reference, in a footnote, to Rivière’s “La féminité en tant que
mascarade,” (La Psychanalyse no. 7) and Montrelay’s “Recherches sur la féminité (Critique
no. 278). See ibid., p. 6 [p. 186].
21 “Morocco,” p. 7 [p. 176].
500  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

“movement of desire works from high to low.”22 In addition, then, to social

and erotic determinations governing the film, a “topographical inscription” is
operative and works along two axes: a vertical axis establishing a hierarchical
opposition between the High (La Bessière’s penthouse apartment) and
the Low (the subterranean cabaret), and a horizontal axis producing an
opposition between the town and the surrounding desert. The interaction
between these multiple sets of oppositional pairs thus produces a system
of “constantly reduplicated batteries of signifiers.” In the rest of Sternberg’s
œuvre, these proliferating rhymes and inversions are merely a “decorative
supplement,” but Morocco stands out for the fact that, in this film, they are
implicated in the structural relations of the film itself.23
The third part of the article concerns itself with the relationship between
the film and the mythological aspect of the Hollywood star system. Morocco,
of course, is indelibly stamped with the star presence of Marlene Dietrich.
Then one of the most recognizable actors in the cinema, her celebrity was
nonetheless unusual in that it was closely tied to Sternberg’s direction. In
a line of thinking that owes a tacit debt to Edgar Morin’s treatise on Les
Stars, Cahiers note that the presence of an actress of Dietrich’s stature
in a cinematic work leads to a transcending of the “filmic/extra-filmic
opposition,” but the films themselves emerge as a “constant disavowal of
this transcendence.”24 In the case of Morocco, the fact that Dietrich plays
the role of a cabaret singer points not only to her own biographical past but
also to her preceding film, Der blaue Engel (also directed by Sternberg)—
although here the class coding of the profession is inverted, and the fate
of Amy Jolly is in fact more closely aligned with that of Professor Unrat in
the earlier film. Morocco is totemic of the ambiguous position of the star in
the narrative structure of Hollywood cinema, at once reinforcing narrative
illusion and undermining it: Dietrich’s first appearance on screen is marked
by a “narrative and iconographic break” from the rest of the film, and the
“austerity” of her acting style is similarly at a remove from the performative
codes prevailing in Hollywood. For Cahiers, the inscription of Dietrich’s
star persona within the fiction of Morocco consists in a “différance of her
signication (her ‘value’) as a star,” and in the “production of a supplement”
which will subsequently be transferred back to her credit by virtue of
the fact that the “fictional effects” produced by the film are required to

22 Ibid., p. 8 [p. 177].

23 Ibid., p. 9 [p. 179].
24 Ibid. See also Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris: Seuil, 1957). translated as The Stars, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 501

valorize her own signification as a star. Sternberg’s films, however, are

distinguished from most Hollywood productions in that the auteur-director
has been able to appropriate to himself the value of the star. In other words,
Dietrich’s on-screen presence has come to be recognized as one of the
defining characteristics of Sternberg’s work. Statements by the director to
the effect that “Marlene, c’est moi” (quoted from a 1965 interview he gave
to Cahiers) appear to “denigrate the star system,” but in fact their violent
disavowal of the fetish character of the star does “no more than reflect its
ideology, while at the same time perverting it.”25
In the fourth section of the article, the Cahiers critics deliver an analysis
of the écriture of Morocco, which consists of the film’s “inscription of the
signifers of Westernness [occidentalité] and Easternness [orientalité].”26
They provide a diagrammatic grid of the film’s characters, placed according
to their position along two axes: the high/low opposition of their social
status, and the West/East opposition of their ethnic coding. While Amy
Jolly and Caesar are Nordic Europeans (typifying the Old World), and Brown
represents the New World of North America (also unambiguously “white” and
“Western”), La Bessière, Mme Caesar and the cabaret owner Lo Tinto are all
coded as racially intermediate characters, either of Mediterranean origin or
mixed-race, while the Moroccans in the film constitute an indistinct mass.
These categories, however, are muddied by the “exclusively feminine value”
that is assigned to the East in the Western mythological tradition (which
leads the female characters to “rejoin the Orient as their mythic locus”)
as well as the film’s inversion of the “phallocentric fantasy of bourgeois
society”—in Morocco, it is the male, Brown, who is both socially inferior
to Amy Jolly and the object of her desire.27
Finally, the article analyzes the inscription of fetish objects in Morocco, an
aspect of the film that is particularly fertile in theoretical resonances, given
the role that the fetish has played in Marx’s political economy, Lévi-Strauss’s
anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis. The fetish objects present in
Morocco—money, jewels, clothing and, above all, women themselves—play
a contradictory role in the film’s signifying system: they “function simul-
taneously as both bourgeois value and erotic signifiers; they are therefore
inscribed both as inalienable values, incapable of being squandered, and
as signifiers of that squandering.”28 The film’s narrative would suggest a

25 “Morocco,” p. p. 10 [pp. 180-181].

26 Ibid., p. 11 [p. 182].
27 Ibid., p. 11-12 [p. 183].
28 Ibid., p. 12 [p. 184].
502  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

moralizing, idealist “critique of fetishism” (the idea of a return to nature

and a renunciation of material objects marked by Amy Jolly’s flight from La
Bessière), but Morocco is also marked by the impossibility for Sternberg of
inscribing this critique into his fiction, owing to the inevitable presence of
“fetish-objects which renew the chain of desire” in the aesthetic system of his
films. Hence, the “closed economy” of Morocco is shaped by an interminable
back-and-forth movement between Sternberg’s “formal fetishism” and his
“anti-fetishist ideology,” which is illustrated in the film by the recurrent
“flight-pursuit” between Amy Jolly and Brown. The only possible conclusion
to the film, then, is a flight into an “impossible elsewhere—the Desert of
jouissance and death.”29 Again, an implicit opposition emerges with Ford,
the unorthodox écriture of whose films belied his reputation as a reliably
conventional director within the US film industry. Although Sternberg was
often seen in Hollywood as an artiste maudit whose cinematic idiosyncrasies
entered into antagonism with the commercial system of filmmaking, for
Cahiers his marginalization is no more than a “false exterior.” In fact, the
ideology of Sternberg’s films fits perfectly well within the framework of the
novelistic narrative model that governed Hollywood in the classical era and
is only superficially masked by the flaunting of certain stylistic flourishes,
which, in the end, fail to undermine the classical system of representation.

Sylvia Scarlett by George Cukor

Already somewhat less of a purely collective endeavor than the Young Mr.
Lincoln article, Cahiers’ analysis of Morocco proved to be the last group
re-reading of a studio-era Hollywood film undertaken by the journal. Later
studies of classical films carried out in 1972—on Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett and
Griffith’s Intolerance—carried the signatures of individual Cahiers critics
(Kané and Baudry respectively). By this point, too, the journal was dominated
by its Maoist political perspective. While in line with the work of 1970,
the sentiment that Kané’s and Baudry’s articles were increasingly distant
from the central prerogative of Cahiers was confirmed with the criticism
of their texts in the November 1972 manifesto “Quelles sont nos tâches
sur le front culturel?”30 It is notable, too, that both these articles analyzed
films that were, in various ways, aberrations within the Hollywood system.

29 Ibid., p. 13 [p. 185].

30 “Quelles sont nos tâches sur le front culturel?: Projet de plate-forme,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 242-243 (November-December 1972-January 1973), pp. 5-23, here p. 6.
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 503

Intolerance’s inability to replicate the commercial success of Birth of a Nation

is well-known, while Cukor’s adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s 1918 novel
was one of the most notorious box-office debacles of the 1930s and was a
source of embarrassment for both the director and its titular lead, Katherine
Hepburn. While French cinephiles in the post-war period resuscitated the
film’s reputation, Daney notes that, even in 1964, Cukor could not accept
its merits. Visiting the director in California for a never-to-be-published
interview, the Cahiers writer recalls:

It was a hot summer day in an amazing villa, among his courtship and
minions, and everyone there seemed to be blossoming, except for us,
drenched in sweat, saying how much we loved Sylvia Scarlett, which
we just discovered in Paris. Cukor wasn’t particularly flattered that we
valorized one of his flops from the beginning of his career. […] The law of
showbiz is that a commercial failure can’t be a good film. When I imagine
the two of us with that old broken man, crafty as a monkey, and whose
last film Rich and Famous proved that he never went senile, I am still
astounded by the way we chose to love American cinema not by their
norms but by our own.31

It was undeniably the film’s aberrant quality that attracted Cahiers to it:
like Morocco, Sylvia Scarlett prominently features cross-dressing and the
phenomenon of masquerade more broadly. For Kané, although Cukor’s
film is an “exemplary classical narrative” due to the preponderance of the
“erotic” level and the concomitant repression of other (social, ideological,
cultural) determinations, it is the inscription of the “trajectory of the bodies”
in Sylvia Scarlett resulting in “effects of transgression on the underlying
classical narrative model” that is responsible for its potential subversion
of Hollywood convention.32 The écriture of Cukor’s film, then, is striated
by the contradiction between the need to conform to the functioning
of the standard narrative template of 1930s Hollywood cinema and the
“displacement-perversion” of this structural model generated by the fact
that Hepburn, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, adopts a disguise as a male
throughout much of the film.

31 Serge Daney, Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), p. 92. Translated as Postcards from the Cinema,
trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 75-76.
32 Pascal Kané, “Relecture du cinéma hollywoodien: Sylvia Scarlett,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 238-
239 (May-June 1972), pp. 84-90, here p. 85. Translated as “Re-reading Hollywood Cinema: Sylvia
Scarlett,” trans. David Wilson, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III, pp. 325-333, here p. 326.
The generic male pronouns from the existing translation have been retained.
504  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Kané’s study thus begins with an analysis of “the place and function of
the hero” in Sylvia Scarlett. The Hollywood hero is generally marked by a
contradiction between the “‘natural’ fixedness of the social roles attached
to individuals” and the “trans-social course” they embark upon—that is, the
tendency to essentialize class status is undermined by the ideology of class
mobility and free enterprise, which finds itself embodied in a cinematic hero
who, Kané maintains, is “generally excluded from any class antagonism.”
In Sylvia Scarlett, this “suturing” of the class determination of the hero is
made clear in the film’s prologue. Briskly establishing the death of Sylvia’s
mother, the financial ruination of her father and her decision to disguise
herself as a boy in order to flee from Marseille to England, this segment
presents the viewer with the basic conditions for the functioning of the
classical narrative. Specifically, “the hero’s obligation to define himself
as being different from the community as a whole” is brought about by
an “extraordinary” event that invests him with a “fictional density which
immediately effaces the ‘triviality’ of their initial situation (class-being,
family relations).” The film hero also fulfils a broader ideological function:
that of “assigning the spectator his true place in the production process”
(which is calqued onto the natural, fixed order that the film’s narrative
posits) at the same time as “denying that it is doing this.”33 In making this
claim, Kané rests on the ideas of the Althusser-inspired theorist Michel
Pêcheux, who, writing for Cahiers pour l’analyse under the pseudonym
Thomas Herbert, elucidated the role of the displacement of signification
through what he terms the “metaphorical effect” in ideology:

The economic law which assigns to the agent of production his position
in the process of production is repressed and disguised [travestie] within
other signifying chains whose effect is both to signify this position to the
subject-agent of production without his being able to escape from it, and to
hide from him the fact that the position is assigned to him. In other words,
the metaphorical effect produces significations by displacing them.34

For Kané, it is the “pseudo-difference” of the hero—here, Hepburn/Sylvia’s

ability to switch between gender roles—that has the paradoxical effect
of guaranteeing the homogenization of the audience, thereby sealing (or

33 The above quotes are from Ibid., pp. 86-87 [pp. 327-328].
34 Thomas Herbert [Michel Pêcheux], “Remarques pour une théorie générale des idéologies,”
Cahiers pour l’analyse no. 9 (September 1967), pp. 74-92, here p. 88. Cited in Kané, “Sylvia Scarlett,”
p. 87 [p. 328].
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 505

“suturing”) the targeted social group more closely together under the
dominance of bourgeois ideology.
The second half of Kané’s text shifts its focus to a reading of the main
sequences of the film. In order to denote the importance to his analysis
of Lacan’s concepts of the “barred subject” (the notion that the subject is
always divided from itself by the existence of a lack) and the objet petit a
(the unattainable object of desire), Kané gives the title of this section the
idiosyncratic orthography “$ylvi(a).” The fact that Sylvia Scarlett opens with
an avowal of the disappearance of the mother inscribes the film with an
œdipal logic, but whereas at the start of the film the “phantasm of incestuous
desire” comes close to being realized, it becomes progressively repressed
through the work of différance governing the storyline. Sylvia Scarlett is
marked, therefore, by a tendency to hypostasize desire as the principal
motor of the signifying chain of the plot, which serves to exclude and repress
a “social scene” that would otherwise play a determining role in narrative
progression. In the same episode, however, Sylvia’s decision to pose as the
son of her father (adopting the name “Sylvester”) is an act of foreclosing
the œdipal fantasy through a “provisional castration,” symbolized here by
her rash decision to cut off her plaits. While this is intended as a hoax to
more convincingly disguise herself as a male, Kané insists that there is a
substantive core to this act: “the plaits,” he proclaims, “are well and truly
cut off.” Something in Sylvia’s body has been affected by her masquerade,
and her transformations in speech, dress and gesture are not so easy to
control. Even after she reverts to her original female status, certain ways of
comporting herself remain ingrained in her demeanor (spreading her legs,
for instance). The figure of Sylvia, therefore, is inscribed with an “initial
excess,” a “discrepancy [décalage] between the character and her function”
which Kané equates to a Derridean “supplement of writing” (supplément
d’écriture) embodied in her act of transvestitism.35
This supplement will end up perturbing the unfolding of the film’s nar-
rative as a whole, leaving effects on even the most conventional elements
of the plot. Kané gives the example of Sylvia’s meeting with the painter
Michael Fane: due to the fact that the traces of the “supplement of writing”
on Sylvia’s body will never be entirely dissipated, her relations with Fane
remain, in the Cahiers critic’s analysis, rather “off-key” (en porte-à-faux) and
only exist on the level of a “denial of desire,” even when they elope together at
the conclusion of the film. Indeed, right up until this final scene, everything
had been pointing to the consummation of Sylvia’s desire for the Cary

35 Ibid., pp. 88-89 [p. 331].

506  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Grant character (Monkley) instead, as a “displacement/transformation” of

her desire for her father. Instead, through the narrative coup de force of the
countess’ suicide, the storyline of the film “deviates from a course whose
‘normality’ it re-marks in passing but access to which is forbidden by an
excess, adhering closely to the character of Sylvia, that is not reducible to
the pre-existing ideological model.” While the narrative codes operative in
the film have the function of effacing this “scriptural trace,” Sylvia’s very
body exists as a site of “erogenous-scriptural” resistance to the repressive
return of such codes, and its preservation as an “‘aberrant’ supplement” thus
represents a process that Kané, revealing here a certain debt to Derrida
and Kristeva, dubs désécriture (unwriting)—that is, an unraveling of the
scriptural economy of classical Hollywood cinema.36

Intolerance by D.W. Griffith

If Sylvia Scarlett was marked by an aberrant supplement, then Intolerance

is possibly the most aberrant film in the history of American cinema. Its
apotheosis/transgression of the then nascent conventions of the Hollywood
narrative system is legendary, and its attraction to the Cahiers team as an
object of symptomatic reading is obvious. Since being placed on the “wrong
side” of Bazin’s division between “f ilmmakers of the image” and “f ilm-
makers of reality,” Griffith had never truly been a member of the Cahiers
canon.37 But when the journal took an interest in questions of montage,
his work began to elicit interest from the Cahiers criticis, particularly due
to the role he played as a forerunner to Eisenstein’s practice. In 1971, the
journal set up a research group on Intolerance, stemming from a seminar
on the film that was run in conjunction with the Institut de Formation
Cinématographique. This project yielded, over the course of four issues
in 1971-72, a detailed, shot-by-shot run-down of Griff ith’s monumental
work, a document that was seen not as a “linguistic duplication” of the
f ilm but as “already almost a commentary, where the greatest possible
quantity of signifying traits in the film are highlighted” and which had the
intended purpose of giving the study group working on it “the means for

36 Ibid., p. 90 [pp. 331-332].

37 See André Bazin, “L’Évolution du langage cinématographique,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le
cinéma? vol. I, pp. 131-148, here p. 132. Translated as “The Evolution of Film Language,” in idem.,
What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 87-107, here
p. 88.
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 507

a more rigorous reading.”38 At the same time, Cahiers published a French

translation of Eisenstein’s article “Dickens, Griffith and Film Today,” a text
which, in discussing the dialectical nexus between the formal technique
of Griffithian montage and the filmmaker’s bourgeois-liberal ideological
outlook, can be seen as one of the major predecessors to Cahiers’ own
work in this area.39
The introduction to this multifaceted project on Griffith explicitly noted
that it was to be “inscribed in continuity with the studies that have already
appeared on Young Mr. Lincoln and Morocco, in the same enterprise of reading
or re-reading ‘classical’ cinema.” For Cahiers, there were several justifications
for the importance of this work: a perceptible reduction in the resistance
towards watching silent films had heightened the demand for re-releasing the
“old masterpieces,” and a repertory program incorporating a dozen Griffith
films was planned to run in Paris later that year. Studying his output thus
constituted an active refutation of the tendency towards reducing it to an
“archeological treasure” and instead involved analyzing its “specific place
and mode of functioning in the intertextuality of signifying practices.”
Intolerance, in particular, holds a paradoxical place in the received account
of film history, at once embarrassingly archaic and precociously modern in
its deployment of film style. Following Eisenstein, Cahiers sought to explore
the relationship between Griffith’s “rhetorical inventions” and the ideologies
that his films convey, thereby bringing formalist histories of film technique
into a dialectical interplay with interpretations of the film’s content, as well as
extending the field of analysis beyond montage and into other “heterogeneous
levels of codage,” such as scenographic space, gesture, set design and costume.
For Cahiers, then, an analysis of Intolerance should entail “try[ing] to define
the type of ideologico-formal contradiction that Griffith’s œuvre constitutes,
and the game of displacement that the work of Eisenstein has exerted on
this contradiction, in order both to highlight bourgeois ideology and draw
the most important theoretical lessons from it.”40

38 “Intolerance de David Wark Griff ith: Introduction,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 231 (August-
September 1971), p. 15. The shot-by-shot description was established on the basis of an 8mm
print of the film borrowed from the IFC as part of this research project.
39 For the English version of this text, see Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and Film Today,” in
idem., Film Form, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1949), pp. 195-255. Cahiers’
French translation was published as “Dickens, Griffith et nous,” in Cahiers du cinéma no. 231
(August-September 1971), pp. 16-22; no. 232 (October 1971), pp. 24-26; no. 233 (November 1971),
pp. 11-26; and no. 234-235 (December 1971-January-February 1972), pp. 27-42.
40 The quotes in this paragraph are from “Intolerance de David Wark Griffith: Introduction,”
p. 15.
508  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

While the initial research was presented as a group project, it was a

single writer, Pierre Baudry, who was credited with the theoretical text
that crowned this endeavor. “Les aventures de l’idée” was published in
two installments in the July-August and September-October 1972 issues of
Cahiers but was left unfinished when the journal’s Maoist turn had negated
the political need for such work. Although Baudry inscribes his text, with its
self-consciously Hegelian title, within the lineage of Cahiers’ re-readings of
classical cinema, he also notes a key distinction of his own project: up to now
the focus had been on 1930s Hollywood films, a period when synchronized
sound had been firmly established and the formal system of classical cinema
had reached what Bazin termed its “equilibrium profile.”41 Intolerance,
filmed at the very beginning of the studio era, is not only a product of the
silent cinema (itself a term Baudry will interrogate), it also dramatically
departs from the formal principles that would later become cast-iron laws
of filmmaking in the studio system. This, precisely, is at the core of what
Baudry terms the film’s “monstrous” nature: economically and aesthetically
“excessive,” it has retained a status as residing “at the extreme limits of
‘the possibilities of the cinema.’”42 In devoting a text to the ways in which
the écriture of Intolerance is capable of “both revealing and subverting its
ideological project,” Baudry also seeks to address a gap: in 1972 there was
almost no French literature on Griffith’s work, despite his titanic status in
film history. While he wishes to avoid contributing to the construction of a
cinematic pantheon, Baudry nonetheless sees the necessity of highlighting
the “nodal role” Griffith’s films have had in the history of the cinema. 43
In using Marxism and psychoanalysis to define this role, his study is a
significant precursor to later scholarship on Griffith, although the debt to
Baudry’s pioneering text is not always fully acknowledged. 44
Baudry begins his analysis by interrogating the three “blinding self-
evidences” with which Intolerance is associated: namely, that it is a silent
film, that it is an American film, and that it is a film by D.W. Griffith. Of
these three terms, it is the last that is of most interest. Following Comolli’s

41 Bazin, “L’évolution du langage cinématographique,” p. 139 [p. 95].

42 Pierre Baudry, “Les aventures de l’Idée (sur Intolérance), 1,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 240
(July-August 1972), pp. 51-58, here p. 51.
43 Ibid., p. 52.
44 Miriam Hansen’s chapters on Intolerance in Babel & Babylon, for instance, reiterate many
of the arguments made in “Les aventures de l’Idée,” but Baudry’s text earns only a couple of
dismissive mentions from the scholar, including the peculiar claim that his analysis reverts to
the model of interpretative closure practiced by New Criticism. Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon:
Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 203.
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 509

“Technique et idéologie” articles, Baudry rejects a teleological vision that

would seek to construct the “cinema as an Essence whose history would be
its progressive realization and perfection, with each filmmaker bringing
their brick to the edifice.” Instead, he argues that Griffith’s films brought
about a transformation of the cinematic fiction consisting of “a displacement
(which is in no way a ‘withdrawal’) of its intertextual status,” and he notes
that the “rhetorical battery” formed by his work creates effects that are
analogous to those of the novel. Pointing to the “lack of equilibrium” between
form and content in Griffith, Baudry therefore determines that Intolerance
represents neither “a ‘masterpiece encompassing all of Griffith’s art, then at
its apogee,’ nor a formal primitivism, but a contradiction between ideology
and textuality.”45
Griffith’s radical formal gesture in Intolerance was to interlace the film’s
four episodes with one another, despite their chronologically disparate
nature. In charting the relations between these narrative strands, Baudry
adopts Metz’s distinction between montage alterné and montage parallèle.
In the first case, the “syntagmatic chains” produced by crosscutting are
governed by relations of temporality and causality (as in the paradigmatic
“race-to-the-rescue” ending), and thus mostly occur within each episode;
in the latter, by contrast, the montage elements “do not possess any a priori
relationship of succession, contemporaneity or causality.”46 In alternating
between totally independent realities, often separated by many centuries
of historical time, Griff ithian montage creates both effects of rupture
(jolting the spectator between historical epochs) and effects of continuity
or resonance: “the interlacing organizes ‘déjà-vu’ effects in the situations
that are mingled together, effects which, far from being attenuated by the
ruptures marking the passage from one era to another, are, on the contrary,
augmented by them; parallel montage thus tends to make the narrative
relatively linear.”47 The imbrication of the episodes through montage causes a
degree of cross-diegetic interference, leading to a narrative interdependence
that is reinforced by the broad analogies that exist between the “networks
of characters” in each of the episodes, defined according to generalized
principles such as the Couple, the Law, Power and Religion.
Baudry provisionally concludes his text with a discussion of the film’s
rapturous apotheosis: a textual supplement in the Derridean sense (appended

45 Baudry, “Les aventures de l’Idée, 1,” p. 53.

46 Pierre Baudry, “Les aventures de l’Idée (sur Intolérance), 2,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 241
(September-October 1972), pp. 31-45, here p. 31.
47 Ibid., p. 41.
510  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

to the film as a whole, it is a climax that is otherwise divorced from the rest
of the text), this scene is also a moment of spectatorial jouissance in the
Lacanian sense, denoting the signifying lack in the imaginary experience
of death. But the apotheosis of Intolerance also highlights the contradiction
that governs the entire film. This emphatic coda is symptomatically needed
in order to establish the synthetic message of historical progress that the
episodes, by themselves, are unable to impart, overpowered as they are by
their own “photogénie of atrocity.” Thus the tension between the “ideological”
and the “textual” is demonstrated by the fact that Griffith’s twin goals of
entertainment and instruction (a classical artistic mission that can be
traced back to Horace’s Ars poetica) enter into a profound contradiction, or
as Baudry puts it: “to render instruction entertaining: it is the very didactic
intention of the film that subverts its own thesis.”48

The Aging of the Same: Reading Contemporary Hollywood

Four articles—on Young Mr. Lincoln, Morocco, Sylvia Scarlett and Intoler-
ance—thus comprised the Cahiers project to re-read classical Hollywood
cinema. The critics did have ambitions for more work in this vein: for
several issues between March 1970 and March 1971, the journal advertised
upcoming articles on Once Upon a Honeymoon by Leo McCarey and Under
Capricorn by Alfred Hitchcock, as well as dossiers on F.W. Murnau and, in
a different cinematic mode, Jean Rouch. 49 Of these projects, the McCarey
text was in the most advanced state: the film was screened and discussed
by Cahiers at Avignon in August 1970 (alongside Moonfleet, one of Daney’s
fetish films).50 All these articles would remain unpublished, however, and
they now belong to the phantom realm of Cahiers’ numerous planned
but unrealized texts. The symptomatic analysis of classical Hollywood
did, however, filter through to another area of Cahiers’ critical work: their
reception of contemporary releases of commercial American films. The
overriding consensus within the journal was that US cinema had entered
into a state of irreversible decline, succumbing to academic mannerism
on the aesthetic level and experiencing plummeting audience numbers
on the economic level at the same time as the nation’s political order was

48 Ibid., p. 45.
49 See advertising notices in Cahiers du cinéma no. 216, p. 5; no. 218, p. 70; no. 220-221, p. 125;
and no. 228, p. 4.
50 See La Rédaction, “Les Cahiers à Avignon,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970), pp. 57-58.
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 511

itself in a deep existential crisis under the effects of the Vietnam War,
student unrest and the pending unraveling of the Nixon administration.
In a flagrant example of willed critical blindness, Cahiers was oblivious
to the rise of the New Hollywood filmmakers: the early work of Brian De
Palma, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman was barely touched on, and
the movement would not be given substantial coverage until much later in
the 1970s. In mainstream American cinema, then, the only contemporary
films that were deemed to be of interest were the final works of a senescent
generation of classical auteurs (Hawks, Boetticher, Losey, Kazan), which
were primarily read by Cahiers as symptoms of the moribund state of the
studio system. To the extent that these films were worth discussing, it was
for the way they shed light on the struggles experienced by these filmmakers
to orient themselves to a situation in which many of the pre-established
codes of Hollywood classicism—the “rules of the game” that had governed
the institution for five decades—were no longer operative.
Daney played a privileged role in the continued discussion of the above-
mentioned auteurs in Cahiers, and his analysis of Hawks’ Rio Lobo, “Vieillesse
du même,” is a moving response to the last gasp of a director who had been
of fundamental importance for the journal’s critical appreciation of the
cinema since the early 1950s. A loose remake of Rio Bravo starring John
Wayne, himself visibly aged and (for Cahiers, at any rate) tarred by his
increasingly right-wing political views, Rio Lobo is undeniably inscribed
with the trope of old age. Daney makes the connection between aging
and writing: in Hawks’ work, the refusal “to inscribe age on faces” and “to
write with images” amounts to “one and the same operation.”51 Rio Lobo is
therefore marked, in the critic’s analysis, by “the most obstinate refusal to
write,” but this does not involve a renunciation of all forms of expression.
Instead, it entails:

retaining nothing of what remains, liking the traces only in the form of
indices, in Peirce’s sense […]: smoke and fire, blood, the coffin and the
murderer, the look and that which is looked at. The index is still the best
mode of articulation because “presence” is only denied there, “lost from
sight” for an instant, ready to re-emerge at the end of a tracking shot or in
the reverse-shot, re-valorized after having been momentarily forgotten.52

51 Serge Daney, “Vieillesse du même (Rio Lobo),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 230 (July 1971), pp. 22-27,
here p. 22.
52 Ibid.
512  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

In line with the Peircean notion of the indexical trace, and under the unmis-
takable influence of Derrida, Daney draws an analogy between cinematic
writing and the presence, in Hawks’ film, of acts of cutting or slicing. Such
a metaphor derives from a deconstructed etymology of the word écrire
itself—the Latin verb scribere can mean both “to write” and “to cut with
a sharp implement.” In this optic, Hawks’ framing is understood as a form
of castration, and Rio Lobo is presented as the site where “the Same is nar-
rowed and, within the interstices, the Other begins to be written.” The most
glaring locus of a symbolic confluence between writing and inscription is
the “monstrous scar” on the cheek of the prostitute Amelita, the indelible
nature of which means that “anybody can read, at all moments (any time),
something (anything) on this face.” From Scarface to Rio Lobo, then, Hawks’
longevous œuvre is the story of a scar—the only change between the two
films is the fact that the scar “has switched cheeks,” from that of the male
protagonist to the female side-character. The message Daney takes from
Hawks’ last film, therefore, is that “from now on, it is women who carry,
written onto their faces, the proof that men do not love them.”53
“Vieillesse du même” featured in the July 1971 issue of Cahiers, and in
the succeeding months the journal published a handful of reviews of the
latter-day works of aged Hollywood filmmakers that mined similar terrain
as Daney’s article. Daney himself covered Losey’s The Go-Between in the
August-September number, based on a screenplay by Harold Pinter and
made in the UK due to the filmmaker’s McCarthyism-imposed exile from
the nation of his birth. Despite receiving the 1971 Palme d’or at Cannes,
the film failed to excite the Cahiers critic, who saw it as an “academic”
work encumbered by a “bric-a-brac of realist notations and factual truths
destined to prove that a social analysis is being undertaken.”54 Eduardo de
Gregorio tackled Boetticher’s A Time for Dying but saw its “perversion” of
the rules of classical cinema as being too self-consciously aware to have
any productive effect, a fate shared, in Kané’s judgement, by the younger
filmmaker John Schlesinger’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday, defined as “one of the
possible ‘arrangements’ by which contemporary filmmakers accommodate
themselves (for better or for worse) to the form of classical narrative.”55

53 The above quotes are from ibid., p. 27

54 Serge Daney, “Le Messager,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 231 (August-September 1971), pp. 52-53,
here p. 52.
55 Eduardo de Gregorio, “A Time for Dying,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (November 1971), pp. 57-61,
here p. 61; and Pascal Kané, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (November 1971),
p. 61.
Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 513

The harshest response to the late work of one of classical Hollywood’s “old
masters” came, however, in the form of Daney’s blistering review of Kazan’s
The Visitors in July-August 1972. Even by Cahiers’ standards, prone as the
journal has always been to critical zealotry, the text is of a rare violence,
with liberal journalists in France just as much of a target of Daney’s fury
as Kazan’s film. For the Cahiers writer, these critical circles—including
PCF-aligned reviewers—were blinded by Kazan’s superficial departures
from Hollywood’s conventional dispositif (his use of 16mm, most notably)
and were thereby lured into believing that The Visitors was a progressive
work, when its politics are in fact deeply reactionary. Provocatively, Daney
even draws an analogy between the rape depicted in the film and Kazan’s
deception of French film critics: “During a rape, the woman forgets her
convictions; during a screening, critics forget that they are ‘on the left.’”56
Far from being an independent production innovatively dealing with a
taboo subject matter (the traumatic effects of the Vietnam war on American
soldiers after their return home), The Visitors, as Daney’s diatribe has it:

renounces essentially nothing of what constitutes the Hollywood model,

nothing of what still ensures its ideological efficacy. Tackling a hot topic,
filming with minimal equipment, and suddenly adopting a position as a
marginal figure allows Kazan to do what had never truly been successfully
achieved before: using the formal apparatus of Hollywood cinema (and
the ideology it conveys), while knowingly proposing to us a reduced,
efficient economic model of what no longer functions very well elsewhere
(above all in Hollywood).57

Whereas Cahiers’ earlier critical re-readings of classical cinema sought to

discern the gap or discrepancy between the ideological purpose of a film and
the work of its formal écriture, capable of undoing or undermining the initial
conception of the project, Daney sees Kazan’s fetishization of the “ambiguity
of the real” in The Visitors as itself being an ideological ruse, serving only to
obfuscate the film’s true nature as a work of racist, misogynistic reaction that
“mobilizes all the major ideologemes of fascistic petty-bourgeois ideology.”58
Moreover, the insidious nature of Kazan’s film lies in its strategy of placing
the spectator in the position of a complicit voyeur of the gruesome events

56 Serge Daney, “Les Visiteurs,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 240 (July-August 1972), pp. 60-64, here
p. 60.
57 Ibid., p. 61.
58 Ibid., p. 62.
514  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

depicted on screen, thus leading the audience to the conclusion that the
victim of the brutal rape not only deserved her fate but even enjoyed it: “The
Visitors is constructed in such a manner that the spectator must sooner
or later abandon his solidarity for the ‘positive’ characters (the couple),
and vaguely desire what appears to be inevitable, the rape. In short, the
spectator, too, must disavow himself over the course of the screening.”59
Appearing in the last issue before the journal’s change to the more austere
format of its Front culturel period, this review provided ample proof that
the Maoist orientation adopted by Cahiers had forestalled the possibility for
the continued productive reading of cinematic écriture in the Hollywood
tradition of filmmaking. What remained was sheer, unadulterated vitriol,
directed towards an object that was reductively seen as the cultural product
of the class enemy.

Works Cited

Barthélémy Amengual, “Les nuits blanches de l’âme,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207
(December 1968), pp. 52-62.
Jacques Aumont, “L’amour du foyer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968),
p. 36.
———, Vampyr de Carl Th. Dreyer (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 1993).
Pierre Baudry, “Les aventures de l’Idée (sur Intolérance), 1,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 240 (July-August 1972), pp. 51-58.
———, “Les aventures de l’Idée (sur Intolérance), 2,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 241
(September-October 1972), pp. 31-45.
André Bazin, “L’Évolution du langage cinématographique,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que
le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 131-148.
Translated as “The Evolution of Film Language,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans.
and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 87-107.
[Cahiers du cinéma], “Intolerance de David Wark Griffith: Introduction,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 231 (August-September 1971), p. 15.
———, “Quelles sont nos tâches sur le front culturel?” Cahiers du cinéma no. 242-243
(November-December 1972-January 1973), pp. 5-23.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Rhétorique de la terreur,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (Decem-
ber 1968), pp. 42-44.
——— and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216
(October 1969), pp. 11-15. Translated as “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” trans.

59 Ibid., pp. 63-64.

Re-reading Cl assical Cinema 515

Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and

Ideology Revisited (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 251-259.
Serge Daney, “Vieillesse du même (Rio Lobo),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 230 (July 1971),
pp. 22-27.
———, “Le Messager,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 231 (August-September 1971), pp. 52-53.
———, “Les Visiteurs,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 240 (July-August 1972), pp. 60-64.
———, Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), p. 92. Translated as Postcards from the
Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
Michel Delahaye, “Circulaire (Gertrud),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 164 (March 1965),
p. 72.
———, “Un phare pilote,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968), p. 10.
Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, “Trilogie mystique de Dreyer (La passion de Jean d’Arc),”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 9 (February 1952), pp. 60-63.
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and Film Today,” in idem., Film Form, trans.
and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1949), pp. 195-255.
Eduardo de Gregorio, “A Time for Dying,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (November 1971),
pp. 57-61.
Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Pascal Kané, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (November 1971),
p. 61.
———, “Relecture du cinéma hollywoodien: Sylvia Scarlett,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 238-239 (May-June 1972), pp. 84-90. Translated as “Re-reading Hollywood
Cinema: Sylvia Scarlett,” trans. David Wilson, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers
du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation (London: BFI, 1990),
pp. 325-333. Hereafter CDC III.
Julia Kristeva, “Narration et transformation,” Semiotica vol. 1 no. 4 (1969),
pp. 422-448.
Jacques Lacan, “La signification du phallus,” in idem., Écrits vol. II (Paris: Seuil,
1966), pp. 685-695. Translated as “The Signification of the Phallus,” in idem.,
Écrits, trans. and ed. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 575-584.
Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Translated as The Stars, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
Jean Narboni, “La Mise en demeure,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968),
pp. 38-41.
———, “Relecture,” in “Dictionnaire sans foi ni loi,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 325
(June 1981), p. 119.
La Rédaction, “Les Cahiers à Avignon,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970),
pp. 57-58.
Jean-Marie Straub, “Féroce,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207 (December 1968), p. 35.
516  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

André Téchiné, “La parole de la f in (Gertrud),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 164

(March 1965), pp. 72-73.
———, “L’archaïsme nordique de Dreyer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 170 (Septem-
ber 1965), pp. 36-37.
Texte collectif, “Morocco de Josef von Sternberg,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 225
(November-December 1970), pp. 5-13. Translated as “Josef von Sternberg’s
Morocco,” trans. Diana Matias, in CDC III, pp. 174-188.
17. The Defense and Critique of Cinematic
Modernism

Abstract
This chapter shifts the focus from Cahiers’ re-reading of classical films to
the journal’s response to works of cinematic modernism. As in the earlier
chapter, the theoretical framework used to treat these films involves a
combination of Althusserian Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, but
whereas the analysis of commercially produced classical cinema entailed
“symptomatic” readings, the critical reception of modernist films had to
acknowledge the director’s own awareness of the possibility of critical
counter-interpretations. This optic was used on an array of filmmakers,
including Luis Buñuel, Jerry Lewis, Federico Fellini, the Taviani Broth-
ers and young filmmakers such as Philippe Garrel, Carmelo Bene and
Bernardo Bertolucci. Finally, Jean-Pierre Oudart and Serge Daney’s major,
Lacan-inspired critique of Luchino Visconti’s Morte a Venezia, “Le Nom
de l’auteur” is discussed.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, modernist cinema, Luis Buñuel, Jerry

Lewis, Luchino Visconti

Luis Buñuel: Between Myth and Utopia

Cahiers’ project of re-reading classical cinema was also accompanied by

its critical reception of modernist f ilms, which for the most part con-
sisted of contemporary releases by the auteurs historically favored by the
journal. Although the theoretical arsenal deployed in this aspect of its
critical work—structuralist Marxism and psychoanalysis—remained by
and large the same as that used for interpreting American films from the
classical era, the methodology adopted for analyzing works of cinematic
modernism was markedly different. Whereas Hollywood films made under
the strict control of profit-oriented studios presented the opportunity for

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch17
518  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

“symptomatic” readings outlining those zones in which the ideological

project of the énoncé (the film’s explicit message) found itself circumvented
by the subterranean work of cinematic enunciation (its system of écriture),
auteurist films made in the rubric of cinematic modernism presented a very
different dynamic between these two levels of signification. In the case of
such works, the director was, as a rule, highly attuned to the possibility of
critical counter-readings and the potential for a pluralized interpretation
of their work in which multiple levels of analysis were in operation. In a
sense, such readings were already consciously programmed into the formal
and narrative framework governing these films. This was perhaps no more
the case than in the œuvre of Luis Buñuel, whose films during this period
both inspired and mockingly undercut the kinds of reading proposed by
critical organs such as Cahiers. Himself a former critic with close ties to the
artistic avant-garde of the 1920s, Buñuel’s cinema was almost too perfect
for the Cahiers critics of the post-1968 era. Propitiously, this was also the
period when the Spanish filmmaker had reached a creative apogee. La
Voie lactée in 1969 and Tristana in 1970 counted among the most important
releases of these years for the journal, and both were subject to dossiers that
presented multiple points of view on the films—underpinning the notion
that a univocal critical response could not possibly do justice to the wealth
of contradictory meanings present in Buñuel’s work. Indeed, the conscious
awareness with which the Spanish filmmaker created the conditions for
such hermeneutic heterogeneity inexorably led the Cahiers critics, in each
of their responses, to interrogate the very notion of what it means to carry
out a critical reading of a film. In reviewing Buñuel’s films, then, Cahiers
was not just reading the director’s work, they were also querying the process
of cinematic écriture itself.
This twin methodological concern was already present in the opening
entry in the Voie lactée dossier, penned by Oudart. For Oudart, the latent
polyvalency of La Voie lactée stems from the “dual relation of possible op-
position and association” between the three levels of its narrative: the
scenes from the life of Christ, sequences relating to the history of organized
Christianity, and the contemporary storyline following an implausible
pair of pilgrims. The reversibility of these relations and the scenographic
collisions between diegetic realms that ought, by the standards of narrative
realism, to remain rigidly divorced from one another leads in Oudart’s
view to a “perpetual tipping over of all the markers of cinematic fiction,”
which presents the spectator with “the absolutely free choice of the level of
fiction he desires.” No reading, in this understanding of the film, can thus
be understood as the “correct” interpretation. Instead, it is the task of the
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 519

critic to comprehend that La Voie lactée is the “imaginary site of a series of

possible readings, discourses and meanings,” the selection of which reveals
the desires and inclinations of the spectators themselves.1
Pierre’s contribution to the dossier follows Oudart’s lead in its focus on
the mode of reading appropriate to Buñuel’s work but reaches markedly
different conclusions. Drawing on Narboni’s 1967 text “Vers l’impertinence,”
Pierre argues that both La Voie lactée and the 1965 film Simon del desierto
invite an “impertinent critical mode” that frees itself from “slavery to the
‘content’ of cinematic works.”2 But she also warns against the dangers of
this approach, which can lead to a “radical pulverization of everything that
constitutes the thematic consistency of the work.” It was indeed important,
in her opinion, to point out that “a film only speaks about itself,” but limiting
the critic’s work to this observation runs the risk of solipsism and presents
the danger of ignoring the social critique issued by the filmmaker on the
thematic level. In the case of Buñuel’s two releases—which “so manifestly
speak ‘about the same thing’”—this theme consists principally in a scabrous
assault on the hypocrisies of Catholicism. It is only by taking account of the
content of its ideological critique that the critic can locate the “subversive
ferment” in a film that is otherwise “written in a strangely classical and
tranquil manner.”3 For Pierre, therefore, “it would be false to merely say that
Buñuel’s cinema only speaks about itself—for, speaking about itself, it speaks
about blasphemy, that is, a speech that is not only irreverent, but harmful.”4
Pierre’s article, defending the validity of addressing the content of a
film even in the case of a paragon of cinematic modernism such as Buñuel,
provoked a response from Narboni. In his rejoinder, Narboni maintains that
La Voie lactée does not concern itself with Christianity per se but with the
“vanity and futility” of any act of interpretation that did not reflect on itself
and attempt to theorize its own functioning. Buñuel’s films are distinguished
by placing at their center, on the denotative level, the problem of their
reading, rather than leaving this question to the margins of the connotative
level. The very theme of La Voie lactée is the contradictory, and even abusive,
interpretations to which the filmmaker has been subject throughout his
career. But to reduce the film to this operation would, in Narboni’s view,

1 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Le mythe et l’utopie,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), p. 35.
2 Sylvie Pierre, “Les deux colonnes,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 37-40, here
p. 37. See also Jean Narboni, “Vers l’impertinence,” Cahiers du cinéma 196 (December 1967), p. 4.
Translated as “Towards Impertinence,” trans. Norman King, in Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma
vol. II, pp. 300-302.
3 Pierre, “Les deux colonnes,” p. 39.
4 Ibid., p. 40.
520  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

“naïvely lessen its importance.” Instead, its truly radical nature stems from
its “fundamental inquisition [mise au supplice] of the cinema’s apparently
constitutive analogy.”5
The multiple and even conflicting readings that La Voie lactée kindled
in Cahiers were continued the following year in the journal’s response
to Tristana. Again, Buñuel provoked a range of reactions from the edito-
rial team, and the dossier collated on his 1970 film incorporated texts by
Bonitzer, Aumont, Pierre and Oudart, as well as the reprinting of examples
of Buñuel’s own film criticism from the late 1920s and a collection of press
clippings relating to Tristana collated by Baudry, who sought to establish
the existence of an “aesthetic class reading” determining considerations
of the film within the bourgeois media.6 In comparison with the more
conjectural viewpoints aired in the dossier on La Voie lactée, the articles
on Tristana—which appear in the same issue as the “Young Mr. Lincoln de
John Ford” text—attest to an increasing comfort on the part of the Cahiers
writers with deploying their elected theoretical framework to the critical
analysis of modernist cinema. Bonitzer, for instance, unabashedly begins
his article by comparing Buñuel’s approach to narrative with the qualities of
the dream as defined by Freud—“parsimonious, indifferent, laconic”—and
contends that his films can therefore be deciphered in much the same
way that psychoanalysis interprets the dream-work.7 While declaring the
discourse of Tristana to be “rigorously Marxist” in its analysis of the rela-
tionship between Don Lope’s libertarian ideology and his socio-economic
status, Bonitzer’s text is dominated by a psychoanalytic interpretation
of the film’s “symbolic writing.” In particular, he highlights the presence
in the film of a pair of slippers which functions as a Lacanian “object of
desire” that plays “no ‘active,’ positive role” in the film’s narrative, instead
constituting “a signifier of castration without the slightest equivocation.”8
The dream-effect caused by the presence of such objects in the film, however,
does not negate its narrative: following Bataille, who saw the superiority of
Un chien andalou over comparable avant-garde works as deriving from the
“predominance” of its script, Bonitzer concludes that “the cinema is only
a language to the extent that a fiction, and above all the repetition of this

5 Jean Narboni, “Le nom,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 40-42, here p. 42.
6 Pierre Baudry, “Tristana: Notes sur son dossier de presse,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (Au-
gust 1970), pp. 24-27.
7 Pascal Bonitzer, “Le curé de la guillotine,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (August 1970), pp. 5-7,
here p. 5.
8 Ibid., p. 6.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 521

fiction, constitute it as such.”9 In his contribution to the dossier, Aumont

takes issue with the standard surrealist reading of Buñuel, as proffered by
Positif ’s Robert Benayoun, and the concomitant will among critics to see
Tristana as a “reduced model” of Buñuel’s filmmaking system or a “condensa-
tion (purification)” of the “typical Buñuel film.”10 Instead, Aumont argues,
Buñuel’s late films offer an “ever more accusatory self-designation” of his
own authorial status and revolve around the fundamental question of
“the recognition, which it will thus be necessary to theorize, of the limits
of their reading.”11
It was, however, Jean-Pierre Oudart’s text on Tristana, “Jeux de mots, jeux
de maître,” that offered the most theoretically stringent reading of Buñuel’s
film. While Tristana deals with obsession, for Oudart it differs from other
films that do so by virtue of the fact that it is not an “obsessional film.” Unlike
Lang’s films, for instance, the obsessions it presents are not embedded in
the structural causality of the film’s écriture. Nor, in Oudart’s analysis, is
Tristana a “psychoanalytic film.” Buñuel offers no diagnosis or theory about
the obsessive symptoms present in the film, such as the symbolic castration
of the two protagonists (Don Lope’s impotence and Tristana’s amputated
leg). Instead, the Spanish filmmaker “admits to knowing no more about
what he is saying than what the assembly of these clichés reveals to him
and allows him to say about them.”12 For Oudart, the “confession of this
non-knowledge” is both the film’s great strength and its chief impasse.
Tristana is marked at one and the same time by “absolute opacity” and “total
transparency,” and Oudart even goes so far as to claim that the entire film
is a “gigantic play on words” through which the signifier is liberated from
its tethering to the signified.13 He stresses, however, that Tristana’s textual
play is derived not from Buñuel’s own individual unconscious but from the
twin social unconsciouses of Catholicism and capitalism, which produce
the “scriptural drive” of the film’s fiction. Finally, Oudart rejects “the idea
that Tristana deconstructs anything at all about bourgeois ideology, about
theology, or about the ‘neurosis’ of the modern era”; rather, in an implicit
reversal of Pierre’s claims for La Voie lactée, he insists that the subversive

9 Ibid., p. 7.
10 Jacques Aumont, “Le plaisir et le jeu,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (August 1970), pp. 7-10, here
p. 7.
11 Ibid., p. 10.
12 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Jeux de mots, jeux de maîtres,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (August 1970),
pp. 13-17, here p. 15. Translated as “Word Play, Master Play,” trans. Joseph Karmel, in Browne (ed.),
Cahiers du cinéma vol. III, pp. 137-145, here p. 139.
13 Ibid., p. 16 [p. 142].
522  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

nature of Buñuel’s écriture exists purely within the field of “an ideology and
an aesthetics of the text.”14

A Modernist of Comedy: Jerry Lewis

Whereas Buñuel’s films are almost universally recognized as an acme of

cinematic modernism, the status of Jerry Lewis’s œuvre has been much
more vividly contested. Operating within the “lowbrow” register of physical
comedy, his films were—and to a large degree continue to be—looked down
on or derided in intellectual circles as vulgar buffoonery. Stereotypes in the
English-speaking world about France’s supposedly inexplicable love for Lewis
notwithstanding, an appreciation of his films from French critics was far
from widespread. Cahiers, however, was a site of unconditional support for
Lewis, and, in an almost unparalleled case of consensus between the rival
journals, it was joined in this estimation by Positif. Most intringuingly, Lewis’
1960 directorial debut The Bellboy was included alongside Méditerranée and
Persona as a textbook example of a “category (c)” film in “Cinéma/idéologie/
critique.”15 It is tempting to read this set of films as a cinephilic in-joke or a
gesture of eclectic one-upmanship, but in fact Cahiers’ admiration of Lewis’
work was longstanding and shared by all members of the journal, who
dutifully greeted the release of each of his films with acclamation. As early
as 1957, Godard had written that Lewis’ part in Frank Tashlin’s Hollywood
or Bust had blended “the height of artifice” with “the nobility of true docu-
mentary,” while the comedian’s last film as director, 1983’s Smorgasbord, was
hailed by Daney—who was perhaps the most steadfast of the Cahiers critics
in his defense of Lewis—as a “tragically funny” film.16 In this text, Daney
explicitly articulated the idea that had governed all of Cahiers’ reception
of Lewis’ work—that he was a modern filmmaker. More specifically, the
body of Jerry Lewis, in Daney’s view, was one that had passed “entirely into
the code where language has become a war machine.”17 For Cahiers, Lewis
was essentially a modernist of comedy whose radical deconstruction of the
visual gag was comparable to the efforts of avant-garde pioneers in other

14 Ibid., p. 17 [p. 144].

15 Comolli/Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” p. 13 [p. 256].
16 Jean-Luc Godard, “Hollywood ou mourir (Hollywood or Bust),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 73
(July 1957), pp. 44-46, here p. 45. Translated as “Hollywood or Bust,” in idem., Godard on Godard,
pp. 57-59, here p. 59; and Serge Daney, “Non réconciliés (Smorgasbord),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 347
(May 1983), pp. 20-22, here p. 22.
17 Ibid.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 523

artistic practices, such as Picasso in painting and Stravinsky in music. If his

films were repellent to received bourgeois tastes, then this was only further
proof of their innate modernism and their profound experimentation with
the very syntactic mechanisms of the cinema.
The fervor surrounding Lewis’ work among the Cahiers team was at
its most intense in the years following 1964. Daney had the rare privilege
of encountering the comedian during his sojourn in Hollywood, and the
resulting conversation was published by Cahiers in November 1964. Having
been shown the biographical notice on him in the December 1963-Janu-
ary 1964 special issue on American cinema, in which Labarthe declared
that the “key” to Lewis’ universe is the motif of the double, Lewis exultantly
replied, “You see, this is what I was telling you, he saw hidden things, even
unconscious things.”18 In June 1964, Daney had spoken of Lewis’ “anarchic
comportment” in Tashlin’s Who’s Minding the Store?, while also presenting
the film as a battle between director and star, in which the viewer can
“pinpoint the moment when Lewis began to reign over Tashlin.”19 By the
time of The Family Jewels, however, the central problematic has shifted: now,
it is the maturing Lewis’ inability to continue playing the “Kid” character
that forms the motor for the film’s narrative, and the seven characters he
adopts in this film-parable offer a choice for the public (incarnated by the
young girl Donna) to select the desired metamorphosis that Lewis should
enact. Although the final choice will be a Jerry Lewis without the mask of
the characters he plays, Daney notes one caveat: Lewis “only wins over his
public on the condition of refusing, for at least a minute (but this minute
is crucial), to make himself up as a clown.”20
1967 was a turning point in Lewis’ career, with that year’s release of The
Big Mouth bringing his prolific run of popular successes since The Bellboy to
an end. The year also saw Cahiers’ most concerted effort at Lewis exegesis,
bookended by a review of Three on a Couch in January by Comolli—who saw
the film as occupying a “vagabond frontier” between “the logic of the dream

18 Jerry Lewis, interviewed by Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames, “Rencontre entre l’ordre et
le désordre,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 160 (November 1964), pp. 24-26, here p. 24. For Labarthe’s text,
see André S. Labarthe, “Lewis, Jerry,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 150-151 (December 1963-January 1964),
p. 142.
19 Serge Daney, “Frank et Jerry (Who’s Minding the Store?),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 156 (June 1964),
pp. 56-58, here p. 57.
20 Serge Daney, “Un rien sur fond de musique douce,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 175 (February 1966),
pp. 36-37. Translated as “A Nothing on a Ground of Soft Music,” Cahiers du Cinéma in English
no. 4 (1966), p. 33.
524  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

and the logic of the spectacle”21—and a 45-page dossier in the Christmas

issue. The latter included a long-form interview with Lewis conducted by
Labarthe and Positif critic Robert Benayoun, a “Petit lexique des termes
lewisiens” and critical texts by Narboni and Comolli.22 Here it was almost
as if the lowbrow reputation of Lewis’ f ilms prompted an inordinately
elevated, even literary critical register. Narboni, for instance, in expatiating
on the “interrupted, incomplete, floating narrative” of The Big Mouth, writes
of the film:

Once The Big Mouth is over, it is hard to prevent oneself from sensing that
what we have been shown was only a tiny part of a vast maritime myth,
the most superficial foam of a tale from the deep, the flotsam of an ancient
shipwreck momentarily tossed out, then swallowed again, or the vestiges
of a city that had been submerged millennia ago but has now returned
to the surface. The film is an Atlantis bereft of a story, whose essence
has been unveiled to us. It is a poem, fleetingly and incompletely sung
(the iceberg only lets a fifth-part of its dangers appear). […] It is tempting
[…] to refer back to a mythological figure who could well constitute the
point of origin from which is animated this game of doubles, masks,
lookalikes, transformations and disguises: Proteus, son of Neptune, god
of metamorphoses.23

Comolli, meanwhile, gives a broad overview of Lewis’ œuvre, treating his

films as exemplary modernist texts, since they include within them “their
own analysis, their own framework and references, their own system of
comparison and critique.” The theme of the double, for instance, is accentu-
ated and varied from film to film, progressively sliding “from the outside of
the work to the inside: shifting from the free zone which is on this side of the
camera to the occupied zone which is in front of it.” The duplication between
the off-screen and on-screen Lewises is thus replicated within the film itself,
beginning notably with The Nutty Professor. The dramatic construction of
his narratives, meanwhile, increasingly comes to resemble a relay race,
a process that finds its summit in The Big Mouth, with its “metaphysical
typhoon” of “tangential races, roundabout pursuits, superpositions and

21 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le médecin malgré lui (Three on a Couch),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 186
(January 1967), pp. 67-68, here p. 68. Translated as “Le médecin malgré lui (Three on a Couch),”
Cahiers du Cinéma in English no. 11 (July 1967), pp. 57-59.
22 See “Spécial Jerry Lewis,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 197 (Christmas 1967/January 1968), pp. 26-69.
23 Jean Narboni, “Le récit empêché (The Big Mouth),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 197 (Christmas
1967-January 1968), p. 57.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 525

interferences” which end up “blurring all meaning and perturbing, through

its waves and counter-waves, space, time, coherence and even comedy, to
the point where we do not know whether to be entertained or terrified.”24
Lewis’ next release would not be until 1970’s Which Way to the Front?,
an independently funded World War II-themed comedy that remains one
of his most neglected f ilms. Cahiers, even deep into its Marxist phase,
remained loyal to the filmmaker. Writing in March 1971, Daney admitted
that it was a “particularly strident and not very pleasant f ilm, where
nothing subsists of [Lewis’] past tendernesses,” but dedicated himself
to an analysis centering around the analogy between the preparations
for war carried out by the protagonist Byers (played by Lewis) and the
preparations for the shoot that Lewis, now his own producer, had to
carry out. The f ilm also, as Daney recognized, marked a new stage in
the comedian’s career: having found himself rejected by the Hollywood
system, no longer willing to finance his projects, “the Lewis of this latest
f ilm is reduced to a word, a brand-image, a Name,” and this, for Daney,
represents the “decisive novelty of Which Way to the Front? in Lewis’
problematic.”25 At the same time as Daney’s article, Eisenschitz, who was
then still nominally a member of the Cahiers team, reviewed the film for
La Nouvelle Critique and within the short space allotted to his notice sought
to convince the journal’s PCF-aligned readership, not particularly well-
disposed towards the American, of the merits of Lewis’ film. Beginning
his article by declaring that Lewis was “one of the rare filmmakers […] to
make courageous and effective films in Hollywood,” Eisenschitz associ-
ated Lewis’ use of anachronisms with the work of Brecht and Pirandello
and ascribed to them a tacit identif ication of Nazi militarism with its
American counterpart. For Eisenschitz, however, the true subversive
force of the f ilm comes from the fact that Lewis “once again questions,
from inside Hollywood, the formal principles on which, for 70 years, the
world’s foremost cinema has been founded, and this says volumes about
just how remote his filmmaking is from the innocence and spontaneity
that we have long ascribed to him.”26

24 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Chacun son soi (The Big Mouth),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 197 (Christmas
1967-January 1967), pp. 51-54, here pp. 53-54.
25 Serge Daney, “Which Way to the Front,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971), pp. 60-61.
26 Bernard Eisenschitz, “Which Way to the Front (Ya ya mon général),” La Nouvelle Critique no. 40
(January 1971), p. 72. Translated as “Which Way to the Front (1970),” trans. Daniel Fairfax, Senses
of Cinema no. 79 (July 2016), sensesofcinema.com/2016/jerry-lewis/which-way-to-the-front/
(accessed January 1, 2021).
526  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

A New Generation: Garrel, Bene, Bertolucci

Buñuel’s involvement in the cinema, as perennially subversive as it was,

dated back to the 1920s, while Lewis too had been working in film since the
late 1940s. But the late 1960s also saw the rise of a much younger crop of film
artists in countries such as France and Italy whose work drew from and fed
into the youth uprisings in these two countries. Generational contemporaries
of the Cahiers critics, their films married radically anti-capitalist politics
with a taste for, at times outrageous, formal experimentation. Combined
with the youthful effervescence of the filmmakers and their actors, this
work could not fail to kindle the interest of the journal, particularly in the
period immediately following May 1968, when its outlook was marked by an
eclectic attraction towards political, social and artistic revolts of all shades.
The youngest and most precocious of this new generation was Philippe
Garrel, who was not yet twenty years old when he completed his first feature
film, Anémone in 1967, and quickly followed it up with Marie pour mémoire,
La Concentration and Le Révélateur in a prolific burst of energy lasting
until June 1968. Alongside Henri Langlois, who saw the young director as a
successor to the French avant-garde cinema of the silent era, Cahiers was
one of the earliest defenders of Garrel’s work, which was derided in other
quarters as senseless juvenilia.27 A short note by Comolli in the Christmas
1967 issue of Cahiers—probably the first critical mention of Garrel any-
where—extolled Anémone as “the most remarkable work of young French
cinema since Pop Game and Le Père Noel a les yeux bleus.” Highlighting the
film’s “saturated, obsessive” 16mm colors, Comolli foreshadowed that “if
only so we can speak about it at greater length, we will do everything to
ensure that the film can soon be seen.”28 Appropriately, for a filmmaker
whose work so directly embodied the spirit of the May protests, the April-
May 1968 issue of Cahiers was sprinkled with references to Garrel. The “Petit
Journal” featured a notice written by the filmmaker ironically describing
Marie pour mémoire as a film made “by an impatient impostor protected
by his status as an artist,” and his response to a questionnaire on the state
of the French film industry contained scandalous provocations such as
“those people seated on the commissions charged with delivering money

27 For instance, a satirical article in Positif by “Abner Lepetit” (a pseudonym for Robert Benayoun)
mocked both Garrel’s f ilms and Sylvie Pierre’s critical response to them. See Abner Lepetit,
“Chut!,” Positif no. 104 (April 1969), p. 51.
28 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le Petit Journal,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 197 (Christmas 1967-Janu-
ary 1968), p. 21.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 527

to filmmakers mostly belong to parasitic sectors who are totally ignorant

of the cinema.”29 At the same time, Cahiers alumnus Pierre Kast compared
Garrel’s precocious ability to skip directly to directing without making his
way through the intermediate stages of the film industry with the ambitions
of “colonized peoples who would make the leap to socialism without passing
through bourgeois democracy,” and he described the emergence of young
filmmakers such as Garrel as “the most exalting phenomenon of the year.”30
The euphoria around Garrel’s meteoric ascent continued the next month in
Narboni and Delahaye’s compte-rendu of the 1968 Semaine de la Critique
at Cannes, titled “C’est la révolution.” In speaking of “the extreme power
of the film, its impact and its disturbing force,” the critics placed Anémone
alongside the work of Moullet, Straub and Kramer as being situated at a
historical juncture when “decidedly, in the cinema as elsewhere, there is
indeed a revolution.”31
The most considered response to Garrel’s work came in September 1968,
when an 11-page interview with the f ilmmaker was accompanied by
Narboni’s text “Le lieu dit.” The former contained a detailed discussion of
Garrel’s improvisational filmmaking method,32 while, in his critical-poetic
response to Garrel’s œuvre, Narboni stressed the filmmaker’s capacity to
relativize the very dimensions of space and time. The screen, in Garrel’s
hands, no longer conforms to the frame/mask distinction posed by Bazin,
but “its very boundaries, its limits, seem to belong to the film, to proceed
from it. The procession of sounds and images imposes the sentiment that
it creates the means of its own enclosure.” With their fleeting, flash-like
quality, giving the impression that the film consumes itself in flames the
instant it passes through the projector, Garrel’s images are comparable to
the type of theater desired by Mallarmé (“a mental milieu linking the stage
with the auditorium”) in that they produce a cinematic screen that is no
longer “a neutral surface gathering forms that exist outside of it and before

29 Philippe Garrel, in “Le Petit Journal,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 200-201 (April-May 1968), p. 103;
and Philippe Garrel, “Vers un livre blanc du cinéma français,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 200-201
(April-May 1968), pp. 73-93, here p. 81.
30 Pierre Kast, “A Farewell to the Movies,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 200-201 (April-May 1968),
pp. 13-18, here p. 17.
31 Michel Delahaye and Jean Narboni, “C’est la révolution, ou l’année en huit jours,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 202 (June-July 1968), pp. 56-65, here pp. 59, 56.
32 Philippe Garrel, interviewed by Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni and Jacques Rivette,
“Cerclé sous vide: entretien avec Philippe Garrel,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968),
pp. 44-54, 63.
528  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

it” but is returned to its “primary function”: “the materialization of these

forms, without which they would dissipate into the distance.”33
Cahiers’ enthusiasm for Garrel, however, was far from unanimously
shared, even among circles of radical film criticism. His films were routinely
derided by Cinéthique, with Leblanc belittling them as “desperate efforts by
the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie to sublimate its condition in ‘noble’ values,”
and the journal preferred the superficially comparable work of Jean-Pierre
Lajournade to that of Garrel.34 Cahiers returned fire in the second install-
ment of “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” arguing that Lajournade’s Le joueur de
quilles was “the acme of complaisant, petty-bourgeois cinema” and that, “in
spite of his messianic positions, and in opposition to them (exhaustingly at
work in his films), Garrel’s filmmaking is infinitely less idealist.”35 Although
a promised “return to Garrel” never materialized, the preference for his work
over that of Lajournade is, if nothing else, proof of the reliable acuity of the
critical goût cultivated by Cahiers: whereas Lajournade has gone down as
a minor footnote in the history of avant-garde cinema, Garrel has pursued
a directorial career up to the present day, which now stands as one of the
most important bodies of artistic work in post-war France.
In the same passage, Cahiers compares Garrel’s work to that of Bene—and
not only because they were both considered by Cinéthique to be “idealist
buffoons.” Indeed, the frenetic psychedelia of Bene’s Artaudian cinema of
cruelty has profound affinities with Garrel’s work: both filmmakers push
against the signifying limits of the cinema and open the medium up to a more
primeval realm of delirious hallucination. Like Garrel, Bene first turned to
filmmaking in the late 1960s: an acting role in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex in 1967
was followed by directorial efforts, with Nostra Signora dei Turchi in 1968
and Capricci in 1969. In contrast to his French counterpart, however, Bene
already had nearly a decade’s experience in experimental theater behind
him. As Aumont later admitted, however, this background was unknown
to the Cahiers critics at the time. He even recalls understanding very little
of Bene’s debut film when it screened without subtitles at the Venice film
festival in September 1968, but that did not hamper the journal’s immediate
enthusiasm for Bene’s “explosive, coruscant, splendid, immodest, ferocious,
generous” work.36 Aumont and Pierre’s report on Venice paired Nostra

33 Jean Narboni, “Le lieu dit,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968), p. 42.
34 Gérard Leblanc, “Direction,” Cinéthique no. 5 (September-October 1969), pp. 1-8, here p. 2.
Translated as “Direction,” trans. Susan Bennett, Screen vol. 12 no. 3 (Autumn 1972), pp. 121-130,
here p. 122.
35 Comolli/Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique (II),” p. 13 [p. 267].
36 Jacques Aumont, Notre Dame des Turcs (Lyons: Aléas, 2010), p. 7.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 529

Signora dei Turchi with Moullet’s Les Contrebandières as “two psychedelic

films” and described Bene’s film as a “phantasmal” work centering around
questions of “consumption, delirium and subjectivity.”37 In the same is-
sue, Narboni conducted an explosive interview with the filmmaker. Bene
opened proceedings by declaring, “In general, I detest journalists”—to
which Narboni responded, with sangfroid, “But we aren’t journalists.” Noting
resemblances with the work of Eisenstein, Welles and Godard, Narboni
highlights the contrast between the fervor of the film’s protagonist and the
fact that its framing and editing are “calm, rigorous, precise, considered.”
He thus sees Nostra Signora dei Turchi as an antithesis of those films which
“give the impression of a complete confusion between the disorder that the
directors want to film and the way in which they film it,” an aspect of his
work which Bene justifies by stating: “Even with my delirium, at the same
moment that I am being delirious, I contest it. I try not to be complicit in
it. This is the only complete liberty.”38
Making its bow at Cannes the following year, Capricci earned a similar
reception from Cahiers in June 1969: Moullet’s festival report included it
in the category of films “dedicat[ing] themselves to the exploration of new
cinematic planets” and dubbed Bene’s film “cinema in a pure state, such
as there has never been before. There is absolutely nothing but the cinema,
nothing but ideas of the cinema, and without any relation to the tried and
tested ideas of cinema.39 Cahiers also published another interview with Bene,
this one conducted by Noël Simsolo, where the filmmaker continued his
attacks on Italian culture and defined Capricci as “total nothingness in art, in
life, in love, passion, everything. Complete nothingness. Everything is false.
In my films, you mustn’t believe in the characters, or in anything at all.”40
Featuring on the cover of this issue and later giving its name to a publishing
house with close ties to the journal, Capricci was evidently a talismanic
film for Cahiers. 41 Bene and Narboni later became close friends thanks
to the intermediary of Deleuze, but at the time his films were released,

37 Jacques Aumont and Sylvie Pierre, “Huit fois deux,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 206 (Novem-
ber 1968), pp. 30-34, here p. 31.
38 Carmelo Bene, interviewed by Jean Narboni, “Carmelo Bene: Nostra Signora dei Turchi,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 206 (November 1968), pp. 25-26, here p. 25.
39 Luc Moullet, “Le Congrès de Cannes,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 213 (June 1969), pp. 31-35, here
p. 34.
40 Carmelo Bene, interviewed by Noël Simsolo, “Entretiens: Carmelo Bene: Capricci,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 213 (June 1969), pp. 18-19, here p. 18.
41 The Capricci publishing imprint was founded in 1999 by former Cahiers editors Emmanuel
Burdeau and Thierry Lounas and has published a signif icant number of works by Narboni,
Aumont, Bonitzer and others.
530  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Cahiers’ rapturous reception of Bene’s work was not accompanied by any

sustained attempts at critical exegesis, something Narboni retrospectively
regrets.42 The lacuna would, belatedly, be filled by Aumont, who published
a monograph on Bene’s first film in 2010.
Bertolucci’s work was a natural point of comparison for that of his
countryman, and in a review of Partner, Oudart indeed classes the film
with Nostra Signora dei Turchi. Each of the two films, in the Cahiers critic’s
eyes, produces “its myth (the Artist) and its paranoia (the Actor) on its scene,”
and both filmmakers represent a “modern cinema de bon ton” in which “the
only subversive discourse permissible” is a self-reflexive consideration of
cinematic signification itself through a scenographic return of the theater.43
Thanks to his earlier films La commare secca and Prima della rivoluzione,
Bertolucci had been an integral figure in the “new cinema” championed by
Cahiers in the mid-1960s, and his status as a contemporary auteur capable of
producing films as “condensations, concretions of a kind of diffuse general
text” was recognized. 44 Bertolucci’s following release, however, incited a
volte-face in attitudes. The May 1971 issue had foreshadowed the imminent
appearance of an interview with Bertolucci on the subject of of Il conformista,
but as Eisenschitz relates, his and Narboni’s conversation with the filmmaker
revealed such irreconcilable political differences that the proceedings were
never published, and the journal’s low estimation of the film forestalled
any deeper critical response. 45 Only a few brief paragraphs in an article by
Oudart, “Un discours en défaut,” were dedicated to Il conformista, which was
attacked, in a line of argument foreshadowing the critique of “retro” cinema
later in the 1970s, for participating in “the ‘artistic’ recuperation,” by the
dominant, bourgeois mode of representation, of the signifying production
of “filmmakers who have made an ideological, political and aesthetic break
with classical cinema.”46 From this point on, Cahiers would firmly align
Bertolucci’s cinema with the cynical aesthetics of the fiction de gauche,
and his strategy of working within the structures of the mainstream film

42 Interview with Jean Narboni, April 2, 2014.

43 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Les privilèges du maître (Partner),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970),
pp. 55-56, here p. 56.
44 Jean Narboni, “Partner (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italie),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 206 (Novem-
ber 1968), p. 33.
45 Interview with Bernard Eisenschitz, April 1, 2014.
46 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Un discours en défaut,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 232 (October 1971),
pp. 4-12, here p. 11. Translated as “A Lacking Discourse,” trans. Joseph Karmel, in Nick Browne
(ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation (London: BFI, 1990),
pp. 276-286, here p. 285.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 531

industry for Ultimo tango a Parigi and Novecento led to these films meeting
with an unambiguously hostile reaction from the journal. 47

Discourse and Power: The Taviani Brothers and Federico Fellini

While Bertolucci was placed in a critical purgatory, other Italian auteurs

found a more welcoming reception in Cahiers. There is little that unites the
aesthetic of the Taviani brothers with that of Federico Fellini, but the fact
that their 1971 releases were given high-profile coverage in successive issues
of Cahiers—with Sotto il segno dello scorpione covered in March-April and I
clowns in May—and the parallels between the approaches Cahiers took to
their respective films authorize a discussion of them in tandem with one
another. With their avowed Marxist politics and the interest their films
evinced for questions of language, communication and ideology, Vittorio
and Paolo Taviani were a natural fit for the critical project being developed
by Cahiers, and indeed they were regularly evoked in the years 1970 and 1971
as models of contemporary political cinema. The journal even organized
screenings of Sotto il segno dello scorpione at a number of its public events,
including the Avignon festival in August 1970 and a conference on “Cinéma
et idéologie” at Le Havre in December the same year. 48
The film’s Parisian exclusivité the following year prompted Cahiers to run
an interview with the brothers, which addressed a wide range of aesthetic
and political issues. Against what they called “consumerist-subversive
cinema,” the Tavianis conceived of their cinema as a political struggle
consisting of “robbery operations” that would “pass off as commercial,
contraband-style operations that are not commercial at all.”49 Although
their films are open to directly political readings, the Tavianis insist that
the real point of contestation in their filmmaking comes at the level of
cinematic language, which is precisely the most obstinate point of blockage
in the commercial cinema: “It is always the enemy that shows us where the
true centers of conflict are. In this case it has pinpointed the real danger of

47 See Pascal Bonitzer, “L’expérience en intérieur (Dernier Tango à Paris, La Grande Bouffe,
La Maman et la Putain),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 247 (July-August 1973), pp. 33-36; and Serge
Toubiana, “Le ballon rouge (Novecento).”
48 The program for the latter event can be found in Cahiers du cinéma no. 225 (November-
December 1970), p. 43.
49 Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer, Bernard Eisenschitz and Jean
Narboni, “Entretien avec Paolo et Vittorio Taviani,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971),
pp. 28-42, here pp. 28-29.
532  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the cinema: its specificity, its language.”50 The argument was a compelling
one for Cahiers, and Kané’s two-part discussion of the Tavianis addressed
precisely this aspect of their film.
Sotto il segno dello scorpione is an abstract, quasi-mythological fable.51
After a volcanic eruption, a group of men seeks refuge with another,
mixed-gender society on the island they both inhabit. In order to escape
from the dangers posed by the volcano, they seek to persuade their hosts
to flee with them to the continent. While Kané resists the temptation to
give a straightforward reading of this narrative premise as an allegory for
contemporary political struggle in Italy, he nonetheless acknowledges its
status as a deliberately conceived “scale model” of class-divided societies.
As Macherey observes in Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, authors
of the modern bourgeois era such as Marivaux, Rousseau, Verne and Defoe
used the literary device of the island as an “ideal fiction” for didactically
proposing historical analogies.52 Even Marx and Engels frequently evoked
Robinson Crusoe in their analysis of capitalist political economy, albeit often
to critique the limitations of what they dubbed “robinsonnades”—bourgeois
fairytales of asocial self-sufficiency and individual ingenuity.53 For Kané,
the dichotomy between the island and the continent that structures the
Tavianis’ film implies a number of other dualities: most notably, the island
is equated to a pre-historical, cyclical existence and is thus an element of
signifying openness and infinitude, while the continent denotes the closed
linearity of history.
Beyond this socially metonymic function, however, the focus of Kané’s
text lies on the question of discursivity in the film, and in this area his
analysis ties into contemporaneous theories of language and signification
in the work of Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva and Derrida. In their attempt to
persuade their hosts of the necessity of leaving the island, the group of men
come up against what Barthes calls “endoxal” speech (that is, the dominant

50 Ibid., p. 31.
51 Even the title, as de Gregorio had earlier reported, has a purely arbitrary relationship with
the content of the f ilm. Eduardo de Gregorio, “Sous le signe du scorpion,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 212 (May 1969), p. 7.
52 See Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, (Paris: Maspéro, 1966),
pp. 224-228. Translated as A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London:
Routledge, 1978), pp. 268-277. Cited in Pascal Kané, “Sous le signe du scorpion: présentation
(suite et fin),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 230 (June 1971), pp. 46-50, here p. 48.
53 Kané evokes Engels’ discussion of Friday’s enslavement by Robinson in Anti-Dühring.
See Pascal Kané, “Sous le signe du scorpion: présentation,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-
April 1971), pp. 43-45, here p. 45.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 533

discourse, based on an analogous relationship with perceived reality).54

A range of rhetorical strategies are deployed: from a “true discourse,” the
men shift to an exaggerated yet “verisimilar” mode of address before finally
crossing over the threshold into outright lying. This new rhetorical system,
however, has a major drawback: in “substitut[ing] a new mystification for
the old one,” it reduces itself to the level of irony, a “metasystem” that would
exist as a “critical variation of the first system, whose proliferation it blocks
by encirclement.” And yet it still succeeds in winning over a segment of
the autochthonous population. In order to defend themselves from the
“irrational” discourse of the newcomers (with their deployment of magical
forms of causality), the autochthonous group ends up resorting to a violent
resolution of the social imbalance caused by the latter’s arrival. But it is this
very gesture that allows the island’s inhabitants to make their way to the
continent—a passage that Kané reads as “the rupture of circularity which
makes History possible.”55 Here it is evident that Kané reads the Taviani
brothers’ film as an allegory for their own filmmaking method, proposing
to the spectator a discourse drawing on tropes borrowed from folklore and
parable in order to produce a historical materialist analysis of society. In
doing so, their conception of Marxist cinema is remote from that of Godard,
Straub/Huillet and other filmmakers who tended to be favored by Cahiers,
and indeed Kané’s analysis is not followed up, in Cahiers, by any deeper
work on the Taviani brothers in the same vein.
In contrast to the Taviani brothers, Fellini’s political views—or, more
accurately, his professed lack of them—were at a distinct remove from
those of Cahiers. The journal never had a straightforward relationship with
the Italian filmmaker: while his early films found favor with Bazin, the
much-lauded works of the 1960s—La Dolce Vita, Otto e mezzo and Giulietta
degli spiriti—tended to leave Cahiers cold. Surprisingly, the journal’s political
radicalization in the years 1969-1971 coincided with a more receptive stance
towards Fellini’s œuvre. Aumont had signaled the change with his review
of Fellini’s contribution to the Poe-adaptation omnibus Histoires extraor-
dinaires, judging that “the Nordic, abstract fantasies of Poe are integrally
restituted here for us by their encounter with the concrete, Mediterranean
obsessions of Fellini.”56 In his review of Satyricon, which focused on the
role of castration as a structuring element of the film, Baudry nonetheless

54 Kané draws the term from a seminar Barthes gave at the Collège de France on “la bêtise.”
55 Ibid., p. 44.
56 Jacques Aumont, “Tobie et le diable (Histoires extraordinaires),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 203
(August 1968), pp. 62-63, here p. 62.
534  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

rejects the use of the term “obsession” as a critical cliché when treating
Fellini’s work. “Certainly these themes are obsessive for the spectator, to
the extent that he keeps on finding them from one film to another, but, far
from operating a blockage […] in the fiction, they play, on the contrary, a
nodal role, a role of resolution.” Baudry instead argues that the adaptation
of Petronius’ epic poem is structured around “effects of repetition,” which
are at the root of the public’s dissatisfaction with the film: “Fellini Satyricon
is a film whose very purpose is to disappoint and deplete.”57
Baudry’s positive appraisal was at odds with one of Cahiers’ most
prominent maîtres à penser. Kristeva, as Bonitzer later noted, denounced the
“ideological inoffensiveness” of the film in her preface to the French edition
of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics.58 And yet this difference of
opinion did not inhibit the Cahiers critics, who dedicated two significant
texts to Fellini’s following film, the relatively unheralded I clowns. Writing
in La Quinzaine littéraire, Comolli rejected the idea that I clowns marks
a reversion to sentimental humanism after the “monstrous fantasies” of
Satyricon, arguing that “such a reading is entirely refuted by the film,” which
in his view is an interrogation of the nature of the cinema as spectacle, with
the visible signs of the reportage carried out on the circus intimating an
equation between the big top and the movie theater. Moreover, the first
scene of I clowns, depicting a young boy waking from his sleep and furtively
witnessing the preparations for a circus performance, cannot fail to evoke
Freud’s primal scene. Indeed, this opening is symptomatic of the fact that
the entire film is structured around representations of sex and death. With
their intolerable and irrational nature, scenes such as this lead Comolli
to conclude that “It is not a question here of sorrow towards the ‘death of
clowns,’ but of the representation—the simulacrum—by these clowns of
death itself, as that which centers all representation, all spectacle.”59
Writing for Cahiers, Pierre built on Comolli’s identification of the film’s
opening sequence with Freud’s primal scene and followed Baudry’s footsteps
in analyzing Fellini’s work through the framework of castration: in this
reading, the open window stands in for representation-as-gaze, while the
erection of the tent denotes the phallus, and the spectacle of the circus is

57 Pierre Baudry, “Un avatar du sens (Fellini-Satyricon),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970),
pp. 56-57, here p. 57.
58 See Pascal Bonitzer, “Mémoire de l’œil (Amarcord),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 251-252 (July-
August 1974), pp. 75-76, here p. 75. For Kristeva’s views on Fellini Satyricon, see Julia Kristeva,
“Une poétique ruinée,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, La Poétique de Dostoïevski (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp. 5-27,
here p. 20.
59 Jean-Louis Comolli, “La mort-clown,” La Quinzaine littéraire no. 115 (April 1-15, 1971), p. 28.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 535

seen as a “metaphorical representation of castration.”60 The child witnessing

the spectacle is thus the neurotic subject—in other words, Fellini himself.
If this interpretation can appear forced, Pierre supports her argument by
pointing to the overtly autobiographical elements present in I clowns and
Fellini’s own familiarity with psychoanalytic theory. After a brief excursus on
the role of the grotesque exaggeration of physical features in Fellini’s films,
the critic returns to the question of castration, focusing on the existence of
a “clown couple” consisting of Auguste, the castrated male, and the White
Clown, a castrating female. In Pierre’s view, however, this dichotomy only
highlights the “entirely feminine passivity” (and hence castration) of clowns
in general due to their “quality as an object of the spectacle, fetishized by
their accessories.”61 In a later interview, Pierre expressed mild embarrassment
at this article, admitting to the “comical pretension of the intellectual prov-
ing her intelligence about the theory with an utter and therefore laughable
seriousness.” She insists, however, that the text touched on “something not
too false” about “what is sublime in Fellini’s poetry,” namely, its profoundly
feminine quality, and she also recalls Daney telling her that “everything
we write is ‘true,’ but in the autobiographical sense. And the last phrase of
the Fellini paper was ‘Woman as fetish should not work.’”62 Appropriately
enough, the text was Pierre’s last for Cahiers before her departure to Brazil
in November 1971.
Pierre’s admiration for Fellini was far from being universally shared
within Cahiers.63 After her departure from Cahiers, Bonitzer doggedly
defended Fellini’s work, penning responses to all his major releases be-
tween Amarcord in 1974 and Ginger e Fred in 1986 and pursuing the focus
on psychoanalytic themes and the role of the carnivalesque in Fellini’s
œuvre. But he has admitted that “Fellini is above all a personal taste, almost
against the modernity otherwise demanded in the journal, and against the
affirmed taste of other editors.” The critic yields that Fellini may well be an
“antimodern” filmmaker but affirms that that the Italian’s “baroque excess,
woven from dreams, fleshy eroticism and crepuscular nostalgia, was like an

60 Sylvie Pierre, “L’homme aux clowns,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (June 1971), pp. 48-51, here
p. 48.
61 Ibid., p. 51.
62 Sylvie Pierre, in Bill Krohn, “Interview with Sylvie Pierre,” Senses of Cinema no. 23 (Decem-
ber 2002), sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/pierre/ (accessed January 1, 2021).
63 This is indicated by the publication in the same issue as Pierre’s review of a letter from
Dominique Païni, then a young communist cinephile, who labeled Fellini an “ideologue of the
liberal bourgeoisie” producing apologias for the decadence of the modern world.” See Dominique
Païni, “Lettre sur Les Clowns,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (June 1971), pp. 64-65.
536  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

antidote for me to so many anorexic films that we had to defend no matter

what, at the price of boredom.”64 The critical dissension within Cahiers on
the question of Fellini came out into the open upon the release of E la nave
va in 1984: Olivier Assayas’s rebarbative rejection of Fellini’s œuvre drew
a stinging reply from Bonitzer, who defined the comic aspect of Fellini’s
film as “the universal laughter, the universal parody of the carnival.”65
Exceptionally, therefore, the Italian director’s work was not a terrain on
which Cahiers waged skirmishes against its critical rivals; rather, it was an
enduring battleground inside the journal itself.

Visconti and the Decadence of European Modernism

In tandem with its turn to Maoism and adoption of a more rigidly politicized
approach to film aesthetics in late 1971, Cahiers’ view of the post-war Euro-
pean modernist tradition embodied by an older generation of auteurs—the
likes of Buñuel, Fellini and Bergman—underwent a discernible shift. For the
most part, this consisted of their exclusion from the field of critical study,
now largely monopolized by more politically and formally radical work. An
exception came, however, with the journal’s response to Visconti’s Morte a
Venezia, which took the form of Daney and Oudart’s co-authored article “Le
Nom-de-l’Auteur: à propos de la ‘place’ de Mort à Venise,” a text that Nick
Browne considers to be “Cahiers’ most comprehensive restatement of the
modernist problematic.”66 Visconti’s œuvre, of course, was impregnated by
the director’s avowed identification as a Marxist. Nonetheless, his privileged
class origins, the anchoring of his stylistics in nineteenth-century artistic
modes (the bourgeois novel, opera, the Romantic music of Wagner and
Mahler) and the unfailing setting—after an early neorealist period—of his
fictions in decadent aristocratic settings all distanced Visconti’s work from
the militant aesthetic that Cahiers came to advocate. The Italian’s thematic
obsession with the historical obsolescence of his own class, the European
haute-bourgeoisie, along with his decision to adapt Thomas Mann’s 1912
novella, would seem to place his films firmly in the category of “critical
realism” as elaborated by Georg Lukács, who saw such literary works as the

64 Pascal Bonitzer, La Vision partielle (Paris: Capricci, 2015), p. 11.

65 See Olivier Assayas, “Sic transit Gloria N.,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 355 (January 1981), pp. 20-25;
and Pascal Bonitzer, “Le rhinoceros et la voix,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 356 (February 1984), pp. 14-17,
here p. 17.
66 Browne, “Introduction,” in idem. (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III, p. 18.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 537

only viable artistic strategy for bourgeois authors to pursue in the period
of capitalism’s phase of terminal decline.67 In one of the only occasions
in which the Hungarian Marxist is explicitly discussed on the pages of
Cahiers, however, Daney/Oudart rejected Lukács’ aesthetic theory, labeling
it a form of idealism in which historical materialism is “‘read,’ recuperated
and ‘totalized.’” They also dismissed Visconti’s claims to Marxism with
the contention that the filmmaker “is obviously completely unversed in
dialectical materialism, since it would put his very practice in question.”
To Visconti’s “defensive” critical realism, then, Daney/Oudart oppose a
“dialectical materialist writing practice,” which, following the aesthetic
theories of Brecht and Mao, would “think through both the process of
destruction and the process of revolutionary construction, and the unity
of these opposites.”68 Ironically, the Cahiers critics tacitly retain Lukács’
notion of modern capitalist decadence in their analysis of twentieth-century
bourgeois realism, even while contending that the “ambiguous ideological
recourse to historical materialism” in writers such as Mann is absent from
Visconti’s adaptation. As a symptomatic work of the fate of a historically
outmoded class, the filmed adaptation of Der Tod in Venedig is therefore
subject to a reading whose methodology—with Daney/Oudart mobilizing
the ideas of Bataille, Lacan and Derrida—is drawn from the parallel efforts
at analyzing classical Hollywood earlier undertaken by the journal.
In this reading, Visconti’s work is inscribed in the lineage of the European
“classical cinema” of Renoir, Rossellini and Carné, which presented itself
as a “reiteration/transformation” of the Hollywood studio system during
its golden age. While this mode of filmmaking reproduces the narrative
transitivity and stylistic transparency of Hollywood’s dominant aesthetic,
it also yields a “supplement” (in the twin Derridean sense of substitution
and addition) through the production of mise en scène effects antagonistic
to the directorial “neutrality” mandated by the US studio system, such as
baroque compositions, extended tracking shots and a proliferation of zooms.
When these effects become widely recognized as the formal “signature” of
a particular author (such as long takes in Renoir or zooms in late Rossel-
lini), the de-subjected anonymity of studio production is replaced by what
Daney/Oudart, borrowing from Lacan’s notion of the Nom-du-Père (the

67 See Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann, trans. Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press,
1964).
68 Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Le Nom-de-l’Auteur: à propos de la ‘place’ de Mort à
Venise,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 234-235 (December 1971-January-February 1972), pp. 79-92, here
p. 80. Translated as “The Name of the Author: On the ‘Place’ of Death in Venice,” trans. Joseph
Karmel, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III, pp. 306-324, here pp. 306-307.
538  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

name or the no of the father) term the Nom-de-l’Auteur. Here, the cinephilic
discourse surrounding auteur filmmakers results in the “cinephile phan-
tasmally tak[ing] the place of the director” as the “fictive other of classical
cinema.”69 In contrast to Hollywood’s “absent articulation,” the cinema of
the Nom-de-l’Auteur fetishizes the frame as the “materiality of the camera’s
displacement” and therefore politicizes and eroticizes the “real-fictive” of
the cinema while at the same time assuming the function of the “agents
producing the filmic inscription.”70 In Morte a Venezia, Visconti exhibits
a dual relationship with the function of the Nom-de-l’Auteur: at the same
time as his film sets up a classical constellation of characters, consisting of
an erotic subject with whom the spectator identifies (the aristocratic artist
Gustav von Aschenbach) and the object of his desire (the attractive young boy
Tadzio), Visconti’s arabesque camera movements insist on the presence of an
Author. Thus, in spite of Visconti’s “denial of the erotic relationship between
the author and his actor” (that is, Tadzio remains a peripheral character),
the film nonetheless comes to be viewed as “the erotic relationship between
the real agent of the filming [Visconti] and his actor, rather than the erotic
relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio.”71
In Visconti’s work, therefore, the will to provide a Marxist discourse which
gives primacy to economic determination—analyzing the decadence of the
ruling class as a sign of its historically outmoded nature—is upended by
the “irruption of sexuality on to the social scene as the symptom, the secret,
the truth of the mise en scène.”72 This contradiction was already apparent in
earlier films such as Vaghe stelle dell’orsa and Die Verdammten, but in Morte
a Venezia the determination of the double articulation of class and erotic
relations through Visconti’s own obsessional neurosis becomes flagrant.
Drawing on Bataille’s statement that “for the bourgeoisie, the communist
workers are as ugly and dirty as the sexual, hairy, lower parts of the body,”
Daney/Oudart determine that this neurosis can be represented by the
expression: “I, a clean bourgeois, am in love with a dirty proletarian.”73
Although this proposition makes intermittent appearances in the film (the
scenes where Tadzio is spattered with mud, for instance), for the most part it
is disavowed by the filmmaker through the presentation of Tadzio as asexual
and immaculate and Aschenbach as lacking in social power and virility.

69 Ibid., p. 89 [p. 320].

70 Ibid., p. 90 [p. 320].
71 Ibid., p. 91 [p. 321].
72 Ibid., p. 85 [p. 313].
73 Ibid., pp. 79, 88 [pp. 306, 317]. For the Bataille quote, see Georges Bataille, L’Anus solaire
(Paris: Éditions de la Galérie Simon, 1931).
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 539

Aschenbach’s repression of the doubly obscene nature of his desire can take
two potential forms: firstly, he can deny that the boy is a proletarian and
fantasize that he is instead an aristocrat; secondly, and more predominantly,
he can ascribe the boy’s “dirty” nature to himself, given that, “in line with
Visconti’s ‘Marxist’ ideology, Aschenbach represents the bourgeoisie as a
corrupted class.” The true “barred question” of the film, therefore, is not the
homosexuality of the protagonist nor that of the director but rather “how
can the bourgeoisie, being unable to escape from itself, fail to fantasize the
proletariat, the lost (but also dirty, shameful) part of the social body, whose
return and emergence it can only desire in an erotic manner?”74
It is here, in the concluding passages to their text, that Daney/Oudart posit
a psychoanalytic recasting of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic: Visconti’s film
is structured by the active yet censored articulation of economic and sexual
desires, which the Cahiers critics read as “the symptom of the repression of the
bourgeois economic system: in its phantasms, the neurotic bourgeoisie desires
the agents of economic production, since they produce the thing that supports
the bourgeoisie’s real mastery (surplus-value).” But inscribing this desire into
the formal structure of the film, its écriture, produces a transgression of “the
image of the master” which an analytical deconstruction of the dominant
system of representation is capable of revealing. Hence, while Visconti’s film
itself remains at the level of “bourgeois obscenity,” which in fact “compromises
only the specular identification, the narcissism of the bourgeois spectator,”
its deconstructionist reading can produce a dialectical reversal of bourgeois
ideology. The political function of the analysis undertaken by Daney/Oudart is
thus here overtly stated: “in a bourgeois society which has not accomplished its
economic/political revolution, the analytical description of this symptomatic
production constitutes the only outside/real of its ideology.”75

Works Cited

Olivier Assayas, “Sic transit Gloria N.,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 355 (January 1981),
pp. 20-25.
Jacques Aumont, “Tobie et le diable (Histoires extraordinaires),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 203 (August 1968), pp. 62-63.
———, “Le plaisir et le jeu,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (August 1970), pp. 7-10.
———, Notre Dame des Turcs (Lyons: Aléas, 2010).

74 Ibid., pp. 91-92 [pp. 322-323].

75 Ibid. [pp. 323-324].
540  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

——— and Sylvie Pierre, “Huit fois deux,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 206 (Novem-
ber 1968), pp. 30-34.
Georges Bataille, L’Anus solaire (Paris: Éditions de la Galérie Simon, 1931).
Pierre Baudry, “Un avatar du sens (Fellini-Satyricon),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219
(April 1970), pp. 56-57.
———, “Tristana: Notes sur son dossier de presse,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223
(August 1970), pp. 24-27.
Carmelo Bene, interviewed by Jean Narboni, “Carmelo Bene: Nostra Signora dei
Turchi,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 206 (November 1968), pp. 25-26.
———, interviewed by Noël Simsolo, “Entretiens: Carmelo Bene: Capricci,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 213 (June 1969), pp. 18-19.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Le curé de la guillotine,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (August 1970),
pp. 5-7.
———, “L’expérience en intérieur (Dernier Tango à Paris, La Grande Bouffe, La
Maman et la Putain),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 247 (July-August 1973), pp. 33-36.
———, “Mémoire de l’œil (Amarcord),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 251-252 (July-
August 1974), pp. 75-76.
———, “Le rhinoceros et la voix,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 356 (February 1981), pp. 14-17.
———, La Vision partielle (Paris: Capricci, 2015).
Nick Browne, “Introduction: The Politics of Representation: Cahiers du Cinéma
1969-1972,” in idem. (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of
Representation (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 1-20.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le médecin malgré lui (Three on a Couch),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 186 (January 1967), pp. 67-68. Translated as “Le médecin malgré lui (Three
on a Couch),” Cahiers du Cinéma in English no. 11 (July 1967), pp. 57-59.
———, “Le Petit Journal,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 197 (Christmas 1967-January 1968),
p. 21.
———, “La mort-clown,” La Quinzaine littéraire no. 115 (April 1-15, 1971), p. 28.
Serge Daney, “Frank et Jerry (Who’s Minding the Store?),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 156
(June 1964), pp. 56-58.
———, “Un rien sur fond de musique douce (Family Jewels),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 175 (February 1966), pp. 36-37. Translated as “A Nothing on a Ground of Soft
Music,” Cahiers du Cinéma in English no. 4 (1966), p. 33.
———, “Which Way to the Front,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971),
pp. 60-61.
———, “Non réconciliés (Smorgasbord),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 347 (May 1983),
pp. 20-22.
——— and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Le Nom-de-l’Auteur: à propos de la ‘place’ de Mort
à Venise,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 234-235 (December 1971-January-February 1972),
pp. 79-92. Translated as “The Name of the Author: On the ‘Place’ of Death in
Venice,” trans. Joseph Karmel, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol.
The Defense and Critique of Cinematic Modernism 541

III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 306-324.
Hereeafter CDC III.
Michel Delahaye and Jean Narboni, “C’est la révolution, ou l’année en huit jours,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 202 (June-July 1968), pp. 56-65.
Bernard Eisenschitz, “Which Way to the Front (Ya ya mon général),” La Nouvelle
Critique no. 40 (January 1971), p. 72. Translated as “Which Way to the Front (1970),”
trans. Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema no. 79 (July 2016), sensesofcinema.
com/2016/jerry-lewis/which-way-to-the-front/ (accessed January 1, 2021).
Philippe Garrel, “Vers un livre blanc du cinéma français,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 200-
201 (April-May 1968), pp. 73-93.
———, “Le Petit Journal,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 200-201 (April-May 1968), p. 103.
———, interviewed by Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni and Jacques Rivette,
“Cerclé sous vide: entretien avec Philippe Garrel,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204
(September 1968), pp. 44-54, 63.
Jean-Luc Godard, “Hollywood ou mourir (Hollywood or Bust),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 73 (July 1957), pp. 44-46. Translated as “Hollywood or Bust,” in idem., Godard
on Godard, trans. and ed. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1972), pp. 57-59.
Eduardo de Gregorio, “Sous le signe du scorpion,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212
(May 1969), p. 7.
Pascal Kané, “Sous le signe du scorpion: présentation,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228
(March-April 1971), pp. 43-45.
———, “Sous le signe du scorpion: présentation (suite et fin),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 230 (June 1971), pp. 46-50.
Pierre Kast, “A Farewell to the Movies,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 200-201 (April-
May 1968), pp. 13-18.
Julia Kristeva, “Une poétique ruinée,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, La Poétique de Dostoïevski
(Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp. 5-27.
André S. Labarthe, “Lewis, Jerry,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 150-151 (December 1963-Janu-
ary 1964), p. 142.
Gérard Leblanc, “Direction,” Cinéthique no. 5 (September-October 1969), pp. 1-8.
Translated as “Direction,” trans. Susan Bennett, Screen vol. 12 no. 3 (Autumn
1972), pp. 121-130.
Abner Lepetit, “Chut!,” Positif no. 104 (April 1969), p. 51.
Jerry Lewis, interviewed by Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames, “Rencontre entre
l’ordre et le désordre,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 160 (November 1964), pp. 24-26.
Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann, trans. Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin
Press, 1964).
Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: Maspéro, 1966).
Translated as A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London:
Routledge, 1978).
Luc Moullet, “Le Congrès de Cannes,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 213 (June 1969), pp. 31-35.
542  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Jean Narboni, “Vers l’impertinence,” Cahiers du cinéma 196 (December 1967), p. 4.

Translated as “Towards Impertinence,” trans. Norman King, in Jim Hillier (ed.),
Cahiers du Cinéma vol. II: The 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hol-
lywood (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 300-302.
———, “Le récit empêché (The Big Mouth),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 197 (Christmas
1967-January 1968), p. 57.
———, “Le lieu dit,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 204 (September 1968), p. 42.
———, “Partner (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italie),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 206 (Novem-
ber 1968), p. 33.
———, “Le nom,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 40-42.
Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Le mythe et l’utopie,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969),
p. 35.
———, “Les privilèges du maître (Partner),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970),
pp. 55-56.
———, “Jeux de mots, jeux de maîtres,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 223 (August 1970),
pp. 13-17. Translated as “Word Play, Master Play,” trans. Joseph Karmel, in CDC
III, pp. 137-145.
———, “Sur Le Sauveur,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 232 (October 1971), pp. 4-13.
Dominique Païni, “Lettre sur Les Clowns,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (June 1971),
pp. 64-65.
Sylvie Pierre, “Les deux colonnes,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 37-40.
———, “L’homme aux clowns,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (June 1971), pp. 48-51.
———, interviewed by Bill Krohn, “Interview with Sylvie Pierre,” Senses of Cinema
no. 23 (December 2002), sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/pierre/
(accessed January 1, 2021).
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer, Bernard Eisenschitz
and Jean Narboni, “Entretien avec Paolo et Vittorio Taviani,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 228 (March-April 1971), pp. 28-42.
Serge Toubiana, “Le ballon rouge (Novecento),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 270 (September-
October 1976), pp. 58-60.
18. Encountering the World Through
Cinema

Abstract
As with Chapter 17, this chapter looks at works of contemporary modernist
cinema, but the geographical focus is shifted from Western Europe to other
parts of the world: the Eastern bloc, Latin America and Japan. While a
certain degree of cultural alienation is unavoidable in their consideration
of f ilms from these regions, certain directors also became key points
of reference for Cahiers during this period. The years 1968-1970 saw an
intense interest in the work of Miklós Jancsó, with Jean-Louis Comolli
and others writing at length on its thematization of Hungarian history
and its formal rooting in direct cinema techniques, while Glauber Rocha
and the cinema novo of Brazil was heralded (especially by Sylvie Pierre)
as a highly politicized and visually exhilarating movement. But it was
Japense cinema, and most notably the films of Nagisa Oshima, that was
of most interest, captivating Cahiers critics such as Pascal Bonitzer with
their combination of political radicalism and psychoanalytic symbolism.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, Miklós Jancsó, Third Cinema, Glauber

Rocha, Japanese cinema, Nagisa Oshima

The Cinema of Eastern Europe

Daney/Oudart’s text marked the definitive statement of the Marxist-Leninist

Cahiers’ views on the modern cinema of the major Western European nations,
with France and Italy serving as the pre-eminent sites for this mode of film
production. The journal’s interest in modernist and avant-garde filmmaking,
however, extended beyond the cinematic “First World” of Western Europe
and North America and into many other geographical areas. This interest
was not quite global in nature; Cahiers was indisputably prone to territorial
blind spots. Despite being one of the most prolific film industries in the

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch18
544  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

world, South Asian cinema, for instance, was never adequately addressed
by the journal. Apart from sporadic articles such as Bonitzer’s review of
Sembene’s Le Mandat, African and Middle Eastern cinema only appeared
on the critics’ radar later in the 1970s, while the complications of Cahiers’
approach towards Chinese cinema in its Maoist and post-Maoist periods has
already been discussed in Part II. Three non-Western regions nonetheless
featured prominently in the journal’s coverage of contemporary cinema
during its Marxist period: Eastern Europe, Latin America and Japan. In all
three cases, the journal emphasized the work of selected filmmakers—for
the most part belonging to the generation beginning their careers in the
1960s—rather than the national productions of these areas more broadly.
Indeed, such films were largely discussed not in terms of their national
specificity but as part of a global movement contesting the cinematic status
quo. In the case of f ilms from the Eastern bloc, of course, the political
dynamic was the reverse of that which obtained in the West: there, radical
filmmakers were not resisting against a capitalist order but bristled at the
stifling nature of communist rule. While Cahiers had a complex, shifting
relationship with the French Communist Party, it had a consistently negative
attitude towards the regimes of Eastern Europe and frequently defended
the work of “dissident” filmmakers in these countries.
The 1960s was a fertile period for “new cinema” in countries such as
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary. The Cahiers writers were
quick to engage with the output of emerging filmmakers from these nations,
focusing in particular on the work of Jerzy Skolimowski, Věra Chytilová,
Dušan Makavejev and, above all, Miklós Jancsó. The critical engagement
with these filmmakers began in 1966, when Narboni’s programmatic text
“Les trois âges” included Skolimowski alongside Groulx, Bertolucci and
Bellochio as major figures in the “new cinema,” which was judged to be a
global inheritor of the legacy of Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle
vague. The oneiric universe of the Polish director’s early films was compared
by Narboni, in consummate Cahiers fashion, to both the novels of Kafka and
the films of Howard Hawks, with the critic claiming that “we have rarely felt
ourselves to be pressed with so much force towards the limits of the screen
by the recollections of lost time, the sarabande of memories, of progressive
renunciations, of Eurydices lost, found and lost once more.” For Narboni, the
“kaleidoscopic succession of strange, unexplained, incoherent characters”
that populates Skolimowski’s films enters into a productive tension with
the filmmaker’s will to “adhere to surrounding reality” through a camera
technique that “responds to the continuity of a space maintained in its
Encountering the World Through Cinema 545

integrality, never broken up, but constantly moving, fluid, compromised,

subjected to brusque dilations and amplifications.”1
Narboni’s text served to ignite the journal’s passionate interest in the
Pole, to the extent that 1967 can almost be seen as the year of Skolimowski
at Cahiers. In the July-August issue, Cahiers published an interview with
the filmmaker, while Comolli and Daney reviewed his films Barrier and Le
Départ respectively. Comolli followed Narboni’s line of analysis by asserting
that “everything happens as if the realist dimension of Barrier was none other
than its oneirism,” a dialectic achieved through the film’s “metamorphosis of
space and its play with white and black leader.”2 Shot in Belgium with Jean-
Pierre Léaud in a starring role, Le Départ finds a more lukewarm response
from Daney, who ascribes some of its weaknesses to the shift in the filming
location.3 After his following production Hands Up! was banned in Poland
later that year, Skolimowski was forced into permanent exile, and for a time
he failed to elicit the same degree of enthusiasm from Cahiers. At the 1982
Cannes film festival, however, Skolimowski made a lightning-bolt-like return
to Cahiers’ critical consciousness with Moonlighting, a film whose political
immediacy and cinematic deftness left a deep impression on the journal’s
critics. Bonitzer had no hesitation in declaring it to be “undoubtedly the
most perfect, and perhaps the most profound, film presented at Cannes,”
one whose “strange intersection of immigrant and British humor” placed
it in the “great vein of Chaplin.”4 Writing for Libération, Daney similarly
pointed to Skolimowski’s “Tatiesque taste for the full-frame gag” while also
pointing to the film’s affinities with another genre: “[Skolimowski] has above
all invented a genre that was lacking in the panoply of modern fictions:
the socialist crime film. What one wouldn’t do for ‘a few zlotys more’!”5 It
was Narboni, however, for whom Skolimowski’s work would leave the most
indelible mark. Narboni’s retrospective look at the “new cinema” of the 1960s
for Les années pop gives Skolimowski’s films, and Walkover in particular, a

1 Jean Narboni, “Les trois âges,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 178 (May 1966), pp. 58-59, here p. 59.
2 Jean-Louis Comolli, “La remontée d’Orphée: à propos de La Barrière,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 192 (July-August 1967), p. 41.
3 Serge Daney, “Moins par moins égale plus: à propos du Départ,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 192
(July-August 1967), p. 42.
4 Pascal Bonitzer, “Notes sur quelques films de Cannes qui ont marqué. Et sur d’autres qui
ont moins marqué,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 337 (June 1982), pp. 11-16, here p. 13.
5 Serge Daney, “Pour quelques zlotys de plus…,” Libération, May 21, 1982, Repr. in idem., La
Maison cinéma et le monde vol. II: Les Années Libé 1981-1985, ed. Patrice Rollet (Paris: P.O.L., 2005),
pp. 623-625, here pp. 624-625.
546  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

prominent place in the movement,6 while a text providing an overview of

Skolimowski’s career published the same year tackled the question of the
national status of a filmmaker who has spent much of his working life in
exile from his native country:

So what nationality is Skolimowski? A nomad, a stateless person, a cosmo-

politan, a citizen of the world, a wandering non-Jew, an exile everywhere
he is? We can propose the hypothesis that he is irreducibly Polish, but
perhaps in the sense in which Jarry understood it in his introduction to
Ubu (the points the two artists have in common are considerable), when
he described Poland as a “land legendary enough to be nowhere, or at
least far off, an interrogative somewhere,” clarifying that this “nowhere
is everywhere, and the country where one finds oneself first of all.”

In Narboni’s view, “it would be difficult to find a better description” for

Skolimowski’s relationship to Poland than this passage from Jarry.7
The work of Vera Chytilová came to the attention of Cahiers in near
simultaneity with that of Skolimowski. Indeed, occasional Cahiers contribu-
tor Paul-Louis Martin’s 1966 review of Something Different even spoke of an
“Eastern” school consisting principally of these two filmmakers, Forman and
Szabo: “Although different in their style, these directors have in common an
exigency which takes root in the respect for film art. The ‘Eastern’ cinema has
the courage and the merit of being beautiful to the first degree without losing
anything in depth.”8 The journal’s exposure to Daisies—which screened at
international festivals despite domestic difficulties with the Czechoslovak
censors—led to Daney sketching out a comparison between it and Chyti-
lová’s first film in the September 1967 issue: to the grey austerity and rigor of
Something Different is contrasted the “orgy of colors” and arbitrary madness
of her new film, with Daney also ascribing the “incoherencies of the story
and the strangeness of the situations” in Daisies to Chytilová’s modernist
aesthetics.9 The critical response to her films, however, mostly took the
form of interviews. Daney himself spoke with Chytilová for an interview

6 See Jean Narboni, “Les futurs antérieurs,” in Jean-Louis Comolli, Gérard Leblanc and Jean
Narboni, Les années pop: Cinéma et politique: 1956-1970 (Paris: BPI/Centre Pompidou, 2001),
pp. 9-20.
7 Jean Narboni, “Jerzy Skolimowski et la fuite impossible,” Cinéma 03 (2002), pp. 61-73, here
p. 63.
8 Paul-Louis Martin, “De la gymnastique au cinéma (O nece jinem),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 181
(August 1966), p. 64.
9 Serge Daney, “À propos de Vera Chytilová,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 193 (September 1967), p. 59.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 547

accompanying his piece on her film,10 a dialogue that was continued in

February 1969, this time in a conversation with Chytilová conducted by
Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette. Rivette’s exchanges with Chytilová
are particularly fascinating for documenting an encounter of ideas between
two filmmakers whose respective styles bore striking parallels with each
other. Rivette’s admiration for the Czechoslovak’s work is palpable, but
the legacy of the Hegelian philosophical outlook that defined his earlier
criticism for Cahiers is also on view, as he reads Chytilová’s work through
the lens of an overriding logic of contradiction. Rivette tells Chytilová, for
instance, that “the idea of transformation and metamorphosis, which is the
central idea of [Something Different] is also true for reality” and that it is this
“contradiction that pushes you to act, and thus to go in a certain direction.”11
Similarly, he praises Daisies for refusing “the schematic and theoretical
side that it could have had” and instead being an “interrogation” where the
spectator questions the very nature of truth: “In the beginning we have a
principle that would risk being a pure clockwork system, but by the end it
has become literally incarnated, it has become something organic, living,
with this spontaneous and mysterious side that something living always
has.”12 More particularly, Rivette notes the lack of individuation given to
the two main characters, and, following Chytilová’s claim that “the number
two, which is the smallest quantity, is that which allows us to say the most
things,” Rivette responds that the theme of the couple in her work is present
in order to “lead people, if they initially thought that the two women are
different, to discover that they are in fact very close to each other, and if
they initially thought that they were similar, to make them discover that
they are different.” With a suitably dialectical locution, he concludes that
Chytilová’s “manner of showing things” results in the spectator “thinking,
by the end, in an opposite way to how they thought in the beginning.”13
In a short notice the same year, Rivette also gave expression to Cahiers’
enthusiasm for the cinema of Titoist Yugoslavia, but while he affirmed
that “(almost) every Yugoslavian film interests us a priori,” he lamented
that the French distribution system saw fit to release three films by the
inauspicious Aleksandar Petrovic while withholding the latest Makavejev

10 Vera Chytilová, interviewed by Serge Daney, “Entretien avec Vera Chytilová,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 193 (September 1967), pp. 60-62.
11 Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien avec Vera Chytilová,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 198 (February 1968), pp. 46-57, here p. 49.
12 Ibid., p. 50.
13 Ibid., p. 73.
548  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

from view.14 The years 1966-1969 had seen solid critical support from Cahiers
for the Belgrade-born director’s early films. Aumont, for instance, viewed
the écriture of Switchboard Operator as being “emblematic” of the young
cinema, comparing the “profound modernity” of its narrative openness to
the work of Skolimowski and Chytilová, as well as Bergman, Godard and
Lewis.15 Even the found-footage curio Innocence Unprotected elicited a
panegyric from Cahiers, with Dominique Noguez comparing the modernist
gesture embodied in his paracinematic “re-vision” of a 1940s Serbo-Croatian
melodrama to the discovery of the Douanier Rousseau by Apollinaire or the
defense of art brut by Dubuffet.16 By the time, however, that Makavejev’s
most celebrated film, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, was released in France,
Cahiers had turned its back on the Yugoslavian filmmaker. Writing from the
Maoist perspective of 1972, Bonitzer and Narboni delivered a stinging rebuke
of W.R.: not only was it “anti-communist,” “anti-Marxist” and—perhaps most
unforgivably—“anti-Freudian,” it was also “an incredibly dumb film.” The
Cahiers writers even feigned wonder at seeing “the delirious enthusiasm
that this consumer by-product aimed at the ‘enlightened’ bourgeoisie has
unanimously inspired in the press,” a phenomenon that was ascribed to
“bourgeois critical gossip [having] warmly received its purgative petty-
bourgeois anarchist complement.”17

Developments in the Jancsó Line

The Eastern European filmmaker of most interest to Cahiers in its Marxist

period was indisputably Miklós Jancsó. Combining an énoncé steeped in a
materialist analysis of Hungarian history with the systematic deployment
of a formal method that was at a distinct remove from the “transparency”
of classical cinema, Jancsó’s films had an irresistible appeal for the journal.
As with Makavajev, an initial period of fervent support for the Hungarian’s
œuvre was followed by a moment of robust critique—although in Jancsó’s
case, the strictures were far more considered and theoretically rigorous

14 Jacques Rivette, “Bice skoro propest Sveta,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 213 (June 1969), p. 65.
15 Jacques Aumont, “Lecture à plusieurs voies (Une affaire de cœur),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 197
(Christmas 1967-January 1968), pp. 88-89, here p. 88. Translated as “Several Routes to a Reading:
Switchboard Operator,” trans. Diana Matias, in Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. II, pp. 303-306,
here p 304.
16 Dominique Noguez, “Le cinéma (re)trouvé,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), pp. 23-24.
17 Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni, “W.R., les mystères de l’organisme,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 240 (July-August 1972), p. 66.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 549

than they were in the disparagement of W.R. The journal’s first in-depth
response to Jancsó, Pierre’s review of The Round-Up (which was also her
first published article for Cahiers) already pointed to the “absolutism” of
the formal system established by Jancsó, with its extended long takes,
circular camera movements and carefully choreographed on-screen action,
which the budding critic saw as “not only the subject but the very principal
of his f ilm.” While commending Jancsó’s technical mastery, Pierre also
had reservations about it, expressing her concern that such a system
could prove to exhibit an “unpleasant complaisance” and a “somewhat
sober closure onto itself.”18 These qualms were swept aside in Cahiers’
subsequent embrace of Jancsó’s work, spearheaded by Comolli. On the
basis of personally witnessing Jancsó’s shooting method, having visited
the set of Silence and Cry for an episode he directed of André S. Labarthe’s
series Cinéma de notre temps, Comolli linked the Hungarian’s work to the
“direct” approach of documentary filmmakers in part two of his article
“Le détour par le direct.” Certainly, Comolli acknowledges, there would
seem to be little trace of any “interference by the direct cinema” in Jancsó’s
f ilming method, with its use of professional actors, post-synchronized
dialogues, elaborate staging and camerawork and the predominance of
plastic elements such as framing and chiaroscuro effects. But the critic
contends that this opposition is negated by the modalities of Jancsó’s
shooting method, and more particularly the relation of the camera to
the action it films: “We know that, most of the time and in the essential
moments in the film, Jancsó does not prepare, nor does he pre-envisage,
pre-design (or, with all the more reason, pre-destine) his shots. He shoots
them. In other words, the action that is to be f ilmed does not have an
existence prior to its f ilming but is strictly contemporaneous with it:
the question ceases to be one of action to be filmed and becomes filmed
action.” The script for a Jancsó f ilm, in Comolli’s telling, is only a short
treatment of several pages giving a rough outline of the narrative; it is
only upon the selection of a scene and the setting up of the camera rails
that the sequence comes to be “executed like a ballet,” with the use of
post-synchronized sound allowing Jancsó to shout orders to his cast and
crew while the camera is rolling. In such a f ilming system, “there is no
‘pre-f ilmic world’ […] before which the cinema would place itself and
from which it would draw the f ilm, but very exclusively a f ilmic world,

18 Sylvie Pierre, “L’ordre et l’ordinateur (Les Sans-espoir),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 187 (Febru-
ary 1967), pp. 67-68, here p. 68.
550  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

produced by the film, and in the film, simultaneously and conjointly with
the making of the film.”19
The following month (May 1969), much of Cahiers was given over to a
discussion of Jancsó’s work. The journal published an extended interview
with the filmmaker in which Jancsó, while taking great pains to explain
the historical and political context of his films, equally insists that “what
interests me the most is [their] form” and further clarifies that if he seeks
“the greatest simplicity and the greatest sobriety in the form, then this
is an attempt to eliminate the sentimental romanticism that we have so
often utilized in the past, in order to pull the public along by the nose.”20
This discussion was accompanied by Comolli’s text “Développements de
la ligne Jancsó,” which addresses Jancsó’s adaptation of his system for his
newer films, The Confrontation and Sirocco. Comolli rejects the idea that
Jancsó is simply applying a pre-constituted, thematically neutral style to
new narrative material. Rather, it is the filming method itself that creates
the subject matter of these works: “Not only is it the subject of the film that
adapts itself to […] the method, which is bent towards it, but, more than
this, […] it flows from it, it is the effect of the method, as if inscribed in it
and written by it.”21 More than a mere style, then, Jancsó’s formal system is
a “working method” and acts as a “political reading” of the subject matter
even before his films are “read” by viewers and critics. In a reversal of the
traditional signifier/signified nexus, the meaning of Jancsó’s films thus
primarily emanates from their formal operations rather than their content—
a content that, in any case, presents a highly abstracted depiction of power
relations. This system is nonetheless nuanced in Jancsó’s more recent films,
invested as they are in more historically proximate, politically charged
events. Both The Confrontation, which charts the formation of a People’s
College immediately after the establishment of communist rule in 1945, and
Sirocco, with its focus on a right-wing anarchist group in the 1930s, address
the often vexatious group dynamics present in political movements, a theme
that is represented on-screen by the intricate criss-crossing movements of
the camera and the actors.
The claims Comolli made for the relationship between Jancsó’s filming
method and the political signified of his films nonetheless came under

19 The above quotes are from Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le détour par le direct (2),” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), pp. 40-45, here pp. 41-42 [p. 237].
20 Miklós Jancsó, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jean-Louis Comolli, “Entretiens avec
Miklós Jancsó,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 17-31, here p. 18.
21 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Développements de la ligne Jancsó,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212
(May 1969), p. 32.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 551

scrutiny by his colleagues the following year. A dossier tellingly titled

“Lectures de Jancsó, hier aujourd’hui,” with contributions by Oudart, Pierre,
Kané, Narboni and Comolli, dominated the journal’s April 1970 issue, and
the polyphonic nature of this set of texts was a manifest reflection of the
diverse viewpoints on Jancsó within the ranks of the journal’s editorial
board. Pierre and Kané continued to give a guarded defense of the film-
maker, with the former defining the paradoxical nature of his work as both
a “cinema of the individual and of everything opposed to the individual,”
a dialectic that allows the Hungarian to reach heights of both abstraction
and realism.22 Oudart, however, was far more antipathetic in his appraisal of
the Hungarian, defining Jancsó’s cinema as a “technique of re-presentation”
which functions as a “reduced model” of thinking on historical and politi-
cal questions. His films, rather than questioning their status as aesthetic
objects, content themselves with “displaying the mechanism of [their]
functioning” and thus persist as an “(absolutely naïve) representation of an
almost linear model of écriture.” The filmmaker’s sinuous camera movements
serve merely as lures of a materialist dialectic, masking the fact that his
œuvre is actually governed by an “indefinitely displaced Manichaeism”
which is part of a representational model that “passes off as complexity
what is merely mechanical complication.” The task of the critic seeking
a dismantling of cinematic creation is therefore to interrogate the seduc-
tive nature of these films—their “permanent and dazzling” mobility that
masks from the spectator “the poverty of the grid that Jancsó applies”—and
their phantasmal production of “a kind of reduced model allowing us to
hypostatize at leisure a knowledge (structuralist, Marxist), a method of
reading, and a representation of reality and of the cinematic object as we
ourselves produce it by means of these aids.”23
In this internal polemic, Narboni opted to side with Oudart’s stringent
stance on Jancsó while also placing the debates around the methods adopted
by the filmmaker within their underlying philosophical context. In Narboni’s
view, while Jancsó’s films can be considered “prototypes of a modern écri-
ture,” the filmmaker’s claims about their potential cognitive effect on the
spectator, their capacity to teach the public about the dynamics of history
from an ostensibly materialist standpoint, align them with “structuralist

22 Sylvie Pierre, “Chacun son chemin,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 33-35, here
p. 34. See also Pascal Kané, “Discours, pouvoir, scène,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970),
pp. 35-37.
23 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “La place,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 30-33, here p. 32.
Translated as “The Place,” trans. Joseph Karmel, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III,
pp. 89-95, here pp. 92-93.
552  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

activity,” which has “defined itself in recent years as the construction of a

‘simulacrum’ of the object, and the simulacrum itself as simply ‘intellect
added to the object.’”24 The structuralist approach has the drawback of of-
fering a static, mechanistic and “thoroughly positivist” model that “separates
structure from its very determination,” and Narboni argues that such a
notion has been rejected and superseded by contemporary Marxist and
psychoanalytic theories, in particular Lacan protégé Jacques-Alain Miller’s
notion of metonymic causality.25 The result is that Jancsó’s films in fact
remain beholden to an outmoded, pre-Marxist concept of history, in which
the political superstructure rests on an “abstract, transcendental, universal
law” that reduces historical analysis to a series of solipsistic questions
and answers. Like Oudart, Narboni thus reads Jancsó’s formal system as a
lure, and only a “‘mystified” critical discourse can misconceive its closed
cyclicality as the “suspension of meaning” typical of an “open work.”26
It was natural that Comolli should respond to these critiques of Jancsó,
which by implication also targeted his earlier, far more positive considera-
tions of the filmmaker’s work. In his “Autocritique,” the Cahiers editor assents
to many of these animadversions, admitting that “attempts at criticism
(mine among them) confined themselves almost without exception to what
immediately struck the eye.” What “critics” (that is, Comolli himself) found
“fascinating” and “reassuring” in Jancsó’s work was “what it sought to grasp
in the modern cinema: filmic functioning.” In doing so, however, his reading
“could settle rather naïvely for a simple description of that functioning in
place of its analysis,” which was the result of a “too perfect equation of
critical discourse with the discourse of the films.”27 In his new text, therefore,
Comolli refuses a “mirror-like circularity of film system/reading system”
and concomitantly questions the “status of the referent” in Jancso’s work.28
All of Jancsó’s films, for Comolli, are marked by a “double referent.” They
depict both the historical moment that they purport to describe and the

24 Jean Narboni, “Comment faire,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 38-40, here
pp. 38-39. Translated as “How to,” trans. Leigh Hafrey, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol.
III, pp. 95-99, here p. 95.
25 See Alain Badiou, Le Concept de modèle: Introduction à une épistémologie matérialiste des
mathématiques (Paris: Maspero, 1969). The origins of the concept of “metonymic causality”
are open to dispute, but in Lire le Capital, Althusser credits it to a seminar given by Miller. See
Althusser et al., Lire le Capital, p. ix.
26 Ibid., pp. 39-40 [pp. 97, 99].
27 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Autocritique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 40-45, here
pp. 40-41. Translated as “Autocritique,” trans. Nancy Kline Piore, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du
Cinéma vol. III, pp. 99-111, here p. 99-100.
28 Ibid., p. 42 [p. 102].
Encountering the World Through Cinema 553

contemporary reality of Hungary, which is marked above all by the major

“non-said” in Jancsó’s work: Stalinism. Jancsó’s films are symptomatic of
the lack of a theoretical account of the phenomenon of Stalinism within
the communist movement, foreclosed by the superficial de-Stalinization
of the Khrushchev era; instead, the filmmaker replaces this absent analysis
with an abstract equation between power and repression. In Comolli’s
view, however, this dynamic changes with The Confrontation. Here, for the
first time in Jancsó’s œuvre, the question of the bureaucratic degeneration
of the communist movement is directly addressed without the need for
allegorical circumlocution, and such a shift in the status of the referent
leads to the dismantling and transformation of Jancsó’s formal system: “The
difference is striking. For the first time, the characters speak and conduct
a discourse; they are no longer the echoes of the filmmaker’s orders to his
actors. Political arguments, tactical ideas confront each other, but in the
words and conduct of the characters. They are no longer reduced and paired
according to absence/presence in the field, they are not interchangeable
or equivalent.” From now on, Jancsó’s system “no longer exists […] except
in a residual form.”29
In spite of his defense of The Confrontation, it is no overstatement to see
Comolli’s assent to the critiques of Jancsó made by Oudart and Narboni
as a turning point in the evolution of Cahiers. Not only did the internal
debate reflect, as Narboni recognized, the journal’s turn away from the
structuralist paradigm of the 1960s towards the “post-structuralist” or
“ultra-structuralist” theoretical framework of Althusser, Lacan and Kristeva,
it was also indicative of a broader shift in attitudes within Cahiers. From
the eclecticism and openness that marked the period between 1963 and
1969, in which the critics conceived of their task as the militant defense
of films that broadly shared their vision of the cinema, Cahiers became
increasingly critical, even censorious, and this tendency saw the field of
cinematic works that found the journal’s support become ever narrower,
leading to the “commissar-style” condemnations of the Maoist period. As
for Jancsó, his work went from being the center of impassioned debate in
1970 to being summarily forgotten about. Unlike other filmmakers, the
Hungarian received no critical rehabilitation later in the 1970s—his turn
away from the sober modernism of the 1960s to the hedonistic erotica of
films such as Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù singularly failed to arouse the
journal’s interest. Years later, Daney would lament, “Indeed, who remembers
Jancsó’s films? […] We had thought of everything but this: these films could

29 Ibid., p. 45 [pp. 107-108].

554  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

disappear.”30 But this oblivion was one in which Cahiers, from 1971 on, was
complicit. All the same, Jancsó’s work has had an enduring impact on one
Cahiers critic: Comolli, precisely, whose films, with their propensity for
structured long takes, bear stylistic traces of the interest that he had taken
in the Hungarian’s films as a critic.

Latin American Cinema: Pierre’s Paean to Glauber Rocha

As with Eastern Europe, the political situation in Latin America was remote
from that of France. In this case, however, it was not the Iron Curtain that
was the source of this distance but the divide between the First and the
Third Worlds. Latin American cinema was thus unavoidably read through
the lens of the continent’s struggle against Western imperialism. And yet
the most thoroughgoing attempt to conceive of the cinema of Third World
nations as part of the anti-imperialist political movement—the notion of a
militant “third cinema” espoused by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino
in their manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema”—found little resonance in
Cahiers. In March 1969, an interview with Solanas appeared, accompanied
by an article by Le Monde critic and occasional Cahiers collaborator Louis
Marcorelles, who, more susceptible to the appeal of third cinema, hailed La
Hora de los hornos as “probably the greatest historical film made to this day.”31
But this enthusiasm did not extend to the core editorial team at Cahiers: as
noted in Chapter 8, Bonitzer had a much more muted—although far from
dismissive—reaction to the Argentine essay film in his text “Film/politique.”
In contrast, the Brazilian cinema novo had a profound and lasting impact
on the Cahiers writers, above all Sylvie Pierre, who after moving to Brazil
in 1971 fostered deep ties of friendship with many of the most prominent
figures in the movement.
As with the work of Solanas/Gettino, it was Marcorelles, a significant
advocate of Latin American cinema in France, who introduced the young
filmmakers of Brazil to Cahiers: in 1966, he was responsible, along with the
Rio de Janeiro-based critic Gustavo Dahl, for a dossier on the cinema novo,
which included an introductory text by Marco Bellochio, who spoke of the
“violent necessity” of a political cinema in an underdeveloped nation like
Brazil, a historical overview of the movement by Dahl, and a round-table

30 Serge Daney, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), p. 300.
31 Louis Marcorelles, “L’épreuve du direct,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 210 (March 1969), pp. 37-39,
here p. 38.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 555

discussion with Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Carlos Diegues, Leon Hirszman,

Paulo Cezar Saraceni and Glauber Rocha.32 Of this group, it was Rocha, the
most high-profile member of the cinema novo, who proved to be of greatest
importance to Cahiers, to the extent that he came to stand in metonymically
for the cinema of the entire continent. The Cahiers critics’ appreciation of his
work was not without reservations: reporting on the 1967 Cannes festival,
Daney objected to the “aestheticism, complaisance and preciousness” of
Terra em transe and felt it was a “succession of bravura pieces ‘for nothing’
(or to illustrate this nothing, which amounts to the same thing).”33 The
film was nonetheless programmed in the second “Semaine des Cahiers”
later that year, and space in the journal was given to Rocha himself, with
the publication of the text “Cela s’appelle l’aurore” in November 1967, where
he defined himself as a “tricontinental filmmaker” who intervenes at a
point in history when “the camera opens up the occupied land of the Third
World” and delivers “a discourse that may be imprecise, diffuse, barbaric and
irrational, but whose refusals are all significant.”34 In the same text, Rocha
advocated an “epic-didactic” approach to film aesthetics that would follow
the lead of Godard, a filmmaker who has opened up “a guerrilla front in the
cinema” and who “goes on the attack, brusquely, unexpectedly, with merci-
less films.”35 The dialogue was continued with the release of Antonio das
Mortes in 1969, which occasioned Aumont to hail the “controlled lyricism”
of the film, deriving from its “global organization founded on plenitude and
saturation, and on distance and rarefaction.”36 In the same issue, Cahiers
published a long-form interview with Rocha, which broached both his own
radical aesthetics—based, according to the filmmaker, on the combined
influence of Eisenstein, Brecht and traditional Brazilian folk culture—and
the more pragmatic project of building up an endogenous film industry in

32 See Cahiers du cinéma no. 176 (March 1966), pp. 43-56. The Bellochio quote is on p. 43.
33 Serge Daney, “Terra em transe,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 191 (June 1967), p. 48.
34 Glauber Rocha, “Cela s’appelle l’aurore,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 195 (November 1967), pp. 39-41,
here p. 39. The term “tricontinental” was used in anti-imperialist literature in the 1960s to refer
to the three landmasses of the Third World: Asia, Africa and Latin America. Sylvie Pierre gives
an account of this text’s genesis and her key role in its publication in Cahiers in “Un texte dans
ses histoires,” Trafic no. 100 (Winter 2016), pp. 93-98.
35 Ibid., p. 41. Pierre recalls that the text was written in a kind of “interlanguage” between
French and Portuguese and that she was tasked with transforming it into standard French.
See Sylvie Pierre, “Glauber Rocha par cœur, de tête et dans un corps,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 329
(November 1981), pp. 9-13, here p. 9.
36 Jacques Aumont, “Berlin 69,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 215 (September 1969), pp. 41-46, here
p. 45
556  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Latin America to supplant the domination of Hollywood.37 Godard was

once again a major reference point in the discussion, which is accompanied
by a “post-script” composed by Rocha. Here, the Brazilian recounts, in a
delirious monologue, his experience of the shoot of Godard/Gorin’s Vent
d’est, in which Rocha featured in a key scene of the film where, arms wide
open, he stood at the crossroads of revolutionary film aesthetics and pointed
forward to a cinema where “everything is dangerous, divine, wondrous.”38
While at Cahiers, Pierre only devoted two short texts to Rocha, but her
notules on Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol and Terra em Transe foreshadowed,
in the briefest of passages, her later, more expansive writings on the film-
maker. The former film, for Pierre, “affirmed the mastery of a lyrical poet, a
rare phenomenon in the modern cinema,”39 while the latter was “constructed
on three essential themes: agitation, confusion and élan,” which are present
in the form of “gesticulations, the proliferation and magnification of the
characters, and even, between the shots, through the effect of a montage
founded on these three dynamics.”40 Pierre was, already in the 1960s, a
confirmed “Brazilomaniac.” Indeed, one of her first major articles for Cahiers
addressed the relationship between poetics and politics in Ruy Guerra’s Oz
fuzis.41 As her marriage with Aumont broke down and she became alienated
from the increasingly sectarian politics of her Cahiers colleagues, the South
American nation was a natural magnet, and she later recognized that the
reason behind her decision to leave for Brazil was “because of cinema, of
course. So you could say that the decision arose, in a certain roundabout
way, from being a film critic, since I went towards a country whose cinema
interested me.”42 In the end, Pierre stayed in Brazil from 1971 to 1976, and she
has since made regular returns to the country. Ironically, her refuge from
the oppressive atmosphere of the politicized Cahiers was a nation under
the grip of Médici’s brutal military regime, which imprisoned and tortured
left-wing activists and strictly censored all forms of public expression, the
cinema included. While fêted within cinephile circles as a writer from the
prestigious Cahiers du cinéma, Pierre recalls the shock of being directly
exposed to the violent dictatorship after coming from the politically agitated

37 Glauber Rocha, interviewed by Michel Delahaye, Pierre Kast and Jean Narboni, “Entretien
avec Glauber Rocha,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 214 (July-August 1969), pp. 23-40.
38 Glauber Rocha, “Post-scriptum,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 214 (July-August 1969), p. 40.
39 Sylvie Pierre, “Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 196 (December 1967),
p. 74.
40 Sylvie Pierre, “Terra em transe,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 199 (March 1968), p. 74.
41 Sylvie Pierre, “Poétique et politique (Oz fusis),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 190 (May 1967), p. 66.
42 Pierre, “Interview with Sylvie Pierre.”
Encountering the World Through Cinema 557

but broadly liberal-democratic conditions of France. At a screening of Strike

during a course she gave on Eisenstein in Rio de Janeiro, she was alerted by
an usher to the presence of the secret police in the auditorium: “A shiver
of intense physical terror shot up my spine. I can still feel it in my back, an
absolutely violent sensation.”43
Pierre refrained from writing film criticism during her time in Brazil, but
the ties she forged in the country have had a major impact on the intermittent
texts she has written since her return to France, for both Cahiers and, later,
Trafic. At times, these pieces have been prompted by misfortune: Rocha’s
dramatic death in 1981, at the age of 42, affected the critic profoundly.
According to Pierre’s necrological meditation, Rocha’s life and work was
dominated by a single, overarching question: “Brazilian filmmakers, who
are we? What is the specificity of our message and in what conditions can
we produce, diffuse, reflect, sell, impose on the world an unprecedented
film culture whose character as an authentic expression of a people nothing
can crush, alter, banalize or corrupt, whether from within or without?”44 In
the same text, Pierre also warned that any book on Rocha would necessarily
have to incorporate “the whole history of these twenty years of [Brazilian]
cinema, of which Glauber has been both the main protagonist and the
principal historian,” as well as accounting for the unique psychological
condition, dubbed “Glauberophrenia,” that both gave his films their frenzied
verve and was at the root of the unending chaos of his life. 45 After making
a film on Rocha, L’homme aux cheveux bleus, co-directed with her husband
Georges Ulmann in 1986 and featuring interviews with Aumont, Bonitzer
and Narboni, Pierre did indeed publish a book on the Brazilian filmmaker
in 1987 as part of the Cahiers du cinéma’s publishing enterprise overseen
by Narboni.
Pierre’s monograph could not possibly have fulfilled the conditions laid
out for a book on Rocha in her earlier article; all the same, it is a passionate
monument to a filmmaker who was both an immensely important figure in
the history of the cinema and a close personal friend of the author. Rocha had
even jokingly urged Pierre, as Narboni recalls, to be his Marie Seton.46 The
volume contains a general introduction to Rocha’s work and a biographical
overview of his life, as well as a selection of Rocha’s own critical texts and

43 Ibid.
44 Sylvie Pierre, “Glauber Rocha par cœur, de tête et dans un corps,” p. 12.
45 Ibid., p. 13.
46 Jean Narboni, “Préface,” in Sylvie Pierre, Glauber Rocha (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1987),
pp. 6-7, here p. 7.
558  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

manifestoes, testimonials from his fellow Brazilian cinéastes Carlos Diegues,

Paolo Rocha and Arnaldo Carrilho, and—perhaps most surprisingly—an
homage from then Brazilian president José Sarney Costa, who was an ac-
quaintance of Rocha’s in the 1960s. Glauber Rocha, Pierre’s first and, until
2014, only book-length work, does more than provide a critical overview
of the filmmaker’s œuvre—a task for which Pierre admits to being “one of
the most poorly placed people in the world” on account of her close bond
with Rocha.47 Rather, it seeks to account for the shared vision of the cinema
that underpins the affinity the critic felt for the filmmaker. Rocha’s work
is governed, in Pierre’s view, by a dialectic between two conceptions of the
cinema—the political and the poetic. The first consists of “making cinema
‘such as it should be,’ for the Third World, for Latin America in revolt”; the
second, meanwhile, corresponds more to “a passion for the cinema such as
it is for the poet, and which regards only him, without ceasing, however,
to reveal the specific contradictions of an oppressed culture.”48 The high
point of this dialectic can be found in Terra em transe, aptly described by
Jean-Louis Bory as a “machine-gun opera.” Confessing to having discovered
the film “with the emotion of an ecstatic cinephile,” Pierre pronounces: “I
like it when, sensually, the cinema dances, when it takes off, musically, with
the beating of its wings. And this is what Terra em transe does, from the
beginning to the end. No cinematic work is as close to Stravinsky. Its flight
is frenetic, euphoric, despite its gravity, its suffering, and its grotesquery.
It is beautiful and bad-tempered, like the greatest work of Orson Welles.”49

The Empire of Signs: Japanese New Wave Cinema

The reception of Japanese cinema by Cahiers was determined by an over-

riding contradiction: that between the political and economic traits shared
in common by the Japanese and French nations and the yawning cultural
differences that distanced the two societies from one another. Like France,
Japan had an advanced industrial economy coming to the end of a long
post-war boom, possessed a bourgeois-democratic political system, and
despite a powerful communist party and the rise of a radical student left
movement in the 1960s, was resolutely on the side of the West during the
Cold War. Like its French counterpart, the Japanese film industry had been

47 Pierre, Glauber Rocha, p. 11.

48 Ibid., p. 24.
49 Ibid., pp. 22-23.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 559

a continuously viable concern since the silent era, capable of contesting the
economic domination of Hollywood within the nation’s borders, and as in
France, the country saw the rise of a “new wave” of young filmmakers debut-
ing their work in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While to a certain degree
this movement took inspiration from the nouvelle vague, in other aspects
it was in advance of its French “model.” On the political level, for instance,
many of these films were far more engaged than the relatively apolitical
early works of the “right-bank” filmmakers in France and anticipated the
more radical work of Godard, Rivette and Straub/Huillet later in the 1960s.
Nonetheless, it took time for the Japanese new wave to have an impact
on Cahiers: the cultural insularity of the Japanese studios and the vagaries
of the international distribution circuit conspired to severely hamper the
visibility of these films in France. Once the journal took a vivid interest
in this movement, its knowledge of new Japanese cinema was necessarily
piecemeal: Nagisa Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan, for instance, did not
screen in Paris until 1980, twenty years after it was made, while pertinent
works such as Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968) and The Man Who Left
His Will on Film (1970) were not discussed by the Cahiers critics for the
simple reason that they never received a French release. Cahiers’ occasional
Tokyo correspondent Koichi Yamada endeavored to fill the information
gap and was responsible for a dossier on the cinema of Japan in 1965,50 but
it was only in 1969 that the journal’s writers, prompted by the release of
a swathe of films by the key filmmakers of the Japanese new wave, truly
latched onto a movement that would come to have a prominent place on
the pages of Cahiers.
The pinnacle of this fascination came with Cahiers’ special issue on
Japanese cinema in October 1970. The theoretical tenor of the dossier was
established in the editors’ introduction, which situated the ensuing collection
of texts within a twin theoretical framework. Firstly, there was Derrida’s
critique of ethnocentrism in De la grammatologie, wherein the philosopher
observed the ways in which the “non-phonetic” writing systems of Asia have
“functioned as a sort of European hallucination.”51 Secondly, there were
Barthes’ notes on Japan in L’Empire des signes, in which both the Orient and
the Occident are treated not as “‘realities’ to be compared and contrasted

50 See “Présent et passé du cinéma nippon,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 166-167 (May-June 1965),
pp. 11-49.
51 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit 1967), p. 119. Translated as On Gram-
matology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974),
p. 80.
560  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

historically, philosophically, culturally, politically” but as “symbolic systems,”

the differences between which open up a “fissure” in the symbolic itself,
resulting in an “emptiness of language.”52 The editors also find significant
precursors to their activity in the fascination held by Brecht, Eisenstein and
Artaud for East Asian artistic practices such as theater and calligraphy.53 In
turning their critical eye to a cinema characterized by its radical alterity
from European culture, Cahiers was acutely aware of the twin pitfalls that
this endeavor risked: the first, in line with the notions of the “pure” cinema
of Mizoguchi and Ozu developed by Cahiers writers in the 1950s, was the
universalizing gesture of valorizing the immediately accessible “humanism”
of Japanese filmmakers, while the second took the shape of an Orientalism
that exoticized these films as impenetrably mysterious cultural objects.
Against these skewed approaches, the Cahiers editors saw their critical task
as one of “avoiding ethnocentric, reductionist gestures that consist simply
of hypostasizing pure scriptural effects” and examining Japanese cinema “as
a signifying practice, that is as a body of codified practices, acts of écriture
possessing their own logic.”54
The Cahiers editors freely admitted to the fragmentary and unreliable
nature of their knowledge of the cinema of Japan, let alone its culture more
broadly, and they were open about their ignorance of the relations that
the filmmakers they examined—Susumu Hani, Yasuzo Masamura and
Yoshishige Yoshida—entertained with the Japanese studio system. They
thus insist that the texts in the dossier should be seen as “a first, fragmentary
evaluation of the way in which a certain number of films are important
to us—and put questions to us.” But this admission does not prevent the
Cahiers editors from making some general observations on the subject.
Japanese cinema is understood as being marked by a dual cultural herit-
age. Its adoption of a technological apparatus invented and developed in
Europe and North America means that it is subject to the same analogical
codes of representation and narration as those prevailing in the West. At
the same time, however, certain formal techniques deployed by Japanese
films—the use they make, for instance, of a “partitioned” space, distinct
from the “naturalistic duplication” of Western scenography—not only have a
subversive value when placed in the context of their reception by European

52 Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp. 11, 14. Translated as The Empire
of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 3-4.
53 See La Rédaction, “Cinéma japonais (1),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970), pp. 4-5,
here p. 5. Translated as “Japanese Cinema (1),” trans. Alan Williamson, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers
du Cinéma vol. III, pp. 146-149, here p. 148.
54 Ibid., p. 4 [p. 146].
Encountering the World Through Cinema 561

audiences but also possess a “close relationship with a general problematic of

the sign.”55 With this in mind, the editors point to three cultural specificities
that overdetermine Japanese cinema: firstly, the preponderant place of the
Father Figure (formerly embodied by the Emperor, now by a more generalized
repressive state apparatus); secondly, the absence of a monotheistic notion
of God and, concomitantly, of the Western notion of the subject; finally, a
“sexual configuration which is not regulated by the phallus as principal
signifier” and which thus finds itself decentered and disseminated in the
films in question.
All three of these elements are focal points of the three articles that—
alongside interviews with Yoshida, Masumura and Hani and filmographies
of the latter two directors – comprise the October 1970 dossier. The very
title of Pierre’s text on Masumura, “Japon/castration,” is an indication of
the theoretical optic through which these filmmakers were examined.
The critic begins, however, by highlighting the fragmentary knowledge of
Masumura’s work in France: of the 44 films he had directed at the time of
writing, only two had been commercially distributed in France: The Red
Angel and Love for an Idiot. While these two films necessarily form the
center of Pierre’s discussion, the extent to which they are representative of
Masumura’s broader œuvre must remain an open question. The filmmaker’s
prolific record was partly enabled by his continued association with the
Daiei studio, a commercial strategy which, for Pierre, made for both his
“originality” and his “aberration.”56 While Cahiers tended to denounce
this industrial entryism when practiced in Europe, Pierre argued that the
mass-audience imperatives of the studio system and its ideology of national
amour-propre meant that “at Daiei, where Masumura is employed, it is
Japan that speaks to itself.”57 Masumura’s relationship to the commercial
mode of filmmaking would seem to place his work in line with the classical
Hollywood films analyzed elsewhere by Cahiers, and Pierre even notes that
his relationship with the actress Ayako Wakao has deep affinities with that
between Sternberg and Dietrich. In both cases, the actress repeatedly adopts
the on-screen role of a “castrator.” But whereas films such as Morocco and
Dishonored functioned as an “obsessional discourse” on the purported “battle
of the sexes” (represented through covert, implied allusions to castration),
Masumura’s work, determined by the political situation of post-war Japan

55 Ibid., p. 5 [p. 148].

56 Sylvie Pierre, “Japon/castration,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970), pp. 20-22, here
p. 20.
57 Ibid., p. 21.
562  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

and the national sense of impotence brought about by the country’s military
defeat, is distinguished by conveying a “literal discourse” on the theme, and
it provides the film critic with a “theoretical goldmine” that allows for “the
possibility of recognizing—in the order of a logic of the symbolic—the direct
spelling out of that which, everywhere else, we have to laboriously put back
together again […] through a labyrinth of occultations and displacements.”58
Baudry’s treatment of Hani’s Nanami, The Inferno of First Love also
relies heavily on a psychoanalytic approach: indeed, he opens his text by
claiming that, like Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva, the film is based
on an “exemplary Freudian fiction” in that it recounts “the history of a
denial (Verleugnung) of castration.” For Baudry, however, recognizing the
psychoanalytically legible nature of the narrative is of nugatory critical value;
what counts is, instead, to find out “what kind of cinematography results
from it.” In the case of Nanami, it is not the film’s narrative but its montage
structure—persistently alternating between mundane melodrama and
graphic sexual violence—that eliminates the distinction between dream
and reality and consequently produces a “general floating of signification.”
The “continual irruption of the corporeality of the characters” nonetheless
gives the critic the opportunity to pinpoint a thesis governing the film as a
whole: namely, that “eroticism is the violence of the visible.”59
Bonitzer’s text on Yoshida’s Eros + Massacre continues the policy of
adopting a psychoanalytic framework to discuss contemporary Japanese
cinema, but here it is combined with a Derridean deconstructionist approach.
Expressing himself in a highly literary voice that frequently addresses the
reader directly in the second-person plural, Bonitzer’s “Un film en +” revolves
around the grapheme “+” of the film’s title, which is seen as a motif of the
différance operative in Yoshida’s film.60 Eros + Massacre is marked above
all by intersections: thematically, between the sexual and the political,
narratively, between the two parallel timeframes of the fiction (the 1920s
and the 1960s), and even graphically, with the horizontality of the décor
traversed by the vertical movements of the camera. Indeed, the entire film,
in Bonitzer’s view, is determined by the “division en (+) [surplus division]”
between its narrative movement and its plastic work. Totemic of this situ-
ation is the interaction that takes place between the two couples, despite

58 Ibid., pp. 21-22.

59 Pierre Baudry, “Premier amour, version infernale,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970),
pp. 35-36, here p. 35.
60 Pascal Bonitzer, “Un f ilm en +,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970), pp. 6-9, here
pp. 6-7.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 563

the temporal gulf that separates them: not only does this transgression
of the norms of narrative logic open up a “vertical space where the two
heterogeneous temporalities intersect;” Yoshida’s film is also distinguished
by the fact that he provides no narrative justification for this chronological
infraction, which is instead directly inscribed onto the symbolic logic of
the film. What is more, in Bonitzer’s view it is “precisely verisimilitude […]
which permits this transgression, that is, a productive writing, one that has
not submitted to representation. Cinematic verisimilitude, coded on the
diegetic level by the nineteenth-century novel and on the technical level
by American cinema, constitutes the norm or the bar of prohibition that
the play of the film, the film as play, discontinues.”61

Body Languages: Bonitzer and Oshima

Among the directors of the Japanese new wave, it was Oshima who most
manifestly spoke to the Cahiers critics. Indeed, his formally challenging,
highly politicized work, with a thematic concern for sexual and familial
neurosis, seemed tailor-made for the journal’s Freudo-Marxian critical
prism, even if, as Aumont has noted, “Oshima ceaselessly varies the angle
of attack of these obsessions” and is therefore distinct from “monothematic”
filmmakers such as Rocha and Jancsó.62 Within Cahiers, it was Bonitzer more
than anyone else who took upon himself the task of responding to Oshima’s
work. The critic has related the powerful effect that his first exposure to
the Japanese director’s work had: “I took a new intellectual pleasure upon
viewing the first Oshima films that we saw. […] What interested me was the
use of signs and symbols, and at the same time a kind of violence, energy
and strangeness. There was a very particular usage of the film fantastique,
there was something that exceeded realism.”63 The impact Oshima had on
Bonitzer immediately expressed itself: two articles on Death by Hanging
were written in quick succession in November 1969 and March 1970, thereby
inaugurating an enduring critical dialogue between the filmmaker and
the Cahiers writer. Over the course of fourteen years, Bonitzer dedicated
a total of seven texts to Oshima’s films, which accompanied each of the
director’s major releases in France, and his writings on Oshima have been

61 Ibid.
62 Jacques Aumont, “À propos de Petit Garçon,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218 (March 1970), pp. 35-37,
here p. 37.
63 Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014.
564  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

influential for later studies on the Japanese director.64 Only Bonitzer’s

series of articles on Fellini even came close to the prolonged nature of
this preoccupation with a single filmmaker, and indeed the two directors
were given a privileged position in his 2016 anthology La Vision partielle.
Inversely to Bonitzer’s regard for the “antimodern” cinema of the Italian, the
critic highlights Oshima’s “erotically and politically aggressive modernity,
marked by the cruelty of Japan and the revolt of its youth at the time” and
reminisces that his initial exposure to Oshima’s films was contemporaneous
with his fixation with the writings of Bataille, an author whose perceived
affinities with Oshima were such that Bonitzer could cheekily ask “do we
not rediscover the egg from Histoire de l’Œil in the vagina of the heroine in
In the Realm of the Senses?”65
Bataille’s influence on Bonitzer’s consideration of Oshima’s work was
apparent from his first article on the filmmaker. In its opening sentences,
the November 1969 review of Death by Hanging established the pertinence
of the dialectic between the erotic and the political. Here the critic claims
that the French critical consensus on the film had occluded the former
aspect in favor of an exclusive focus on its political theme, which tended
to reduce Oshima’s film to a partisan pamphlet against the death penalty.
For Bonitzer, by contrast, the signified of Death by Hanging is primarily
erotic, and its political ramifications lie predominantly on the level of the
signifier: “If Oshima’s film is exciting, it is not because his theses contribute
evidence to the dossier on the death penalty, racism and the crimes of
Japanese imperialism, but because his discourse, if it is indeed a discourse,
is deployed on the screen in a never-before-seen manner.” The critic is
further persuaded that “Oshima could not care less about the death penalty
in general;” instead, it is the fact that executions are carried out by hanging
that is of interest to Oshima. The noose in which the condemned man R’s
neck is placed is a graphical zero sign, which Bonitzer reads as “the place
and the sign of Lack (of Desire), the place and the sign of the Crevice, of
Difference (of Death).”66 The “zeromorphic” rope in Death by Hanging is
also a graphic depiction of the state of R’s amnesiac unconscious as well as
the eternal return to zero he suffers through the persistent re-enactment
of his crime by his executioners.

64 See, for instance, Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Bonitzer’s critical response to Oshima is discussed
on pp. 70, 138-139 and 180-183.
65 Bonitzer, La Vision partielle, p. 11.
66 Pascal Bonitzer, “La pendaison,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 217 (November 1969), pp. 59-60, here
p. 59.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 565

This argument is developed further a few months later in “Oshima et les

corps-langages,” which took inspiration from Deleuze’s discussion of Pierre
Klossowski in Logique du sens.67 Here, again, Bonitzer’s reading centers
on the figure of the noose, which the critic reads as “a functional element
of the narration, like a simple machine to separate R from himself.” But
Bonitzer pivots his second text towards the divided subjectivity of R: the
purpose of the executioners is to impel the condemned man to remember
his crime—or, in other words, to impel R’s unconscious psyche to become
a consciousness. This “fictive, fictional division of the subject R” is thus
to be read allegorically on a number of levels. Firstly, it is an expression of
the “juridico(-politico)-religious division between innocent and guilty.”68
Secondly, the split between the id and the ego in R is an analogy for the
disjuncture between the political and the erotic in the film. Thirdly, the
cleavage in R’s own personality produces a gap in the narrative logic of the
film itself, which never finds an adequate resolution, a unified narrative
closure. Finally, in an argument that substantially anticipates the later
influential analysis made of Oshima’s film by Stephen Heath, R’s split sub-
jectivity is an allegory for the situation of the cinema spectators themselves,
divided between their own subjective position and their identification with
the on-screen action.69 In this last reading, the film Death by Hanging is
itself the crime, its writing practice an infraction of the laws governing the
dominant system of representation.
This mode of reading Oshima’s work is deepened by Bonitzer in his 1971
article on The Ceremony, “Cinéma/théâtre/idéologie/écriture.” As with
Narboni’s treatment of Othon, the relationship between theater and modern
cinema dominates Bonitzer’s discussion of The Ceremony, which regards
the film as a symptom of the crisis of mise en scène in modern cinema.70 In
the centerpiece sequence of Oshima’s film, the lack that, for Lacan, is at the
center of any ceremony is inscribed in literal fashion, with the continua-
tion of nuptial rituals in spite of the bride’s disappearance. The supremely

67 See the chapter titled “Pierre Klossowski ou les corps-langages” in Gilles Deleuze, Logique
du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), pp. 325-349. Translated as The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 280-301.
68 Pascal Bonitzer, “Oshima et les corps-langages,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218 (March 1970),
pp. 31-34, here p. 31.
69 See Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Screen vol. 17 no. 3 (Autumn 1976), pp. 68-112, especially
pp. 109-112.
70 The very title of the film, in Bonitzer’s view, designates both a “referential place” and “the
symbolic scene (the scene of the dream).” See Pascal Bonitzer, “Cinéma/théâtre/idéologie/
écriture: à propos de La Cérémonie,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 231 (August-September 1971), pp. 5-12,
here p. 5.
566  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

ironic nature of this scene is such that the foreclosure of representation

is openly avowed by the film, with its overt “absenting of the absent one.”
Concomitantly, The Ceremony is marked by a “double mutilation of classic
filmic space”: not only is its narrative strikingly elliptical but the closed
spatial construction of the film stands in opposition to the “centrifugal”
nature of filmic representation as understood by Bazin. Bonitzer quotes
at length from Bazin’s “Théâtre et cinéma”—including the crucial passage
arguing that “the screen is not a frame as in a painting, but a mask which
only lets us perceive a part of the event”—but he critiques his elder for his
“misrecognition” of the “historico-ideological character of the structures and
effects he describes” and ascribes to Bazin’s text a teleological, technocratic
perspective that sees the cinema as the inevitable Hegelian Aufhebung of
the theater.71
As opposed to this viewpoint, Bonitzer sees the presence of theatrical
closure in modernist cinema as a Derridean supplement to the scenography
produced by the cinematic apparatus (one that both adds to cinematic
representation as a reduplicated scene and substitutes itself for the cinematic
scene), at the same time as it produces an act of signifying castration, which
has effects on the Oedipal narrative of the film. Indeed, an act of incest
between Terumichi and his mother Setsuko does take place in The Ceremony,
but the nature of their relationship is portrayed in such a lacunary manner
that it must be inferred rather than directly witnessed by the spectator. The
film’s narrative thus functions as a lure whose principle is analogous to that
governing Young Mr. Lincoln: “we see everything but we know nothing.”
In contrast with Ford’s film, however, which produces an idealist reading
within the film itself by substituting the percipient character of Lincoln
for the spectator, in The Ceremony no such exchange takes place, and thus
“we will know nothing—apart from a supplement of writing. To write this
reading, the enunciation of its énoncé, is what the film incites us to do.”72
Bonitzer’s subsequent responses to Oshima’s films tended to revert to
a more critical/evaluative, less theoretical mode of receiving his work,
although psychoanalytic themes retained their pertinence for the critic. In
the Realm of the Senses, for instance, is marked by the excess of joy—and
not pleasure or jouissance—accompanying Sada’s literal castration of Kichi,
a sensation that produces an “unavowable unease” in the spectator. The
stark depiction of violent sexuality paradoxically discourages spectatorial
voyeurism, and Bonitzer concludes that “by seducing too much, [the film]

71 Ibid., p. 8.
72 Ibid., p. 12.
Encountering the World Through Cinema 567

almost disappoints, as Oshima often does. Sometimes we would like, before

this breathtaking corrida of the scene and the real, less virtuosity, and more
fear.”73 Night and Fog in Japan, belatedly reviewed in 1980, was analyzed
primarily through the circular structure characterizing both its narrative
and its closed scenography. The repetition across two different timeframes of
the same “boy meets girl” narrative within the paranoiac Cold War mentality
of the Japanese communist milieu is, for the Bonitzer of 1980, “ferociously
anti-dialectical” and instead evokes a Nietzschean “eternal return of the
same.” Although the critic retrospectively sees profound similarities between
Oshima’s 1960 film and The Ceremony, he avers his satisfaction that the
earlier work was not shown in France at the time The Ceremony was released:
“if we had seen the f ilm back then, we would have lacked the sense of
humor necessary to appreciate it.” For the Bonitzer of 1980, it is in fact the
“histrionic style” of French communist leaders such as Georges Marchais
that constitutes “the ideal sounding board for this film.”74
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was the final film of Oshima’s examined
by Bonitzer. While the film’s neo-classical mise en scène recalls Ford at
certain moments and even invites comparisons with the fascist Japanese
writer Yukio Mishima, this is offset by an “‘obliquity’ of technique” that
produces a “displacement of sense” and even a Barthesian “third meaning”
through such disruptively symbolic markers as the humped back of Major
Celliers’ deformed younger brother. Just as, in Bonitzer’s analysis, the scenes
of Anglican ceremonial worship in the prisoner-of-war camp are watched by
a “Japanese eye” (that of the camp guards), so too is the film’s superficially
classical mise en scène surveilled by Oshima’s “modern aesthetic conscious-
ness.” Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence—in a judgement that can apply to
Oshima’s œuvre as a whole—thus belongs to “the most acute modernity.”75

Works Cited

Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques
Rancière, Lire le Capital (Paris: Maspero, 1965). Translated in abridged form as
Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009 [1970]).

73 Pascal Bonitzer, “L’essence du pire (L’Empire des sens),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 270 (September-
October 1976), pp. 48-52, here p. 52.
74 Pascal Bonitzer, “Le cercle de famille (Nuit et brouillard au Japon),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 309
(March 1980), pp. 4-8, here p. 4.
75 Pascal Bonitzer, “La bosse et la voix: Furyo de Nagisa Oshima,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 348-349
(June-July 1983), pp. 19-22, here p. 22.
568  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Jacques Aumont, “Lecture à plusieurs voies (Une affaire de cœur),” Cahiers du

cinéma no. 197 (Christmas 1967-January 1968), pp. 88-89. Translated as “Several
Routes to a Reading: Switchboard Operator,” trans. Diana Matias, in Jim Hillier
(ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. II: The 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating
Hollywood (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 303-306.
———, “Berlin 69,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 215 (September 1969), pp. 41-46.
———, “À propos de Petit Garçon,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218 (March 1970), pp. 35-37.
Alain Badiou, Le Concept de modèle: Introduction à une épistémologie matérialiste
des mathématiques (Paris: Maspero, 1969).
Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Translated as The Empire
of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
Pierre Baudry, “Premier amour, version infernale,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224
(October 1970), pp. 35-36.
Pascal Bonitzer, “La pendaison,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 217 (November 1969),
pp. 59-60.
———, “Oshima et les corps-langages,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218 (March 1970),
pp. 31-34.
———, “Film/politique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 33-37.
———, “Un film en + (Eros + Massacre),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970),
pp. 6-9.
———, “Cinéma/théâtre/idéologie/écriture: à propos de La Cérémonie,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 231 (August-September 1971), pp. 5-12.
———, “L’essence du pire (L’Empire des sens),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 270 (September-
October 1976), pp. 48-52.
———, “Le cercle de famille (Nuit et brouillard au Japon),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 309 (March 1980), pp. 4-8.
———, “Notes sur quelques films de Cannes qui ont marqué. Et sur d’autres qui
ont moins marqué,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 337 (June 1982), pp. 11-16.
———, “La bosse et la voix: Furyo de Nagisa Oshima,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 348-349
(June-July 1983), pp. 19-22.
——— and Jean Narboni, “W.R., les mystères de l’organisme,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 240 (July-August 1972), p. 66.
Vera Chytilová, interviewed by Serge Daney, “Entretien avec Vera Chytilová,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 193 (September 1967), pp. 60-62.
———, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette, “Entretien avec Vera
Chytilová,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 198 (February 1968), pp. 46-57, 72-73.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “La remontée d’Orphée: à propos de La Barrière,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 192 (July-August 1967), p. 41.
———, “Le détour par le direct (2),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969),
pp. 40-45. Translated as “The Detour through the Direct,” trans. Christopher
Encountering the World Through Cinema 569

Williams, idem. (ed.), Realism and the Cinema: A Reader (London: BFI, 1980),
pp. 224-244.
———, “Développements de la ligne Jancsó,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969),
pp. 32-33.
———, “Autocritique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 40-45. Translated
as “Autocritique,” trans. Nancy Kline Piore, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du
Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation (London: BFI, 1990),
pp. 99-111. Hereafter CDC III.
———, Gérard Leblanc and Jean Narboni, Les années pop: Cinéma et politique:
1956-1970 (Paris: BPI/Centre Pompidou, 2001).
Serge Daney, “Terra em transe,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 191 (June 1967), p. 48.
———, “Moins par moins égale plus: à propos du Départ,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 192
(July-August 1967), p. 42.
———, “À propos de Vera Chytilová,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 193 (September 1967),
p. 59.
———, “Pour quelques zlotys de plus…,” Libération, May 21, 1982, Repr. in Serge
Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. II: Les Années Libé 1981-1985 (Paris:
POL, 2005), pp. 623-625.
———, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993).
Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969). Translated as The Logic of
Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). Translated as On
Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974).
Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Screen vol. 17 no. 3 (Autumn 1976), pp. 68-112.
Miklós Jancsó, interviewed by Michel Delahaye and Jean-Louis Comolli, “Entretiens
avec Miklos Jancsó,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 17-31.
Pascal Kané, “Discours, pouvoir, scène,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219, pp. 35-37.
Louis Marcorelles, “L’épreuve du direct,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 210 (March 1969),
pp. 37-39.
Paul-Louis Martin, “De la gymnastique au cinéma (O nece jinem),” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 181 (August 1966), p. 64.
Jean Narboni, “Les trois âges,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 178 (May 1966), pp. 58-59.
———, “Comment faire,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 38-40. Translated
as “How to,” trans. Leigh Hafrey, in CDC III, pp. 95-99.
———, “Préface,” in Sylvie Pierre, Glauber Rocha (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1987),
pp. 6-7.
———, “Jerzy Skolimowski et la fuite impossible,” Cinéma 03 (2002), pp. 61-73.
Dominique Noguez, “Le cinéma (re)trouvé,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969),
pp. 23-24.
570  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Jean-Pierre Oudart, “La place,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 30-33.
Translated as “The Place,” trans. Joseph Karmel, in CDC III, pp. 89-95.
Sylvie Pierre, “L’ordre et l’ordinateur (Szegenylegenyek),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 187
(February 1967), pp. 67-68.
———, “Poétique et politique (Oz fusis),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 190 (May 1967), p. 66.
———, “Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 196 (December 1967),
p. 74.
———, “Terra em transe,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 199 (March 1968), p. 74.
———, “Chacun son chemin,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 33-35.
———, “Japon/castration,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970), pp. 20-22.
———, “Glauber Rocha par cœur, de tête et dans un corps,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 329 (November 1981), pp. 9-13.
———, Glauber Rocha (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1987).
———, “Un texte dans ses histoires,” Trafic no. 100 (Winter 2016), pp. 93-98.
La Rédaction, “Cinéma japonais (1),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 224 (October 1970),
pp. 4-5. Translated as “Japanese Cinema (1),” trans. Alan Williamson, in CDC
III, pp. 146-149.
Jacques Rivette, “Bice skoro propest Sveta,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 213 (June 1969),
p. 65.
Glauber Rocha, “Cela s’appelle l’aurore,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 195 (November 1967),
pp. 39-41.
———, interviewed by Michel Delahaye, Pierre Kast and Jean Narboni, “Entretien
avec Glauber Rocha,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 214 (July-August 1969), pp. 23-40.
———, “Post-scriptum,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 214 (July-August 1969), p. 40.
Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
19. The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont

Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of Jacques Aumont’s life and writings
since leaving Cahiers du cinéma in 1974. While many former Cahiers critics
of the post-1968 era have taken teaching roles, Aumont was the only one
to fully pursue an academic career. Writing his doctoral dissertation
on the films of Eisenstein (published as Montage Eisenstein in 1979), he
became a key f igure in the formation of f ilm studies in France in the
1970s and 1980s. In his prolific writings since that time (including major
works such as L’Œil interminable, À quoi pensent les films and Matière
d’images), Aumont has attempted to produce a scholarly account of the
cinema that would place it within a broader system of the arts (with an
emphasis on the relationship between cinema and painting) as well as
devoting monographs to individual filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman
and Jean-Luc Godard.

Keywords: Jacques Aumont, film studies, Sergei Eisenstein, aesthetic

theory, film phenomenology, cinema and painting

From Cahiers to the University

On the level of film aesthetics, one of the most consequential legacies of

Cahiers’ post-1968 period has taken the form of the university career pursued
by Aumont after his 1974 departure from the journal. The only member of the
editorial team to fully dedicate himself to academia upon leaving Cahiers,
Aumont played a fundamental role in the consolidation of film studies
in France in the 1970s and 1980s, and over the course of four decades of
teaching and research—which, with stints at Paris-III, Lyon-II and the École
nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, extends to the present day—he has
supervised the work of some of the most important film scholars working
today, including Fabrice Revault d’Allonnes, Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues,
Luc Vancheri and Dork Zabunyan. Aumont’s time in academia has been

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch19
572  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

particularly prolific, with the publication of 28 book-length works, 22 edited

volumes and well over a hundred journal articles. In contrast to the national
isolation of many of his Cahiers colleagues, whose more recent activity has
found limited recognition beyond the borders of France, Aumont’s scholar-
ship has also had a profound global impact: translations of his writings have
appeared in at least twenty languages, while the institutional framework
of the university has enabled him to establish direct contact with those
studying the cinema in other nations. In particular, Aumont has engaged
in collaboration and debate with his North American contemporaries,
including David Bordwell, Dudley Andrew, Rick Altman, Noël Carroll and
Tom Gunning, and his work thus constitutes the most tangible conduit
between the Cahiers tradition of critical reflection on the cinema and the
contemporary treatment of visual media in anglophone academia.
Throughout this activity, Aumont has developed and honed a theoretical
apprehension of the cinema in which questions of aesthetics are of absolute
centrality. Taking his distance at an early stage from the semiological
framework which, under the influence of Metz, was dominant in French
film studies in the 1970s and early 1980s, Aumont has instead focused his
theoretical considerations of the cinema on its status as an art form, on its
specificity as an aesthetic medium, and on its relations with other modes
of artistic practice, particularly those such as painting, photography and
music that relate closely to the sensorial elements of the cinema. That
his research program has been averse to comparisons between film and
literature is perhaps best summed up by remarks he made for Pierre’s 1988
documentary L’Homme aux cheveux bleus in which Aumont, stressing the
importance of the films of Glauber Rocha in the broader history of art (and
not just the history of the cinema), stated: “I am interested in the problem of
the filmmaker as an artist, not as an auteur.” Such an outlook notably informs
some of Aumont’s key works of film theory, including L’Œil interminable
(1989), À quoi pensent les films (1997) and Matière d’images (2005), as well
as more specialized texts such as Du visage au cinéma (1992), L’Attrait de
la lumière (2010) and Le Montreur de l’ombre (2012). In recent years, it has
also received a corrective in certain auteur-focused studies published by
Aumont, such as his Ingmar Bergman monograph, as well as one of his
latest works of film theory, Limites de la fiction (2014).
In this sense, Aumont’s scholarship can be seen as one of the most fecund
offshoots of the Cahiers project, particularly since many of his later concerns
were already present, in nuce, in the texts he wrote for the journal in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Filmmakers whose work was encountered during
this period—including Godard, Garrel, Bene, Bergman, Dreyer and, above
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 573

all, Eisenstein—have continued to be at the core of his reflections on the

cinema. Conversely, however, Aumont’s film theory often seems remote from
the conceptual configuration adopted by Cahiers, and he himself tends to
minimize the importance of his time at the journal for his later thinking
on the cinema.1 On the occasions in which Aumont discusses Cahiers in
his later writings, it is usually in a highly critical manner—a stance that
applies as much to the Bazin era as it does to the period in which Aumont
himself was involved with the journal. With respect to the Althusserian
Marxism that dominated Cahiers in the post-1968 period, Aumont is prone
to adopting a tone of withering derision, seeing it as outdated, too confused
to have constituted a theory of the cinema properly speaking and, by the
2000s, largely neglected by contemporary researchers in the field of film
studies. In spite of these reservations, which could be read as disavowals of
his past, a residual effect of the Cahiers tradition on Aumont’s later work in
film studies can nonetheless be detected. Aumont’s more explicit theoretical
framework may have decisively changed since his time at the journal. But
on a subtler, more intangible level, a certain ethics of film analysis espoused
by Aumont is distinctly influenced by the legacy of Cahiers. Indeed, this is
the aspect of the journal that Aumont himself emphasizes, arguing:

Honestly I do not see what remains [of Cahiers] as a theoretical con-

struction. There was a great intellectual agitation, which is undeniable,
which I do not disown, and of which I have kept an emotional, pleasant
recollection, but as an intellectual construction I don’t see anything.
On the other hand, […] there are ethical values. As an ethical content I
would say that it is something that is worth continuing to be considered.2

As an academic discipline within the university system, film studies in

France began in earnest after the reorganization of higher education after
the student unrest of 1968, which split the Sorbonne into 13 autonomous
universities.3 Departments of études cinématographiques were established in
Paris-I, Paris-III and Paris-VIII, and with a dire need for instructors capable
of knowledgeably lecturing on the cinema, film journals such as Cahiers

1 This was a recurrent theme in the interviews conducted with Aumont. He has stated, for
instance, “The problem is that Cahiers played a minuscule role in academic practice, almost
nothing.” Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 11, 2014.
2 Interview with Jacques Aumont, May 5, 2014.
3 Metz, who at the time was the only film studies academic qualified to supervise research,
taught at the École de Hautes-Études de Sciences Sociales, which was organizationally distinct
from the university system.
574  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

were an obvious source of personnel, despite the fact that most of the critics
had little academic record to speak of. Narboni began lecturing at Paris-VIII
in Vincennes, succeeding Rivette, who had spent the 1969-1970 academic
year in the position. Other Cahiers editors, on the initiative of the literature
professor and Artaud specialist Alain Virmaux, gravitated towards Paris-III.4
In addition to Aumont, Bonitzer, Kané and Baudry all taught regularly in
the nascent film studies department at the Censier campus, while Comolli
and Daney lectured there intermittently. Research into the early period of
French film studies is at present very limited, with no equivalents as yet
to the work done on its North American counterpart, such as Grieveson/
Wasson’s Inventing Film Studies or Polan’s Scenes of Instruction.5 Aumont
nonetheless recalls that the four Cahiers editors at Paris-III lectured on a
collective basis, continuing in the vein of the journal’s communal ethos,
and recalls that they gave “farcical [croquignolesques] courses in packed
auditoriums, where the students came down and shouted at us: ‘Who are
you to talk? What are you doing for the working masses?’”6 He has described
this time as one in which the instruction of cinema was carried out in
“unbelievable conditions,” particularly when it came to screening films
(usually with imported 16mm prints from the US), but also emphasized
the “heroic side” of this early period in academic film studies in France:
“everyone knew that we were pioneers, that the teaching of cinema in the
university took place due to our stubbornness, that we had to hold firm. Even
if there was no material, we could still see films. We were really devoted to
the cause of cinema.”7
An idea of the type of courses given by the Cahiers editors at Paris-III
can be discerned from an article for Screen by George Lellis, a graduate
student at the University of Texas-Austin who provided a synoptic account of
classes taught during an exchange year at the Centre d’études universitaires
américain du cinéma in Paris in 1974-1975. Alongside Metz, Mitry, Thierry
Kuntzel and Michel Marie, Aumont, Baudry and Kané led seminars as part
of this program, run in conjunction with Paris-III but intended for Ameri-
can students. As this account has it, Aumont’s “Initiation to Film” course

4 See Jacques Aumont, interviewed by Nicole Vulser, “Jacques Aumont, le cinéma né sous X,”
Le Monde, September 29, 2003.
5 See Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds.), Inventing Film Studies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2008); and Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the US Study of Film
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
6 Jacques Aumont, interviewed by Patrice Blouin and Jean-Marc Lalanne, “Le gai savoir,” Les
Inrockuptibles, April 27, 2005, pp. 36-38, here p. 38.
7 Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 20, 2014.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 575

incorporated screenings of Young Mr. Lincoln, Only Angels Have Wings, Roma
città aperta, Intolerance, Gertrud, Les Carabiniers, Nicht versöhnt, Antonio
das Mortes, La Pyramide humaine, Au hasard, Balthazar and Céline et Julie
vont en bateau and included discussions of “film as a medium reflecting
historical, political and economic realities,” “cinema as a dream medium,
the presentation of different levels of reality,” “formalism and idealism in the
cinema,” and “films which break with the classic model.” Baudry, meanwhile,
conducted a seminar on “Film as Commodity” involving an economic analysis
of recent commercial cinema, and Kané taught on “The American Narrative
Model and Its Variations” using the theories of Brecht and Lacan to produce
a close analysis of Dr Mabuse, der Spieler and films by Ford and Welles.8
Most of the Cahiers figures to teach in a university context, however, did
not embark upon a full-fledged academic career. Kané, Bonitzer and Baudry
all stopped teaching in the 1970s, while Narboni held a lecturing position
at Paris-VIII until his retirement in 2003 but never conducted research
sufficient to gain a professorial position.9 Only Aumont would complete a
doctorate and eventually become a professor at Paris-III.10 His professional
ascension was not without its obstacles, however: in an article for Trafic,
Aumont claimed that his prospective appointment to a position at Lyon-II
in 1975 was prevented by the education ministry after a letter denouncing
him as an “apostle of intolerance” and a member of a “semiotico-Marxist
conspiracy” was sent to the minister by Henri Agel—a Catholic academic
who was, ironically, Daney’s former high school teacher.11 The next year,
however, Aumont was successful in his bid for the post at Lyon, where he
taught alongside Jean-Louis Leutrat until returning to Paris-III in 1980.

Montage Eisenstein

At the same time as teaching in Lyon, Aumont pursued his doctorate in

Paris-I. The institutional support for this endeavor, however, was minimal:

8 See George Lellis, “A Year of Film Study in Paris,” Screen vol. 16 no. 4 (Winter 1975), pp. 133-139.
9 Comolli has also taught intermittently in France and other countries, but his efforts have
been more focused on filmmaking.
10 Of the Cahiers critics from other generations, Éric Rohmer received a doctorate in the late
1970s for a study on space in Murnau’s Faust and periodically taught cinema at university level.
See Éric Rohmer, L’Organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: U.G.E., 1977).
11 Jacques Aumont, “Mon très cher objet,” Trafic no. 6 (Spring 1993), pp. 53-69, here p. 55. Aumont
now cautions, however, that he has no direct proof that Agel wrote this letter and regrets having
made the accusation in a public forum.
576  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

preferring not to work under Metz at the EHESS, Aumont instead took the
art historian Bernard Teyssèdre as his supervisor. One of approximately
150 doctoral students studying under Teyssèdre, Aumont was content to
prepare his thesis “all alone in my corner” and only met Teyssèdre for
the f irst time on the day of his viva voce defense.12 The resulting work,
published virtually unchanged as Montage Eisenstein in 1979, was a
landmark text in French f ilm studies and remains a reference work for
scholars of the Soviet f ilmmaker. Aumont, of course, was particularly
well-positioned for this undertaking. He was the key f igure overseeing
the translation of Eisenstein texts for Cahiers in the years 1969-1971 (in
addition to writing articles on the f ilmmaker such as “Eisenstein avec
Freud: Notes sur ‘Le Mal voltairien’”13) and continued this work throughout
the 1970s, translating and editing a series of six volumes of Eisenstein’s
writings, published by Christian Bourgois between 1974 and 1985.14 This
project enabled Aumont to familiarize himself with Eisenstein’s f ilm
theory to an unparalleled degree and served as important preparatory
work for his doctoral thesis. In his introduction to the f irst volume,
Aumont stressed that Eisenstein’s importance to the history of cinema
was just as much due to his writings as his f ilms, stating: “Eisenstein
the ‘writer’ is thus, to say the least, as diverse and as variable as E. the
f ilmmaker. In his theoretical reflection, he is an ‘all-rounder’ who does
not forbid himself from any intellectual domain, even the most unknown
and the most hazardous.”15
The ties forged through the Eisenstein translation project, however,
did little to impinge on what Aumont has described as the “deliberate
intellectual isolation” in which Montage Eisenstein was written. In his
preface to the 1987 English translation of this work, Aumont baldly states:
“I am acquainted with practically all the books of any importance—and a
significant number of articles—on Eisenstein in English, French, German,
Italian, and Russian, and I hope I will not sound too immodest if I say that

12 Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 20, 2014.

13 Jacques Aumont, “Eisenstein avec Freud: Notes sur ‘Le Mal voltairien,’” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 226-227 (January-February 1971), pp. 68-74.
14 The six volumes were: Au delà des étoiles (1974), La Non indifférente Nature vol.1 (1975) Mémoires
vol. 1 (1977), La Non indifférente Nature vol. 2 (1978), Mémoires vol. 2 (1979) and Mémoires vol. 3
(1985). A seventh volume was also prepared but was never published. Aumont discusses the
project in a 1975 dialogue with Bellour; see Jacques Aumont and Raymond Bellour, “Eisenstein:
Écrits sur le cinéma,” Magazine littéraire no. 99 (April 1975), pp. 52-53.
15 Jacques Aumont, “Présentation,” in S.M. Eisenstein, Au-delà des étoiles, ed. Jacques Aumont
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1974), pp. 7-17, here pp. 14-15.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 577

this book is indebted to none of them. In fact, what I found in most, even
the better ones, tended to obscure rather than illuminate my understanding
of Eisenstein’s work.”16 Montage Eisenstein nonetheless bears a major debt
to one figure: Roland Barthes. For a start, the first chapter exhibits clear
influences of Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux. A biographical
overview of Eisenstein’s life, it was seen by Aumont as a necessary prelude
to his study given the “imbrication of [Eisenstein’s] life (itself mediated
by his autobiographical texts) with his cinematic production.”17 Similarly,
the close reading of sequences from The General Line and Ivan the Terrible
consciously draws on the methodology—and even the terminology—of
the literary theorist’s analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine in Barthes’ influential
study S/Z, a factor that links Montage Eisenstein with Cahiers’ collective
reading of Young Mr. Lincoln. In 2004, Aumont admitted that S/Z was
“my great model,” despite the fact that it owed “rather more to a talent
for interpretation than to a generalizable method” and despite Aumont’s
retrospective judgement that “my own analysis, alas, does not have the
charm of Barthes’ analysis.”18
An additional influence, this one in the negative sense, came from
Bordwell: in an article for Screen, the American scholar used Bachelard’s
notion of the epistemological break as a metaphor for what he perceived to
be a significant turning point in Eisenstein’s conception of film form: that
between the “dialectical epistemology” of the 1920s, with its revolution-
ary aesthetics placing the emphasis on conflicts and ruptures, and the
“behaviorist epistemology” of the 1930s and 1940s, which inclined, under
the more artistically conservative climate of Stalin’s rule, towards an
organicist concept of montage, stressing unity and totality.19 Bordwell’s
article represented, in Aumont’s eyes, a lucid articulation of a more general
attitude towards the relationship between Eisenstein’s silent films and
his later work. In contrast to this schematic division, Montage Eisenstein
argues for a more dialectical understanding of the evolution of the Soviet
filmmaker’s montage practice, one that would highlight both the ruptures
and the continuities in his work and theory. For Aumont, Eisenstein’s activity
in the cinema is marked by the “ongoing and even somewhat systematic

16 Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley and Andrew
Ross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. vii.
17 Ibid., p. viii.
18 Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, 2nd ed. (Paris: Images modernes, 2005 [1979]), p. 11.
19 David Bordwell, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift,” Screen vol. 15 no. 4 (Winter 1974),
pp. 29-46.
578  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

study of the principal of montage.”20 The tension between an aesthetics of

conflict and an aesthetics of organic unity, transposed by Bordwell onto two
distinct chronological moments in Eisenstein’s life, should be understood as
operating throughout Eisenstein’s time as a filmmaker. Or as Aumont puts it:
“There is not a revolutionary Eisenstein, the Eisenstein of the twenties, who
supposedly thought in terms of struggle of opposites (and their dialectical
unity), and then another, idealistic Eisenstein, the Eisenstein of the thirties
and forties, in pursuit of the chimerical ‘total and synthetic art.’” Instead,
there is, in his view, “an Eisensteinian system (which is indeed constantly
evolving), which constantly attempts to adjust itself to various theoretical
and/or philosophical discourses, in particular, to ‘dialectical materialism.’”21
Aumont’s choice to carry out a close reading of the functioning of montage
in two films that are frequently understood to represent distinct periods
in Eisenstein’s œuvre—The General Line and Ivan the Terrible—is thus a
gesture towards relativizing this oppositional dichotomy. Despite their
significant differences in film technique, the same fundamental principles
of montage—resting on the dialectical “law” of the unity of opposites in
struggle—are in operation in both films.
It is the failure of Eisenstein’s montage practice to adequately serve as an
analogy for the theoretical propositions of dialectical materialism, however,
which in Aumont’s understanding provides the motor for his restless evolu-
tion as a thinker and artistic practitioner. For this reason, Eisenstein’s notes
on his project to make a film adaptation of Marx’s Capital are of particular
interest. They represented one of the most concerted efforts by the film-
maker to conceptualize his notion of a “montage of intellectual attractions,”
but the foundering of this project highlights the irreducible gap between
written language and cinematic enunciation. For Aumont, the notion of
“film-language” (ciné-langue) is an “unfortunate metaphor” and does an
injustice to the suppleness of Eisenstein’s understanding of the signifying
resources of film. At the same time, he rejects the commonplace notion,
favored by more “humanistic” approaches to the cinema, that the aesthetic
exuberance of Eisenstein’s filmmaking countervailed the arid sterility of
his theoretical concepts. Instead, Eisenstein’s theory and practice should
be understood as two distinct modes of writing (or écriture) that relate both
to the cinema and to more fundamental concerns about politics, art and
nature and that are marked by the contradiction between the “ecstatic” and

20 Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, p. 207 [p. 146]. For the Aumont of 2005, this standpoint still
seems to be a “credible” one. Ibid., p. 11.
21 Ibid., p. 91 [p. 67].
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 579

“conceptual” sides of Eisenstein’s praxis. Thus it was the “principal wager”

of Montage Eisenstein, as Aumont declared in 2005, to “take Eisenstein
seriously as a writer,” and this is one of the major legacies of the book.22
Here again, therefore, the concept of écriture as developed by Cahiers in
the 1970s, borrowing heavily from Barthes and Kristeva, comes to the fore.
Although Aumont had broken with his Cahiers colleagues, the theoretical
apparatus behind Montage Eisenstein was still in broad continuity with the
journal’s project in its post-1968 period. The book represented, as Aumont later
noted with a bittersweet chagrin, “an apprehension of Eisenstein dating from a
certain era, when Marx, Freud and Saussure still meant something.”23 Indeed,
the influence of Cahiers on the work is palpable: texts by Bonitzer, Oudart,
Narboni, Pierre and Comolli are all referenced, and the close analysis of the
two Eisenstein films are in continuity with the re-readings the journal carried
out on Young Mr. Lincoln, La vie est à nous and The New Babylon. Moreover,
the early stages of Aumont’s doctoral work saw a momentary renewal of ties
with Cahiers. A preliminary version of the chapter on The General Line was
published in the journal’s November 1976 issue, with an introductory note
by Aumont cautioning the reader about the “strictly academic” nature of the
text and attesting already to an expository method grounded in Barthes’
literary theory.24 A translation by Aumont of “The Filmic Fourth Dimension”
was also published by Cahiers in this period, and the renewed interest in
Eisenstein inspired articles by Bonitzer on the Soviet filmmaker’s concept
of extasis (also an important notion in Montage Eisenstein) and Narboni on
the “mechanical delirium” of The General Line, which, he argued, combined
propagandistic goals with the aesthetics of modern advertising.25

The Interminable Eye: Aumont’s Film Aesthetics in the 1980s

In an academic context dominated by the semiology-inspired “textual

analysis” of Metz and Bellour, Aumont’s work on Eisenstein thus presented

22 Ibid., p. 9.
23 Ibid., p. 10.
24 Jacques Aumont, “Un rêve soviétique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (November 1976), pp. 26-44,
here p. 26.
25 See Sergei Eisenstein, “La quatrième dimension du cinéma,” translated into French by
Jacques Aumont, Cahiers du cinéma no. 270 (September-October 1976), pp. 5-28; Pascal Bonitzer,
“Les machines e(x)tatiques (Macroscopie et signification),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (Novem-
ber 1976), pp. 22-25; and Jean Narboni, “Le hors-cadre décide de tout,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271
(November 1976), pp. 14-21.
580  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

an alternative model of structuralist film analysis, one grounded not in

Saussurean linguistics but in a theory of cinematic écriture, which was
combined with the dialectical materialist approach to film form espoused, at
the time, by both the subject and the author of Montage Eisenstein. This ap-
proach was honed in other, shorter texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s.
A sequence analysis of La Chinoise published in the journal Linguistique
et Sémiologie (which appeared in English in Camera Obscura under the
symptomatic title “This Is Not a Textual Analysis”) was, Aumont confesses,
his only article that was “vaguely of semio-linguistic inspiration.”26 But the
same theoretical mixture also impregnated L’Esthétique du film (co-authored
with Alain Bergala, Michel Marie and Marc Vernet), which was conceived of
as an introductory primer to film analysis for a field that had by this point
entered a period of institutional consolidation.27
The 1980s, however, was a period of confusion and intellectual mutation
for film studies, as the previously hegemonic theoretical configuration
of semiology, psychoanalytic theory and structuralist Marxism rapidly
evaporated. Aumont gives a vivid account of this moment:

It was very disorienting as a period, because we perceived that there was

no more impetus, there was no more momentum. There was no more
movement. But we didn’t know why. And we did not have the necessary
distance to understand. We were on the inside and we could not see
from the outside why it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working because there
were too many aporias. There were two factors. There was the internal
factor: it was an approach that had exhausted itself because it was too
aporetic. It led to impasses. It was the moment when structural linguistics
completely disappeared. […] Then there was the death of Barthes, the
death of Foucault. The founding fathers perished. All that is symbolic,
but it also had real effects.28

The result was a widespread sense of dispersal as the discipline fractured into
a multiplicity of new perspectives. In France, the publication of Deleuze’s
Cinéma diptych in 1983 and 1985 had a dramatic effect. Again, Aumont

26 Interview with Jacques Aumont, May 8, 2015. See Jacques Aumont, “Notes sur un fragment
de La Chinoise de Godard,” Linguistique et Sémiologie, no. 6 (1978), 55-91. Translated as “This Is
Not A Textual Analysis,” Camera Obscura, no. 8-9-10 (Spring-Summer-Fall 1982), 131-160.
27 See Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie and Marc Vernet, Esthétique du film (Paris:
Nathan, 1982). Translated as The Aesthetics of Film, trans. Richard Neupert (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1983).
28 Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 20, 2014.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 581

evocatively relays of the impact this work had on him and his colleagues:
“There is this great philosopher who has landed on the cinema and says
things that have nothing to do with what we were doing, and who we don’t
understand. It was a difficult moment, which, I believe, destabilized film
studies for a very long time.”29 Scholars in the field reacted to this disciplinary
transformation in a variety of ways, and the debates of the period can now
be tracked in scholarly journals with which Aumont was involved, such as
Hors-cadre and the Franco-American quarterly Iris. His own approach was to
shift focus towards more purely aesthetic questions in a concerted attempt
to generate a globally coherent—if not totalizing—aesthetic theory of the
cinema. No longer were Barthes, Althusser and Saussure the ne plus ultra
of theoretical influence. Instead, Aumont’s research has probed the vast
constellation of art history and theory, taking succor from the writings of
twentieth-century figures such as Arnheim, Panofsky, Warburg, Gombrich,
Francastel and Auerbach, reacquainting himself with the more venerable
ideas of Alberti, Lessing, Kant and Hegel, and becoming conversant in
contemporary scholarship and practice in other artistic fields—above all,
at this point in his career, painting.
The fruits of this work were borne in the 1989 monograph L’Œil inter-
minable, which Aumont regards as his f irst “real” book after Montage
Eisenstein.30 In tracing the relationship between the cinema and painting,
an affinity stretching from the Lumière brothers to Godard’s late work,
L’Œil interminable spoke closely to Aumont’s own research interests.
The book had a tortured publication process: initially commissioned
by Patrice Rollet for Macula, the manuscript suffered an unfavorable
reception from the series editor Jean Clay, and Aumont instead published
it with Séguier. In his preface to the 2007 re-edition to the work, Aumont
gives a succinct encapsulation of the thesis guiding the work, which, he
admits, was only presented en creux in the original version: “the cinema,
for nearly a century, has interminably been a matter of the eye. It has
always been a question of seeing and showing the world, as Vertov’s old
program put it.”31 The cinema’s contribution to visual representation,
beyond the achievements of painting, was to introduce movement to
the eye and thus create the “variable eye” that lends its title to one of the

29 Ibid.
30 While not renouncing them in any way, Aumont considers L’Esthétique du film and the
1988 text L’Analyse des films to be reference works without any “personal ideas” in them. See
Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films (Paris: Nathan, 1988). For the remarks,
see interview with Jacques Aumont, March 20, 2014.
31 Jacques Aumont, L’Œil interminable, 3rd ed. (Paris: La Différence, 2007), pp. 9-10.
582  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

book’s key chapters. While accepting Bazin’s def inition of the cinema
as “change mummified,” Aumont does not see a contradiction between
the cinema’s impetus towards “preservation and embalmment” and its
concern for “fabricating images” and thus refuses the “old opposition”
between Lumière and Méliès, or Stroheim and Eisenstein. Whereas paint-
ing has a natural tendency toward allegory and metaphor, cinema “is in
a relationship of interpretation with the world,” and Aumont inscribes
his own work in the lineage of those thinkers—Schefer, Epstein, Balázs,
Bazin, Pasolini and Godard—who have understood the cinema as “the
invention of new, indispensable manners of interpreting the world by
continuing the enterprise of images.”32
Aumont’s consideration of the relationship between the plastic arts and
cinema largely avoids the superficial presence of paintings in films, such
as citations of artistic works or “painterly” approaches to the creation of
cinematic imagery. Instead, his focus lies on the common concern both
mediums manifest for elementary formal questions such as the shot (plan),
the frame, the scene, the experience of temporality and the perception of
reality. These factors are already present in the vues produced by Lumière,
who Aumont, echoing Godard’s declaration uttered by Jean-Pierre Léaud in a
direct-to-camera address in La Chinoise, describes as the “last impressionist
painter.” This claim has a provocative element to it—the Lumière brothers,
pragmatically minded factory owners, in no way conceived of themselves as
artists—but Aumont categorically points to the “flagrant absence” of any
of the visual tics of nineteenth-century academic painting in the corpus
of films created by the Lumières. There are no allegorical scenes, abstract
landscapes or female nudes in their work, nor do they attempt to recreate
fictional episodes from literature and mythology. Instead, the Lumière
films constitute “a veritable iconography of the ascendant bourgeoisie,” and
their formal concerns are derived from the aesthetics of impressionism,
whose major representatives shared their class background.33 Two principal
problematics are operative in both impressionism and the earliest works
of cinema: the production of “effects of reality” (the famous ripple of leaves
blowing in the wind, which outdoes even Théodore Rousseau in its detailed
rendering of the natural world) and the role of framing in defining the
bounds of the image, assigning to it a point of view and articulating the
field of the visible with its external hors-champ—even if, in the case of the

32 Ibid., pp. 11, 21.

33 Ibid., p. 28.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 583

Lumière films, the boundaries between these two domains are “permeable,”
“supple” and “porous.”34
This discussion leads into the chapter on the “variable eye,” which, partly
because of its translation into English, is the most widely known section of
the book. For Charles O’Brien, indeed, the genealogy of cinematic representa-
tion given in this text “anticipated what has become a major shift of focus
in contemporary film theory, away from the disembodied gaze attributed
to the classical spectator and toward a post-classical, corporeal glance.”35
In this chapter, Aumont follows the American art historian Peter Galassi’s
distinction between the ébauche and the étude in Western painting in the
period 1780-1820 (that is, directly before the invention of photography).
Whereas the ébauche was conceived of as “an attempt to register a reality
predetermined by the project of a future painting,” the étude is “an attempt
to register reality just as it is.”36 The chief distinguishing trait of the étude
is thus not exactitude but rapidity, and in this sense it lays the groundwork
for the advent of photography later in the century. While Aumont avers his
dissatisfaction with the notion that the figurative techniques of modern
painting have been defined by bourgeois ideology, he nonetheless unam-
biguously sides with Comolli’s “Technique et idéologie” when it comes to
his Cahiers colleague’s notion of a socially determined “deferral” in the
invention and subsequent technological development of the cinema.37 The
instantaneity and mobility that form the ideological basis of photographic
media find themselves already present in techniques of visual representa-
tion honed well before the advent of the mechanically reproduced image.
Two further events in the 1800s contribute, in Aumont’s account, to the
rise of the “variable eye”: the spread of the railroads and the popularity
of the panorama. Both entail a mobile gaze, even while the spectator is
corporeally motionless, and both thus prepared Western populations for
the phenomenological conditions of film viewing that were to come by the
end of the century.
Subsequent chapters in L’Œil interminable interrogate the role of time in
cinema and painting, the use of framing and its negative counterpart, the

34 Ibid, p. 43.
35 Charles O’Brien, “The End of Cinema?: An Afterword to Jacques Aumont’s ‘The Variable Eye,’”
in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute (Austin: University of Texas, 1997), pp. 259-262,
here p. 259.
36 Aumont, L’Œil interminable, p. 52. For the English translation, see Jacques Aumont, “The
Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze,” trans. Charles O’Brien and Sally Shafto, in Dudley
Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute, pp. 231-258, here p. 232.
37 Ibid., p. 51 [p. 231].
584  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

function of “deframing” (drawn from Bonitzer’s notion of décadrage) in the

two mediums, the relationship they entertained with theatrical scenography,
and their utilization of plastic elements such as lighting and color. Perhaps
the most controversial section of the book, however, was the chapter “Forme
et déformation: expression et expressionnisme.” Having aligned the cinema
with impressionist painting, Aumont refuses any relationship with the
expressionist movement and categorically states that “expressionism in
the cinema, whether German or otherwise, does not exist, and never did
exist.”38 As an appellation to describe films such as Caligari and Von morgens
bis mitternachts, let alone Die Nibelungen or Tartuffe, it is vague at best and
misleading at worst and “serves the discourse of science less than it does
that of love, or hatred.”39 At most, Aumont accepts that the cinema retains
a certain reserve of expressivity—which can be seen in the films of Welles,
Renoir and Hitchcock—but he insists that “the film image, decidedly, is not
a graphism.”40 For a scholar partial to filmmakers such as Eisenstein and
Epstein, who vocally detested “Caligarism” in the cinema, such a stance is
perhaps not surprising, but it is a position that Aumont later nuanced. A
footnote in the 2007 edition of L’Œil interminable signals that he has now
adopted “a more pragmatic position,”41 and in his preface to the 2008 anthol-
ogy Le Cinéma expresionniste: De Caligari à Tim Burton, Aumont accepts
that, while expressionism in the cinema is a “secondary phenomenon”
compared to its role in other art forms, “the word ‘expressionism,’ along
with certain of the visual characters through which it was translated in
films, has had a real and durable fortune in film criticism.”42 Nonetheless,
Aumont insists, even at this stage, that “contrary to the other ‘-isms’ of the
early twentieth century, [expressionism] is not a modern movement” and
that, if anything, the value of expressionist cinema has been to reveal the
“anomaly” of a tendency that “does not comfortably enter into the history
of artistic movements.”43
A broader retrospective account of L’Œil interminable is undertaken
in a postscript to the work’s second edition, dubbed “P.S., P.S., P.S.” Here,
Aumont admits to a strain of sentimentalism that came with charting

38 Ibid., p. 255.
39 Ibid., p. 261
40 Ibid., p. 279.
41 Ibid., p. 255
42 Jacques Aumont, “Où commence, où finit l’expressionisme?,” in Jacques Aumont and Bernard
Benoliel (eds.), Le Cinéma expressioniste: De Caligari à Tim Burton (Rennes: Presses universitaires
de Rennes, 2008), pp. 13-28, here p. 14.
43 Ibid., p. 28.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 585

the development of modernism in art at a juncture when it was ceding

to postmodernist aesthetics. A certain historical despondence is indeed
discernible in his work, itself symptomatic of the broader mood of the 1980s,
bookended by Lyotard’s declaration of the end of “grand narratives” and the
collapse of the political realities of the post-war order with the fall of the
Berlin Wall. As for the prevalent discourse surrounding the “death of cinema”
during this period, Aumont insists: “deep down, we did not believe in it: it
was a game, perhaps an exorcism, a superstition.”44 The cinema, evidently,
did not perish, but it did undergo significant transformations in the two
decades separating the book’s first edition from its second, and its relations
with other art forms have concomitantly changed. The cinematic eye,
Aumont affirms, continues to see, but it has irrevocably lost its “variability.”
Between death and transfiguration, however, Aumont recognizes that “the
cinema (and, doubtless, the other arts of the image) has very fortunately
chosen the latter,”45 and the consequences of these mutations will form
the subject of much of his writing on the cinema in the 2000s and 2010s.

A Phenomenology of the Image?

Having opened up the relationship between cinema and the other arts
at the end of the 1980s, Aumont’s work in the 1990s covered more general
conceptual terrain, comprehending the cinema within a broader framework
of aesthetics and human perception. This often took the guise of texts
intended as reference works and thus written in a more neutral, ostensibly
objective register. Nevertheless, the theoretical questions preoccupying
Aumont during this period are abundantly apparent in these works, and his
personal perspective on the subject matter under discussion is also fitfully
visible. It is notable, here, that a palpable distance emerges between the
framework of his initial critical practice at Cahiers (and the early period of
his academic scholarship) and the outlook adopted in his writings dating
from the 1990s on.
In L’Image (first published in 1990), for instance, the perceived need
to incorporate questions of visual perception and optical geometry into
his study of the visual image leads Aumont towards a distinctly phenom-
enological orientation. For someone whose intellectual formation was in
Althusserian Marxism’s theories of the ideologically constructed nature

44 Aumont, L’Œil interminable, p. 317.

45 Ibid., p. 345.
586  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

of humanity’s perceptual relationship with the world, this move may be

surprising. When interviewed, Aumont nonetheless affirmed that “I remain
attached to phenomenology, and have been so even before I realized it. I
was already a phenomenologist without knowing it.” Although he stresses
that he is not, strictly speaking, a philosopher, a phenomenological outlook
is nonetheless the “state of mind” that Aumont finds closest to his own
viewpoint: “The only reference that I can find is in phenomenology—and
Merleau-Ponty more than Husserl, incidentally.”46 Symptomatic of Aumont’s
predilection for substantially revising his texts when they are republished,
L’Image has undergone sweeping transformations over the course of the
three editions released between 1990 and 2011, both in order to remain
up-to-date with current developments in the field and to reflect the shifts
in his own thinking on the subject. 47 It is notable, however, that a concern
for the nature of visual perception and a phenomenological account of
this field of investigation remain in place throughout all three editions of
L’Image; if anything, the references to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre become
more prevalent in the more recent renderings of the text.
The motivation for a study of the visual image in the broader sense—
discussing “what all visual images have in common, whatever their nature,
form, use and mode of production, and whatever their significant differ-
ences”—is motivated in Aumont’s introduction to the original version of
L’Image. In this account, his project emerges from two key observations
made while teaching the theory and aesthetics of film. Firstly, “film theory
cannot develop in splendid isolation”; instead, it must be “historically and
theoretically articulated with other forms of concrete visual imagery, such
as painting, photography and video.” Secondly, although Aumont is dubious
about banal evocations of a modern-day “civilization of the image,” he
nonetheless accepts that “we all, to some extent, have experienced living
in a world where images are not only proliferating but becoming increas-
ingly varied and interchangeable,” with the result that “no single category
of the image could be studied in isolation without taking into account

46 Interview with Jacques Aumont, May 8, 2015.

47 In fact, publishing updated editions to his work was something Aumont regularly carried
out: Montage Eisenstein has had two editions; Esthétique du film five; L’Analyse des films, three;
L’Œil interminable, three; L’Image, three; Dictionnaire théorique et critique du cinéma, two; Les
Théories des cinéastes, two; Matière d’images, two; and Le Cinéma et la mise en scène, two. Often
the texts underwent widespread revision for their re-publication. Of this practice, Aumont made
the tongue-in-cheek remark: “All you have to do is throw out the first version. By definition, the
second is better.” Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 20, 2014.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 587

all the others.”48 As such, L’Image remains on a general conceptual level,

and the first edition of the book is structured around five broad areas of
inquiry: visual perception; the psychological and cognitive functioning of
spectatorship; the dispositif (that is, the social, institutional and ideological
contexts of viewing an image); representation and signification; and, finally,
the image as produced for artistic purposes. 49
It is primarily in the first section that a detailed discussion of human
vision drawing on phenomenological accounts of perception is in evidence.
Here, Aumont discusses the functioning of the eye, the nature of light
and the perception of space, depth and movement, the “double perceptual
reality” of images (which are perceived both as two-dimensional surfaces
and as representations of a three-dimensional field), optical illusions and
the figure-ground duality. In his conclusion to this section, Aumont is
categorical: “there is no image that is not the perception of an image.”
Whereas images are cultural and historical objects, the eye is “the most
universal of instruments,” and Aumont resists a cultural relativist account
of vision, instead insisting on its inherently human quality. He admits that
studies of the perception of images should be on guard about ethnocentrism
and of extrapolating experiments carried out in Western, industrialized
societies, and yet “the intercultural study of visual perception has provided
us with ample evidence that subjects who have never seen an image have
an innate capacity to see the objects represented in an image along with
their compositional organization.” Aumont concludes that the perception of
images, as opposed to their interpretation, is “a process which is characteristic
of the human species and which has simply become more cultivated in some
societies than in others. The part played by the eye is common to everyone
and should not be underestimated.”50
Notwithstanding the importance of the “part played by the eye” in the
perception of images, Aumont devotes ample space to a discussion of the
dispositif of the visual image, substantially drawing on the “apparatus
theory” debates of the 1970s, towards which he was far from taking a hostile
stance. Here it is notable that Comolli’s “Technique et idéologie” is granted a
privileged position and considered to be among “the most important texts
rehearsing these questions.”51 Aumont makes minor criticisms of certain

48 Jacques Aumont, L’Image, 1 st ed. (Paris: Nathan, 1990), pp. 3-4. Translated as The Image,
trans. Claire Pajackowska (London: BFI, 1997), p. 1.
49 The two later editions of the book would modify this structure substantially.
50 The quotes in this paragraph are from ibid., p. 52 [p. 50].
51 Ibid., p. 139 [p. 135].
588  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

points in Comolli’s discussion, including his outdated invocation of the

“persistence of vision,” his tendency to conflate the ideology of realism
with the ideology of the visible, and his propensity to be carried away by his
own polemics on the relationship between the “ideological” and “scientific”
aspects of the cinematic apparatus. “Technique et idéologie” nonetheless has
the merit of presenting, in Aumont’s view, “a systematic account of the way
we conceive of the relations between the image (especially the photographic
image), its technique, its dispositif and the ideology that convey the latter to
the spectator.”52 Moreover, while the Aumont of 1990 acknowledges that the
debates on the cinematic apparatus in which Comolli intervened have lost
the central position they had in the field of film studies during the 1970s,
he does so with a palpable sense of remorse:

After having been the object of innumerable discussions for a whole

decade, these theses are today rather forgotten, mainly because of the
generalized (and wrongful) neglect of their Althusserian and Marxist
frames of reference. The debate on history may still be very contemporary,
but the concept of ideology as defined fairly precisely by Marxist criticism
has fallen into disuse. Despite the aporias in any definition of ideology,
there are good reasons to regret this abandonment: the theoretical void
it left has been rapidly filled by a smug empiricism based on statistics,
quantitative studies and crude “common sense.”53

By the time of the 2011 edition of L’Image, this perception of distance from
the 1970s debates on the cinematic apparatus has grown all the greater, while
any sense of regret on Aumont’s part has been minimized. The chapter on
the dispositif is now subsumed into a broader discussion on “The Image, the
Medium, the Dispositif,” with Aumont arguing that “theorizations of the
dispositif, belonging to the vocabulary and concepts of the psychoanalysis-
inspired semiology of the 1970s, […] today have everything to gain from
being put into perspective through a more contemporary consideration of
the medium of the image.”54 The passages on “Technique et idéologie” have
here been radically pared back, and the terms in which they are discussed
are more perfunctory: Comolli’s text is now merely “an interesting testament
to this quarrel” and “proposes some interesting ideas for a reflection on the
link between the history of the sciences, that of technical inventions, and

52 Ibid., p. 140 [p. 136].

53 Ibid., p. 141 [p. 137].
54 Jacques Aumont, L’Image, 3rd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), p. 5.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 589

that of artistic ideas.” The “Marxo-Freudian” framework in which Comolli

wrote “Technique et idéologie,” meanwhile, is “today forgotten, for better or
for worse,” and the study of the “ideological” determination of film technique
is principally “the domain of historians.”55
If L’Image sees Aumont enact a significant turn towards phenomenology,
this nonetheless does not entail a fresh preoccupation with Bazin’s film
theory, itself inspired by certain ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Indeed,
of all the Cahiers critics of the post-1968 generation, Aumont probably
remains the most impervious to Bazinian ontology. Aumont now admits
that the polemical assimilation of Bazin’s ideas with those of cinematic
“transparency” in his 1979 article “Griffith, le cadre et la figure” represents
“one of the botched aspects of this text” and that “the Bazin treated in this
article is a rather imaginary Bazin.”56 And yet his more recent film theory has
remained reasonably unconcerned with that of the founder of Cahiers, as is
evident in the 2005 book Matière d’images. In this collection of texts dealing
with the “materiality” of the cinematic image, Aumont explicitly avoids any
discussion of an ontological relationship between the film image and the
profilmic reality, a form of “presence” that he ascribes to the “essentialism”
of Bazin.57 Despite noting his admiration for the Bazinian tradition, Aumont
avers that it paid “little heed to the matter of the image” and avows an
influence from two other, quite distinct sources: Jean Epstein’s theories
of cinégénie (the “intelligence” of the cinematic machine) and Jean Louis
Schefer’s notion that images are not “pre-formed vehicles for signification”
but “tools for thinking.”58 Hence, the “matter of images” that is of most
interest to Aumont consists neither of its ontological relationship with the
model—the conception of which, he yields, can be of a perfectly materialist
nature (as in Straub/Huillet)—nor of the physical existence of the celluloid
strip, subject to productive aesthetic treatment by experimental filmmakers
such as Brakhage or the “structuralist-materialist” movement. Rather, it
entails such components of the cinematic image as lighting, shadow, grain,
color, montage effects, framing and visual composition. Aumont aligns these
elements with Lyotard’s notion of the figural, defined as “that which in the
image exceeds (or subverts) the figurative and the figured, that which can be

55 Ibid., pp. 142-143.

56 Interview with Jacques Aumont, May 5, 2014.
57 Jacques Aumont, Matière d’images, redux (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2009), p. 14. This
is an augmented second edition of Matière d’images (Paris: Images Modernes, 2005).
58 Ibid., pp. 10-11. Aumont also oversaw an edited collection on Epstein, which was an early
contribution to the recent renaissance of scholarship on the French filmmaker. See Jean Epstein:
Cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1998).
590  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

seen neither as mimesis nor as metaphor, but which participates in a dynamic

specific to the image (or to the figure in the image).”59 That these aspects
of film form have been a central preoccupation for Aumont is evident not
only in the articles reproduced in Matière d’images, which discuss the role
of mirrors in the films of Rivette, Bergman and Cassavetes, the relationship
of Hitchcock to painting, Kubrick’s use of color, or the presence of “phantom
materials” in the found-footage films of Bruce Conner. It is also apparent
in Aumont’s other book-length studies from the 1990s and 2000s, the very
titles of which are an indication of their more prolonged exploration of
particular manifestations of cinematic materiality: Du visage au cinéma
(1992), Introduction à la couleur: des discours aux images (1994), L’Attrait de
la lumière (2010) and Le Montreur d’ombre (2012).

Film Analysis Analyzed

Aumont’s interest in the idea, derived from Schefer, that artistic objects
are “forms that think” also informs his most important text of the 1990s,
À quoi pensent les films (1996). Here, the very act of film analysis itself is
placed under analysis. Indeed, the presiding question of Aumont’s book is
posed in its very first sentence: “How to understand a film?” For a figure
who has dedicated his life to the critical scrutiny of films, the query is
evidently a crucial one. With the advent of film studies as a university
discipline, film criticism has been transformed into film analysis, a far
more methodologically rigorous mode of interpretation. But Aumont still
insists that cinematic images “have generally been poorly evaluated.”60 The
goal of Aumont’s text is therefore to “explore the powers of film analysis
(and, virtually, by extension, the analysis of moving images).” He specifies
that the object under examination in À quoi pensent les films is not the
cinema as a whole but specific films, sequences or shots, and it is due to
this “voluntary reduction in the quantitative ambition” of his study that
Aumont feels equipped to “understand the reason or reasons for each of
these singular events which compose what we call films.”61 It is precisely
due to these “singular events” that a film, in Aumont’s view, can be a “site
of ideation” or an “instrument of thought,” and not through the cinematic
regurgitation of preconceived discourses formulated outside of the act of

59 Ibid., pp. 25-26. See also Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).
60 Jacques Aumont, À quoi pensent les films (Paris: Séguier, 1997), pp. 5-6.
61 Ibid., pp. 8-9.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 591

filmmaking itself. The cinema “thinks,” therefore, in a way that is specific

to the medium and distinct from the thinking that occurs in literature,
philosophy, science or even painting. It is, as Aumont will explain later in the
book, a “non-verbal” mode of thought dependent on the formal procedures
that underpin the production and articulation of cinematic images: “The
image presents mental processes which, without it, would not have a form.
It transports elements of symbolization or elements already symbolized,
and does so while rearranging them, which transforms them. It is, in sum,
on this double postulate that rests […] the possibility of analyzing every
film as the site of meaning.”62
The resulting structure of Aumont’s study of film analysis was the product
of circumstance: the scholar had at that time published a number of analyses
of individual films, while he had also composed an incomplete text treating
the question of film analysis in a more abstract fashion, and À quoi pensent
les films alternates between these two modes of writing in a sort of “parallel
montage.” But this structure is appropriate to the subject matter, itself
concerned with formal combinations, alternations and contradictions.
Although he wanted to avoid a text that would be a heteroclite “grab-bag”
of pre-existing articles, Aumont was aware of the lacunary nature of his
project: “That, in any case, this book is not finished, is clear to me, and is
only acceptable on the condition (and not only as an intention) of genuinely
taking it to be one moment in an almost interminable work, that of defining
film analysis.”63
A provisional tone, then, dominates Aumont’s study. His discussion none-
theless progresses step by step though the different stages of film analysis:
beginning with a historical overview of the “powers of analysis,” he proceeds
to highlight the importance of two acts without which analysis would be
impossible: firstly, the “reductive” gesture of assignation (giving an image
its technical, historical or stylistic context) and secondly, the “inventive”
gesture of interpretation, that is, grasping the meaning or significance of an
image.64 Subsequently, in a chapter given the Malrucian title “L’Enfance de
l’art,” Aumont argues that the act of analysis should leave the last word to
the image itself and not to the analyst, and he warns against “a dangerous
conception of immanentism” in critical interpretation, which can take two
opposing forms: “either it has absolute confidence in descriptions, consid-
ering them as self-justifying because objective, estimating that analysis

62 Ibid., pp. 156-157.

63 Ibid., p. 11.
64 Ibid., pp. 88-89.
592  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

ends with them; […] or it transforms the immanent into the systematic, at
least virtually, as the majority of structural analyses have the tendency to
do.”65 Again, Aumont returns to the idea that the goal of film analysis is
to highlight the act of thought contained within the image itself, but here
he qualifies the proposition: “if the image is a solution,” he writes, it is a
solution not to a precise, unambiguously circumscribed problem but rather
to “a figurative or formal enigma.”66 By the same token, however, Aumont
refuses a formalist account of film analysis. Although politics is, in this
period, mostly absent from his writings on the cinema, the former Cahiers
critic makes an unexpected return to his militant roots by insisting that:

The analysis of the image […] only has meaning, importance and, in
the end, value, if it targets the relationship of the cinema with thought
and with politics: in this way, its strategic ambition is to contradict all
enterprises whose common characteristic is to reduce analysis to what a
film “means,” either by assuming creative intentions, or, worse and more
dangerously, by locating in its surface énoncé the trace of pre-fabricated
“ideological” énoncés. But, symmetrically, it is also essential to refuse an
absolutely immanentist practice. The reproach made about the formalists,
that they evade ideology, is often unwarranted, but crucial nonetheless.67

Following the model of the “par ailleurs…” (then again…) of Bazin and
Malraux, which uses this phrase to reverse the thrust of a text’s argument
in its concluding sentence,68 Aumont concludes his study with a series of
“par ailleurs.” “Then again,” he admits, “films tell stories.”69 They are also
impregnated with a specific rhythm, which, in its qualitative rather than
quantitative sense, is notoriously difficult to subject to analytic interpreta-
tion. Finally, and most crucially, film analysis is a fundamentally aleatory,
arbitrary and erratic practice. For Aumont, viewing images is, “par ailleurs,
par ailleurs, par ailleurs,” the “provocation of an encounter.”70

65 Ibid., p. 244.
66 Ibid., p. 246.
67 Ibid., p. 258. A footnote in Aumont’s text nonetheless critiqued the “Young Mr. Lincoln”
article for univocally assigning a “castrating function” to the gaze of Henry Fonda in the film.
68 See André Malraux, Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2003
[1939]), p. 77; and André Bazin, “L’Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in idem., Qu’est-ce
que le cinéma? vol. I, pp. 11-19, here p. 19. Translated as “Ontology of the Photographic Image,”
in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Barnard, pp. 3-12, here p 10. Bazin actually uses the
synonymous phrase “d’autre part” when writing “Then again, the cinema is a language.”
69 Aumont, À quoi pensent les films, p. 259.
70 Ibid., p. 262.
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 593

Earlier in À quoi pensent les films, Aumont makes the intriguing claim
that there is “a certain amphibology” between the object of analysis and
the analysis that is carried out on it (as well as, by extension, the individual
making the analysis), as if a process of mimesis had taken place between
them. The examples he highlights, indeed, are those of f igures close to
him, such that Aumont even sounds a warning about the possibility of
indiscretion: Raymond Bellour’s analysis of The Birds is as masterfully
meticulous as Hitchcock’s film, Marie-Claire Ropars develops her notion
of a “divided text” on the model of Duras’ India Song, Stephen Heath’s
analysis of Touch of Evil replicates the complex, meandering intricacy of its
model. Thus, the object of analysis is, to borrow Eisenstein’s terminology,
“non-indifferent” to the analyst. More specif ically, both the object (if it
is worthy of analysis) and the analyst (if they prove to be equal to the
task) are marked by a common quality, that of inventiveness. “The work
that matters for analysis is that which invents something. And, since a
signifying practice, a language or an art can only invent new conceptual
content by also inventing new modes of expression, the work is that which
poses a problem of expression—or, better, which gives a solution to this
problem.”71
The temptation, of course, is to ask if the same amphibology is operative
in the analyses of specific films carried out by Aumont. At issue here is
not the presence of biographical analogies but whether Aumont’s critical
analysis itself parallels the textual models of the films he analyzes. À quoi
pensent les films includes close discussions of Che cosa sono le nuvole?
by Pasolini, Man with a Movie Camera by Vertov, La Chute de la mison
Usher by Epstein, La Naissance de l’amour by Garrel, Moses und Aron by
Straub/Huillet and Nouvelle Vague by Godard. Certainly, the blend of
visual sensitivity and theoretical erudition present in Aumont’s writing
finds echoes in this corpus of films. Moreover, the filmmakers Aumont
discusses all, undeniably, form part of the Cahiers canon dominant
during the time he wrote for the journal. While Aumont’s theoretical
and ideological points of reference have markedly changed since his
time at Cahiers, his taste in cinema—his goût—has remained remark-
ably constant across the decades. This f idelity to the cinematic corpus
encountered while at Cahiers is also represented in the book-length
studies Aumont has dedicated to individual f ilmmakers in the 1990s
and 2000s. Amnésies (1997) focused on Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma,
while Ingmar Bergman: mes films sont l’explication de mes images (2003)

71 Ibid., p. 124.
594  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

covered the œuvre of the Swedish cinéaste, and Notre-Dame des Turcs
(2010) centered on Carmelo Bene’s incendiary debut f ilm. All three, it
should be recalled, are filmmakers who were central to Aumont’s critical
maturation at Cahiers in the late 1960s.
Of the three books, Amnésies, with its detailed discussion of the modalities
of montage in Godard’s 4½-hour video essay, is methodologically closest to
the concerns of À quoi pensent les films. Indeed, Aumont had the privilege
of watching, over the course of a decade, various provisional versions of
the work as it was being completed by Godard, and he penned a number of
articles on Histoire(s) during these years.72 His argument that film analysis
is concerned with “images that think” is undoubtedly inspired by Godard’s
own phrase, invoked as a mantra in Histoire(s), that the cinema consists of
“forms that think.” The Bergman monograph, by contrast, perceptibly shifts
the coordinates of Aumontian analysis. If his project in the 1980s and 1990s
privileged the “filmmaker as artist” over the “filmmaker as author,” Ingmar
Bergman reverses the dualism, evincing a concern for thematic traits in the
narratives of Bergman’s films that fulfil the “par ailleurs” of À quoi pensent
les films as well as anticipating the later study Limites de la fiction, which
returns to the issue of narrative fiction in the cinema after a long period
during which this question had been bracketed off by Aumont.73
The growing concern for fiction in Aumont’s film aesthetics, after ques-
tions of narrative had been largely evacuated from his conceptual framework,
was only one of the changes that his theory would undergo in the early
years of the twenty-first century. From this point on, issues relating to
more recent manifestations of image culture—digital imagery, video art,
television, the Internet, even video games—would assume a central position
in his thinking. For this reason, the thread of Aumont’s film theory will
be momentarily dropped, to be picked up again later: the work he carried
out in the 2000s and 2010s, equally as prolific as in earlier decades, will be
discussed in the final chapter of this book.

72 See Jacques Aumont, “Leçon de ténèbres,” Cinémathèque no. 10 (Autumn 1996), pp. 5-11;
Jacques Aumont, “Beauté, fatal souci. Note sur un épisode des Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc
Godard,” Cinémathèque no. 12 (Autumn 1997), pp. 17-24; and Jacques Aumont, “La Mort de Dante,”
CINéMAS vol. 8 no. 1-2 (Autumn 1997), pp. 125-145. When interviewed, Aumont divulged that
his partner Anne-Marie Faux, who worked as an assistant for Godard, between 1989 and 1993,
provided him with copies of provisional versions of Histoire(s) du cinéma.
73 Jacques Aumont, Limites de la fiction: Considérations actuelles sur l’état du cinéma (Montrouge:
Bayard, 2014).
The Film Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont 595

Works Cited

Jacques Aumont, “Eisenstein avec Freud: Notes sur ‘Le Mal voltairien,’” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 226-227 (January-February 1971), pp. 68-74.
———, “Présentation,” in S.M. Eisenstein, Au-delà des étoiles, ed. Jacques Aumont
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1974), pp. 7-17.
———, “Un rêve soviétique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (November 1976), pp. 26-44.
———, “Notes sur un fragment de La Chinoise de Godard,” Linguistique et Sémiologie,
no. 6 (1978), pp. 55-91. Translated as “This Is Not A Textual Analysis,” Camera
Obscura, no. 8-9-10 (Spring-Summer-Fall 1982), pp. 131-160.
———, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: Albatros, 1979). Translated as Montage Eisenstein,
trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987). 2nd ed., Paris: Images Modernes, 2005.
———, L’Image, 1st ed. (Paris: Nathan, 1990). Translated as The Image, trans. Claire
Pajackowska (London: BFI, 1997).
———, “Mon très cher objet,” Trafic no. 6 (Spring 1993), pp. 53-69.
———, “Leçon de ténèbres,” Cinémathèque no. 10 (Autumn 1996), pp. 5-11.
———, À quoi pensent les films (Paris: Séguier, 1997).
———, “Beauté, fatal souci. Note sur un épisode des Histoire(s) du cinéma de
Jean-Luc Godard,” Cinémathèque, no. 12 (Autumn 1997), pp. 17-24.
———, “La Mort de Dante,” CINéMAS vol. 8 no. 1-2 (Autumn 1997), pp. 125-145.
———, interviewed by Nicole Vulser, “Jacques Aumont, le cinéma né sous X,” Le
Monde, September 29, 2003.
———, interviewed by Patrice Blouin and Jean-Marc Lalanne, “Le gai savoir,” Les
Inrockuptibles, April 27, 2005, pp. 36-38.
———, L’Œil interminable, 3rd ed. (Paris: La Différence, 2007).
———, “Où commence, où finit l’expressionisme?,” in Jacques Aumont and Bernard
Benoliel (eds.), Le Cinéma expressioniste: De Caligari à Tim Burton (Rennes:
Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008), pp. 13-28.
———, L’Image, 3rd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011).
———, Limites de la fiction: Considérations actuelles sur l’état du cinéma (Montrouge:
Bayard, 2014).
——— and Raymond Bellour, “Eisenstein: Écrits sur le cinéma,” Magazine littéraire
no. 99 (April 1975), pp. 52-53.
———, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie and Marc Vernet, Esthétique du film (Paris:
Nathan, 1982). Translated as The Aesthetics of Film, trans. Richard Neupert
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).
——— and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films (Paris: Nathan, 1988).
André Bazin, “L’Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que
le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 11-19.
596  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Translated as “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in idem., What is Cinema?,

trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 3-12.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Les machines e(x)tatiques (Macroscopie et signification),” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 271 (November 1976), pp. 22-25.
David Bordwell, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift,” Screen vol. 15 no. 4 (Winter
1974), pp. 29-46.
Sergei Eisenstein, “La quatrième dimension du cinéma,” translated into French by
Jacques Aumont, Cahiers du cinéma no. 270 (September-October 1976), pp. 5-28.
Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds.), Inventing Film Studies (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008).
Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).
André Malraux, Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (Paris: Nouveau Monde,
2003 [1939]).
Jean Narboni, “Le hors-cadre décide de tout,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (Novem-
ber 1976), pp. 14-21.
Charles O’Brien, “The End of Cinema?: An Afterword to Jacques Aumont’s ‘The
Variable Eye,’” in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute (Austin: University
of Texas, 1997), pp. 259-262.
Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the US Study of Film (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007).
20. Two Ciné-fils: Pascal Kané and Serge
Daney

Abstract
This chapter examines the phenomenon of cinephilia through the work of
two Cahiers du cinéma critics: Pascal Kané and Serge Daney. To reckon with
the affective, deeply personal role that his relationship with film played
in his life, Serge Daney coined the word ciné-fils (“cine-son”) as a pun on
the more usual cinéphile, a term with which Kané has also identified. But
their cinephilia has manifested itself in different ways since their time
at Cahiers: for Kané, critical writing has taken a back seat to his efforts
as a filmmaker, while Daney joined the newspaper Libération in 1981,
where he wrote prolifically on contemporary cinema over the following
decade. These writings now form a touchstone for understanding the
transformations that the cinema underwent during a period of defeat
and disorientation for the left-wing cultural milieu with which Daney
and Libération were associated.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, Pascal Kané, Serge Daney, cinephilia,

Libération, mannerism

A Genealogy of Inspiration: Pascal Kané’s Film Criticism

While Aumont imported the theoretical legacy of the Cahiers project into
the purportedly objective or even “scientific” discursive field of academic
scholarship, two of his former colleagues took their relationship with the
cinema into more subjective, affective realms. After leaving Cahiers in the
early 1980s, Pascal Kané and Serge Daney went in different professional
directions, with Kané turning to filmmaking and Daney practicing criticism
in a new guise, as a reviewer for the left-wing daily Libération. Both, however,
profoundly remained “amateurs” of the cinema, and their work has been
marked by a deep interrogation of the phenomenon of cinephilia—that is,

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch20
598  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

of the emotional attachment, or even love, that they and their generation
of Parisian film obsessives have had with the cinema. Of course, this mode
of film appreciation had suffered a bracing critique by none other than
Cahiers itself during its Marxist period, when the journal came perilously
close to a “cinephobic” attitude towards film spectatorship. Later, the rise of
television threatened to kill off the cultural practice of cinephilia altogether,
as film attendance dropped precipitously throughout the 1970s and 1980s
and large numbers of movie theaters closed their doors. A combination of
nostalgia for and critique of their cinephilic past, therefore, was central
to the activities of Kané and Daney, both during their time at Cahiers and
after they left the journal.
Daney, for his part, devised a term for the quasi-familial relationship
he enjoyed with the cinema, the role it played as a kind of surrogate
father during his formative years: he famously claimed to be not merely
a cinephile but a ciné-fils (film son). The same could be said of Kané, who
has persistently explored the links between cinephilia and childhood in
both his criticism and his filmmaking. More recently, Kané has used an
anecdotal event the two close friends shared to describe the qualities that
unite their outlooks. Riding together on a train from Aix-en-Provence
back to Paris one evening, they struck upon “the correct way to formulate
a question that had, in our opinion, been poorly framed until then: that
of know-how [savoir-faire] and intended meaning [vouloir-dire], two false
values in art, which have nonetheless encumbered critical discourse.” Film
criticism would profit, they wagered, if these two notions were replaced
by the more “operative” values of vouloir-faire (wanting to do) and savoir-
dire (knowing how to say), “two aleatory concepts issued from our own
critical practice.”1 This chapter will thus look at the ways in which these
two ciné-fils integrated the principles of vouloir-faire and savoir-dire into
their reflection on the cinema, which took the various guises of criticism,
journalism and filmmaking.
In Kané’s initial writings on the cinema, from his early years at Cahiers
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this critical approach was channeled above
all in his appraisal of the work of Roman Polanski, even if the Polish-born
filmmaker was not an obvious target for the journal’s approbation. Kané’s
first published piece of criticism was, fittingly, an article on Polanski’s
French production Cul-de-sac: here, already, he remarked that the filmmaker
“continues to work in a cinema that is lightly anachronistic (the timeless-
ness of the problems), traditional (the direction of the actors, the choice

1 Pascal Kané, Savoir dire pour vouloir faire (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2015), pp. 18-20.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 599

of the scripts, his ‘style’) and theatrical (a restricted number of typecast

characters, a single place of action).”2 From the perspective of the present
day, Kané affirms that his attraction to Polanski’s works stems from the
director’s capacity to “affirm an originality by means of generic codes,”3
and indeed the tension in Polanski’s cinema between the cultivation of an
individual filmmaking style and an interest in working within the structures
of commercial genre cinema was already discerned in Kané’s writings at the
time. A December 1968 review of Rosemary’s Baby, for example, notes “the
seriousness with which this very gifted director treats rather naïve, musty
genres like horror, vampire movies or the supernatural thriller.”4 Here, the
“abundance of signs” that the film is invested with leads critics to read it
in multiple ways: on the level of its surface narrative (a coven of witches
in contemporary New York), on a “critical level” that would question the
sanity of Mia Farrow’s character, and on a third level that arises from the
combination of the two prior readings, one that interrogates the status of
the spectator and recognizes that it is in the mechanisms governing the
interaction of these interpretative modes that the viewer’s “fascination” for
the film is produced.
This critical discussion is deepened in Kané’s monograph on Polanski,
published in the “7eme Art” collection by the Éditions du Cerf in 1970 and
one of the first book-length studies undertaken by the post-1968 generation
of Cahiers critics. As with his two critical pieces on Polanski, Kané’s longer
essay centers on Polanski’s relationship with film genres and the problematic
of the artistic corpus that this practice raises. If a filmmaker works across
multiple genres in varying registers (from earnest sincerity to parodic
farce) and with starkly different stylistic hallmarks, how can we speak of
their work as constituting a cohesive corpus? In the case of Polanski, Kané
argues, the director’s œuvre is united by the fact that everything he makes,
regardless of the genre it occupies, is a “theoretical” film, whereby the genre
is knowingly chosen in order precisely to highlight the period of nostalgic
decadence that Hollywood cinema had entered by the late 1960s.5 If all of
Polanski’s films are characterized by the “opposition between a neutral,
objective universe and a world or rather a mental milieu in perpetual
transformation that gives rise to phantasms,” then this recurrent trope

2 Pascal Kané, “Le château vide (Cul-de-sac),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 187 (February 1967), p. 70.
3 Interview with Pacal Kané, March 12, 2014.
4 Pascal Kané, “Everybody loves my baby (Rosemary’s Baby),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207
(December 1968), pp. 81-82, here p. 81.
5 Pascal Kané, Roman Polanski (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970), pp. 20-21.
600  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

can also be seen as proposing a “metaphor of the cinema,” which is most

profitably to be seen not as an “analogous world” to our own but as a universe
with its own laws and logic.6
From this provisional judgement, Kané shifts to a discussion of the role
of fascination and ideology in Polanski’s cinema. For Kané, Polanski’s work
is part of a broader rupture with the traditional model of the spectator as
possessing a naïve, depoliticized fascination for film. The cinema of the
1960s bears witness to the acquisition of “ideological awareness” among the
audience, for whom “the cinema has definitively lost its innocence.”7 But
Polanski’s cinema is distinct from the work of Godard or Straub/Huillet by
dint of occupying a central place within the cinematic mainstream. In es-
sence, Polanski critiques and demystifies the spectacle of Hollywood cinema
from inside the spectacle itself. In order to do so, the director demands a
“complex reading” of his films, which are exceptional in their ability to
provoke multiple and contradictory interpretations. For Kané, the basis
of this divided reading is the irreducible contradiction between the two
components of the image: signification and expressivity. The “principal
lesson” of Polanski’s films, therefore, is that the cinematic image can be
reduced neither to its “message” (a “pure ‘signification’”) nor to its “expres-
sivity” (its auteurist style) but arises from the interaction between these
two signifying levels.8
The publication of Kané’s book, importing concepts drawn from the liter-
ary theory of Barthes, Genette and Todorov into a cultural format that had
hitherto been the preserve of a more Romantic strain of cinephilia, incited
resistance from other critical quarters. In Le Monde, for instance, Patrick Séry
condescendingly estimated the monograph to be “a little adolescent” and
said of its ostensibly obtuse writing style, “the fact that the author is a critic
for Cahiers du cinéma leaps out at you.” The Cahiers editors took umbrage at
this “disdainful dispatch,” penning a letter responding to Séry’s criticisms,
which Le Monde declined to publish.9 Cahiers’ own review of Kané’s book
was, as could be expected, far more positive, with Baudry highlighting the
value of his impulse to highlight “the modernity of a cinema such as that

6 Ibid., p. 27
7 Ibid., p. 38.
8 Ibid., p. 52.
9 Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Lettre au Monde,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227
(January-February 1971), p. 121. This letter, dated January 10, 1971, quotes at length from Séry’s
original article, which appeared in the January 7 edition of Le Monde.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 601

practiced by Polanski; a modernity all the more difficult to clarify for the
fact that these films ‘mime’ classicism.”10
In his response to Polanski’s later f ilms, Kané extended the critical
apparatus he had established in his monograph, and in 1979, upon the
release of Tess, Kané finally had the opportunity to interview the director.11
Furthermore, Kané’s enduring appreciation for Polanski’s work enabled
him to identify the merits of New Hollywood cinema at a time when his
fellow Cahiers critics were slow to give it recognition. While he judged
Friedkin’s The Exorcist to be a “mediocre product” whose only value was the
“privileged symptom” of the economic and political crisis of the Western
bourgeoisie posed by its extraordinary popular success, Taxi Driver and
Dog Day Afternoon were received far more positively.12 But it was the work
of Brian De Palma that elicited Kané’s most considered critical response:
beyond superficial resemblances with Hitchcock, De Palma’s representation
of monstrosity is infused with a “passion for difference” that critiques not
only the racism of American society but also a certain bien-pensant humanist
anti-racism that “represses the idea of difference.” It is this attitude that is
at the root of the “violent, impossible, mortal passions” in De Palma’s films,
which are “destined to failure in that they aim only to preserve the worst
of their object: the return to the norm, to recognition, to indifference.”13
In one of his last articles for Cahiers, Kané returned his critical focus
to classical cinema, analyzing the contradictions between the three in-
carnations of the Mabuse figure in the films of Fritz Lang, a symptomatic
reflection both of the evolution of the cinema and of the historical changes
in Germany between 1920, 1933 and 1959. He concludes here that “it is not
the search for and affirmation of mastery that renders Lang’s cinema so
remarkable, but, on the contrary, the terror before the realization of this

10 Pierre Baudry, “Un livre,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971), pp. 64-65, here p. 64.
Baudry nonetheless cautions that “the process of designation-critique engaged by Polanski of
certain codes and genres is in no way sufficient to legitimately subvert their problematic.”
11 See Pascal Kané, “La ville des feintes (Chinatown),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 256 (February-
March 1975), pp. 63-64; and Roman Polanski, interviewed by Serge Daney, Pascal Kané and
Serge Toubiana, “Entretien avec Roman Polanski,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 306 (December 1979),
pp. 4-11. Cahiers had previously interviewed Polanski in 1969, but Kané was not involved in that
conversation.
12 Pascal Kané, “Le secret derrière la peur (L’Exorciste),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 253 (October-
November 1974), p. 41. See also Pascal Kané, “Taxi Driver; Un après-midi de chien,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 268-269 (July-August 1976), p. 99.
13 Pascal Kané, “Note sur le cinéma de Brian de Palma,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 277 (June 1977),
pp. 59-60, here p. 60.
602  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

mastery.”14 After departing from Cahiers in the early 1980s, Kané only
made rare forays into film criticism, preferring to concentrate his energies
on filmmaking instead. One major exception is the text “Généalogie de
l’inspiration,” presented as a lecture at the Cinémathèque française in 1995
and first published in 2000. Here, Kané reclaims the “unloved” concept of
aesthetic inspiration and discloses that “what has particularly inspired me
are the forms of classical Hollywood cinema” that are capable of “visually
concretiz[ing], through their mise en scène, the themes of their authors.”15 As
such, Kané finds himself drawn principally to “narrator-filmmakers” (rather
than “artist-filmmakers” or “poet-filmmakers”), and he discusses the work
of Elia Kazan, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Nicholas Ray through this optic.
From the radical deconstruction of “narrative transitivity” dominant during
Cahiers’ “Freudo-Marxist” period, then, Kané has embarked on a critical
return to the classical aesthetics of American cinema, with its traditional
approach to storytelling and mise en scène, even if the thematic concerns of
all three of the filmmakers he treats push against the ideological boundaries
of the Hollywood system. Such a reversal can also be detected in Kané’s
own filmmaking, which takes inspiration from the likes of Polanski and
Mankiewicz in attempting to use the tropes of genre cinema in order to
undo its ideological codification.

Cinephilia and Childhood in Kané’s Cinema

Cinephilia was at the center of one of the last great polemics on the pages
of Cahiers. Between October 1977 and February 1978, Louis Skorecki, who
had written on and off for the journal since 1963, penned the incendiary
text “Contre la nouvelle cinéphilie.” The article was slated to appear in the
April 1978 issue but, as Skorecki himself pointed out in a prefatory note to
the text, caused a “problem” within the editorial committee, and publication
was delayed until October 1978. In the text, Skorecki both delivers a paean to
the obsessive, fetishistic nature of early 1960s cinephilia—seen as a purely
masculine, even homosexual affair—and vituperates against the cultivated,
consensual nature of post-1968 film culture, a “barring” of cinephilia in
which even Cahiers played a role. Consequently, Skorecki violently rails

14 Pascal Kané, “Revoir Mabuse,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 309 (March 1980), pp. 48-51, here p. 51.
15 Pascal Kané, “Généalogie de l’inspiration,” in Jacques Aumont (ed.), La Mise en scène (Brussels:
De Boeck, 2000), pp. 167-175, here p. 168. The text is reprinted, in revised form, in Kané, Savoir
dire pour vouloir faire, pp. 229-253.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 603

against the privileged position given to Godard and Straub by his Cahiers
confrères and instead insists that Jacques Tourneur is “the greatest of all
filmmakers.”16 If the traditional cinephilia of the cinémathèques and reper-
tory movie theaters is dead, Skorecki nonetheless perceives a place where it
can be preserved. Television, for the Cahiers critic and future TV reviewer
at Libération, is now the “last place where something of the hallucinatory
lucidity of yesterday’s cinephilia is still possible.”17 It was apt that Kané
would be tasked with the editorial right-of-reply to Skorecki’s broadside.
Assimilating Skorecki’s positions with the acritical fascination for the cinema
in the macmahonisme of Michel Mourlet’s “Sur un art ignoré,” Kané argued
that only a politically contextualized cinephilia could allow it to become
“a critical school, a school for filmmakers.”18
The nexus between cinephilia and filmmaking was evidently a central
preoccupation for Kané at the time: his just completed feature film debut,
Dora et la lanterne magique, had thematically grappled with the cinephilic
fascination for the film image and its parallels with the child’s captivated
gaze upon the world. Dora et la lanterne magique was not Kané’s f irst
experience in filmmaking: he had already directed two shorts, La Mort
de Janis Joplin in 1973 and À propos de Pièrre Rivière (a filmed interview
with Foucault) in 1975 and was an assistant on the set of La Cecilia. He
nonetheless recalls having to grapple with the “taboo” surrounding the
desire to become a filmmaker within the Cahiers team in the years after
1968, which impelled “a certain discretion,” even in spite of the journal’s
notable history of incubating new generations of filmmakers.19 Co-written
with Raúl Ruiz, Dora et la lanterne magique has a fairy-tale quality to it,
as the young Dora is transported to exotic lands by means of her magical
apparatus (the titular lantern). The storyline’s status as an allegory for
cinema spectatorship is self-evident, while the premise also allows Kané
to develop what he sees as a heteroclite approach to film form, creating
a kaleidoscopic collage that incorporates a wide range of image formats.
Newsreel footage (of the May ’68 protests, notably), photography, graphic
novels, home movies, rear projections and even pre-cinematic moving
images such as shadow plays all feature in the film. While Kané contends
that his film relates to “the reflection on the media that we are proposing

16 Louis Skorecki, “Contre la nouvelle cinéphilie,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 293 (October 1978),
pp. 31-52, here p. 38.
17 Ibid., p. 51.
18 Pascal Kané, “Réponse à ‘C.N.C.,’” Cahiers du cinéma no. 293 (October 1978), pp. 52-54, here
p. 54.
19 Kané, Savoir dire pour vouloir faire, p. 15.
604  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

in the new format of Cahiers du cinéma,”20 the dominant aesthetic of Dora

et la lanterne magique, with its ample use of Méliès-like trick effects, places
it in opposition to the Lumièrism closely associated with the Cahiers critical
line. As with La Cecilia and L’Olivier, however, the journal did not hesitate to
promote Kané’s film, running reviews of it by Bonitzer and Bergala, as well
as a long interview with Kané himself.21 In this dialogue, Kané distances
himself from Brechtian aesthetics, despite the deeply self-reflexive quality
of his film, and instead contends that “what interests me is when elements
of magic, the supernatural, enchantment and fascination are in play. It’s the
opposite of the cinema as an instrument of knowledge.”22 While he admits to
the importance of Godard and Straub/Huillet for his critical understanding
of the cinema, Kané states that “the only filmmaker with whom I would find
a proximity on the choice of subjects” is Jacques Demy—a stance that would
have been scandalous in the Cahiers of 1973 but passes without comment in
1977.23 As Kané insists, Dora et la lanterne magique is above all a film about
childhood, and one of the most engrossing parts of the filmmaking process
for the fledgling director was the work required to coax a performance out
of the young actress playing Dora, which, he reveals, necessarily took on a
“ludic dimension” that quickly extended to the other actors on the set. As
Kané later explained: “Playing a role [le jeu] is linked with childhood. And
shooting a film is like playing. Shooting a film is a game. It’s not a profession,
it’s not work, it’s a game.”24
Dora et la lanterne magique had a mixed critical reception—although
Kané later noted with satisfaction that the film had enduring success at
children-oriented matinée screenings, thereby fulfilling his goal of making
a film that could please young and old alike.25 Bergala ascribed this critical
bemusement to the “serene liberty” with which Kané’s film thwarted the
twin presuppositions of the press. Firstly, by being a film for children, Dora
et la lanterne magique disrupted the expectation that a “Cahiers film” must
be “theoretical, difficult and boring, intelligent but oh so austere, in any

20 Pascal Kané, “Pour un cinéma hétéroclite,” Libération, March 1, 1978.

21 See Pascal Bonitzer, “Dora et la lanterne magique (P. Kané),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 276
(May 1977), pp. 41-42; Alain Bergala, “Dora et la lanterne magique (Pascal Kané),” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 287 (April 1978), pp. 52-54; and Pascal Kané, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer and Serge
Daney, “Entretien avec Pascal Kané,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 279-280 (August-September 1977),
pp. 67-80. The film itself features a scene where Daney, Narboni, Toubiana and Bonitzer play a
band of Mexican rancheros.
22 Ibid., p. 73
23 Ibid., pp. 75-76.
24 Interview with Pascal Kané, March 12, 2014.
25 Interview with Pascal Kané, May 12, 2014.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 605

case a film of non-pleasure.” In tandem with this, however, its parodic, even
deconstructive aspect also subverted the received notion of a children’s
film, and the resulting confusion among reviewers led them to miss “what
is principally in play in the film—to wit, the spectator’s relationship with
belief.”26
In Kané’s sophomore feature—1983’s Liberty Belle, which remains his
best-known work—the thematic preoccupation with cinematic spectator-
ship is thrust to the fore. Although, in the 1970s, Cahiers fulminated against
the retro mode, Liberty Belle was not without its own retro effects: the film
takes place in 1960, at the height of the tensions surrounding the Algerian
independence movement. Julien (Jerôme Zucca) is a student sent to Paris
after the death of his communist father and finds himself torn between
the lure of his wealthy classmate Gilles, a sympathizer with the neo-fascist
Algérie française cause, and his philosophy teacher Vidal, a Sartrian and
collaborator with Algeria’s independence movement, who enlists Julien to
help him in a smuggling operation. In addition to this political intrigue, the
film is also concerned with the cinema itself. Liberty Belle’s protagonist is
an ardent filmgoer during the high watermark of Parisian cinephilia and
is initially enamored with the modernism of Bergman and Antonioni.
Julien’s encounter with Gilles also introduces him to the macmahoniens.27
Early on in their friendship, Gilles expresses his distaste for the cerebral
nature of L’Avventura, declaring with gleeful defiance that he would happily
exchange “all of Antonioni’s cinema for a single shot from Raoul Walsh.”
Several years later, in the film’s epilogue, Julien and Gilles seem to find a
reconciliation in their cinematic predilections when they bump into each
other at a screening of Pierrot le fou.
Alongside Luc Moullet’s Brigitte et Brigitte and Les Sièges de l’Alcazar,
Liberty Belle is one of the most evocative depictions of the post-war film-
going sub-culture in Paris. As Libération critic Olivier Séguret writes:

Here, cinephilia is not represented as a zone of shadows, cooped up in a

complicit territory or magnified like a secret garden. Treated seriously
but without any superfluous gravity, the cinema functions in Liberty
Belle like a system of thought, with a history now rich enough for one
or more dialectical or physical laws to be extracted from it. The film’s

26 Bergala, “Dora et la lanterne magique,” p. 52.

27 Although the macmahoniens were indisputably on the far right, the claim that they were
also active in the movement against Algerian independence is historically contentious but
remains implied rather than explicitly stated in Kané’s film.
606  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

density doubtless derives from this institution of a symbolic formula where

the cinema is not just a privileged reference, but occupies an essential
function.28

The title of Kané’s film was taken from a pinball machine that was popular at
the time, and Séguret concludes his review by expressing his wish, in gaming
parlance, that the “same player shoots again.” Unfortunately, however, Kané’s
subsequent career was marked by a series of professional frustrations and
obstacles, which prevented him from realizing a sustainable career as a
filmmaker up until his recent death in August 2020, at the age of 74.29 Shortly
after Liberty Belle he shot the spontaneous mid-length film Nouvelle suite
vénitienne, in which, inspired by a performance piece by the artist Sophie
Calle, the actress Anne Alvaro follows a stranger around the canals of Venice.
A mooted venture in Hollywood involving Ava Gardner (and, after Gardner
withdrew, Cyd Charisse) never got off the ground, and Kané lamented losing
four years to the project. Other proposals have fallen victim to the vagaries
of the French film funding system. Over the last three decades, therefore,
Kané was only able to work on a sporadic basis, but he nevertheless built
up a sizable body of work, which includes three feature films (La Fête des
mères in 1991, L’Éducatrice in 1995 and Je ne vous oublierai jamais in 2010) and
numerous television projects, as well as a radio play based on the literary
couple Marcel and Élise Jouhandeau (Mésalliance, 2012). Paradoxically, it
is Kané’s work for television that speaks to the thematic concerns that are
personally closest to him: the 1998 telefilm Le Monde d’Angelo, for instance,
returns to the twin themes of childhood and cinephilia that had been
developed in Dora et la lanterne magique, while Rêves en France (2003)
updates Liberty Belle by exploring the world of Parisian youth in the early
twenty-first century. Kané is at his most unabashedly autobiographical
in the 2001 documentary La Théorie du fantôme, in which, incited by the
discovery of his dead father’s papers, the filmmaker explores his family’s
tragic history. The elder Kané had migrated to France in 1925 in order to
pursue studies in medicine, leaving his mother and sisters in Poland, where,
during World War II, they were sent to Auschwitz and murdered. The film
follows Pascal’s voyage to Poland to trace his family’s origins in Lodz and the
village of Zgierz, his trip to Florida to meet an aging relative who survived the
war, and the consecration of a ceremonial tombstone in a Jewish cemetery

28 Olivier Séguret, “Liberty Belle fait tilt,” Libération, September 17, 1983.
29 Cahiers published an obituary on Kané in its October 2020 issue. See Pierre Eugène, “Pascal
Kané, à l’école du cinema,” Cahiers du cinema no. 769 (October 2020), pp. 62-63.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 607

for his grandmother and two aunts. Having been generally absent from his
critical writings, it is only in the medium of film that Kané felt able to give
expression to this aspect of his personal life.

Serge Daney: From Cahiers to Libération

Unlike Kané, Daney harbored little desire to “pass ‘to the other side’ of
the camera.” Soon before his death, the critic recalled a single, fruitless
attempt to become a filmmaker: in 1967, he made a “masochistic” short
called Une (très) mauvaise journée, which was never finished and which
now lingers as “a bad memory, a sort of ignoble nightmare” revealing “the
certainty of being led onto the wrong stage, or at least not my stage.”30 The
experience was never repeated, but Daney’s decision to remain faithful to
his vocation as a film critic proved to be eminently justifiable. Despite his
tragically premature death from AIDS on June 12, 1992 at the age of only
48, Daney’s contribution to French cinema could hardly have been more
profound, and he is now generally ranked alongside André Bazin as the
greatest film critic the nation has produced. This renown is above all due to
the decade Daney spent as a reviewer for Libération, between 1981 and 1991,
which was both his most quantitatively prolific period as a writer and the
era in which his ideas about the cinema reached their broadest public. The
impact Daney had during this period is such that his own prolific output has
come to be matched by a surge in writings on Daney. More than any of his
contemporaries at Cahiers, Daney’s lifework has been discussed, analyzed
and championed by his peers and followers. Although, shortly before his
death, Daney would lament the fact that he never wrote a “real” book, the
critic published four collections of his critical writings during his own
lifetime: La Rampe (a selection of his writings for Cahiers from 1964 to 1981),
Ciné journal (featuring film reviews for Libération in the years 1981-1986), Le
Salaire du zappeur (collecting the texts he wrote for a column on television
in 1987) and Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à main (containing
articles written in the last years of his life, from 1988 to 1991). After Daney’s
death, this corpus has been bolstered by the testimonial interview books
Persévérance (with Serge Toubiana) and Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils (with Régis
Debray). Posthumous publications also include L’exercice a été profitable,
Monsieur (which published the notes left on Daney’s computer at the time of
his death, composed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, partly as preparation

30 Daney, Persévérance, p. 56 [pp. 48-49].

608  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

for the “real” book he intended to write), L’Amateur de tennis (a selection

of articles for Libération on tennis, Daney’s second great passion), and the
mammoth four-volume anthology La Maison cinéma et le monde, published
between 2000 and 2016, which contains nearly all of the texts credited to
Daney that had not been published in the aforementioned books.31
To this vast textual corpus can be added the swelling body of work
inspired by Daney’s thinking. Special issues of Cahiers (no. 458) and Trafic
(no. 37) have been dedicated to the critic, along with a monograph by Jean-
François Pigoullié (Serge Daney, ou La morale d’un ciné-fils), several academic
conferences and numerous doctoral studies.32 Uniquely, Daney’s life has
even been the subject of a one-man play, La Loi du Marcheur by Nicolas
Bouchaud, drawn from the critic’s dialogue with Debray and first staged in
2010.33 There are some limitations to this outpouring of exegesis, however.
Much of it is consumed by personal recollections of Daney, often by his
fellow Cahiers critics, and takes the form of a mourning work for a cherished
friend. A tendency towards hagiography and a sanctification of Daney’s
persona at the expense of a rigorous analysis of his critical concepts are
the inevitable results. In the hands of Pigoullié and his Esprit colleagues,
meanwhile, Daney’s work is infused with a quasi-theological worldview
that the critic himself would have great difficulty recognizing. Daney’s
criticism may well rank alongside that of Bazin, but his thinking has always
been more protean than that of his elder and less rooted in a consistent,
underlying philosophy of the cinema. In the case of Daney, the value of his
writings on film comes from the trenchancy of his critical judgements and
the relations he sought to draw between the cinema and broader cultural
and political questions, as well as in his interrogation of the phenomenon
of cinephilia itself. It is this quality, perhaps, which has ensured that, while
Daney is clamorously acclaimed in France, a familiarity with his critical
ideas has remained confined to the Hexagon. Notoriously, his work has
garnered little interest in the English-speaking world. Rosenbaum has

31 Not included in these meticulously compiled volumes are texts written collectively for
Cahiers, or published under a pseudonym, as well as interviews in which Daney took part as
an interviewer. For publication details of the books mentioned in this paragraph, see the list of
works cited at the end of this chapter..
32 See Cahiers du cinéma no. 458 (July-August 1992); Trafic no. 37 (Spring 2001); and Jean-François
Pigoullié, Serge Daney, ou La morale d’un ciné-fils (Lyons: Aléas, 2006). For an overview of a 2004
conference dedicated to Daney at Harvard University, see Paul Grant, “‘One More Effort, Ameri-
cans…’: A Report on ‘Beyond Film Criticism: A Symposium in Homage to Serge Daney,” Senses of
Cinema no. 31 (April 2004), sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-articles/serge_daney_symposium/
(accessed January 1, 2021).
33 Nicolas Bouchaud, La Loi du Marcheur (Besançon: Les Solitaires intempestis, 2011).
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 609

lamented this deficiency while suggesting a reason behind it: “the fact
that Daney was more of a journalist than Bazin, but also less of a theorist,
has placed him in an alien zone: too theoretical for Anglo-American film
journalism, yet also too journalistic for the academy.”34 As of 2017, only one
of the thirteen volumes credited to Daney has been translated into English:
Persévérance, as Postcards from the Cinema in 2007.35 Notwithstanding the
exiguous proportion of Daney’s work available in English, the vast size of
his critical corpus means that it can only be cursorily treated here, and to
properly do it justice would require a stand-alone study. In the last chapter
of this volume, I will discuss Daney’s writings on newer forms of audiovisual
media, which became a particular concern for him in the latter half of the
1980s. Here, after an overview of Daney’s transition from Cahiers editor to
Libération journalist, I will focus on two aspects of his film writing: the
critical practice he exercised in the early 1980s, a time of major changes in
film production and consumption; and the interrogation he carried out on
the ties between cinephilia and history in the final years of his life, a period
when he willingly saw himself as an inter-generational passeur (smuggler)
of the cinema’s historical legacy.
There is no small irony in the fact that the figure involved with Cahiers
in its Marxist phase who has gone on to garner the greatest reputation as
a critic was also the one whose link to the journal during this time was
the most tenuous and intermittent. Although it yielded articles of lasting
value such as “Sur Salador,” “Vieillesse du même” and “L’Écran du fantasme,”
Daney’s output between 1968 and 1973 was sporadic, and the period was
marked by bouts of illness and stints where he was both intellectually and
geographically distant from his colleagues. Travels to India, Africa and the
Caribbean in these years interrupted his participation in the day-to-day
affairs of Cahiers for months on end, and his views were, concomitantly,
often at a tangent to the dominant voices within the editorial team. In
later years, Daney not only vigorously distanced himself from the Marxism

34 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Missing Image,” New Left Review no. 34 (July-August 2005),
pp. 145-151.
35 In an article for Trafic, whose original English version was published in Senses of Cinema,
Rosenbaum highlighted the existence of a manuscript for a collection of Daney writings in English,
provisionally titled Cinema in Transit. The prospective publisher declined the proposal, and it
remains unpublished. See Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Daney in English: A Letter to Trafic,” Senses
of Cinema no. 13 (April 2001), sensesofcinema.com/2001.film-critics/daney/ (accessed January 1,
2021). Scattered articles by Daney do exist in English, the bulk of which have been collated by
Laurent Kretzschmar on the useful website Serge Daney in English (sergedaney.blogspot.com,
accessed January 1, 2021).
610  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

espoused by Cahiers, he also sought to minimize the extent of his earlier

political engagement, cautioning that he “had absolutely no sort of political
culture” before joining Cahiers and that he was never attracted to “the
eschatological part of Marxism, that is to say, the brighter tomorrows, and
the liberation of humanity.”36 If Marxist theory did interest Daney, then
it was in its “absolutely tragic and living sense of history” as well as the
“air of romanticism” that this outlook brought about, and if he relished
his involvement with Cahiers at the time of its Maoist turn, then this was
primarily motivated by the “will to be a part of a counter-society that would
have all the benefits of a society, with its friendships, its passions, and its
ruptures.” Both Cahiers and the communist movement were precisely such
counter-societies, and the latter shared with the cinema the fact that it “is
not of the realm of society”: “the two, which make the history of a century,
in a terrible way have that in common.”37
In its post-gauchiste period, of course, Daney was more central to Cahiers,
and the journal itself gradually retrieved its prominent position in French
f ilm culture. As a result, his critical prof ile rose considerably, but this
tendency stood in contrast to the increasingly pessimistic outlook Daney
held on the state of the cinema. This downcast mood was exemplif ied
in his contribution to the February 1980 text “Les films marquants de la
décennie,” a collective look back on the cinema of the 1970s. The films that
marked the decade for Daney—Tristana, Ici et ailleurs, Milestones, Saló and
La Région centrale among them—were all characterized by their “difficult,
marginal, sometimes paradoxical” production histories, proof that the
“cinema-machine” had begun to malfunction. The ever-increasing chatter
about a “crisis” in the cinema had the ring of a “plaintive and bitter, nostalgic
and vengeful cry: what have we done to our toy? Have we broken it?” Above
all, however, Daney laments what he sees as the “embourgeoisement” of
the cinema, and the “inadequacy of the old specialized journals (including
Cahiers), which no longer know how to carry out the work that no longer
seems needed.” In a final knife to the heart, Daney feels compelled to concede
that “it is the Positif-taste that has won out.”38
This reflection was continued the following year in “Le cru et le cuit,”
a testimonial article of sorts in which Daney, with unparalleled lucidity,
focuses on the situation of contemporary French cinema. The 1970s, in his

36 Daney, Persévérance, pp. 140-141 [pp. 117-118].

37 Ibid., pp. 143-144 [pp. 119-120].
38 Serge Daney, “Les films marquants de la décennie (1970-1980),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 308
(February 1980), pp. 45-46, here p. 45.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 611

view, was “the ‘post-’ decade par excellence: post-nouvelle vague, post-68,
post-modern.” In the absence of any coherent artistic movements or formal
schools, it came close to being an “aesthetic desert.” And yet French cinema
remained unique in the world, albeit for the conservative reason that “it was
in France that the old seventh art, the cinema-art-of-the-twentieth-century,
had retreated the least, or the least quickly.”39 This was above all due to
the pre-eminence given in France to the figure of the auteur, which has
been the most tenacious point of resistance against the forces threatening
the continued vitality of French cinema. But this has come at the price of
auteurs—in the case of figures like Rohmer, Godard and Vecchiali—need-
ing to become their own producers, constrained to developing personal
“micro-systems” in order to sustainably fund their work. If the cinema is a
“radiography of the times,” then these auteur-machines, with their catch-cry
of “small is beautiful,” reflect the disenchantment and minoritarian outlook
of the post-gauchiste era in France. The utopia of transforming society may
have evaporated, but a “minor cinema” can continue to be made within the
margins of the industry. 40 Filmmakers like Truffaut, Resnais or Demy have
fared worse in this decade because they represent the “just middle” that has,
precisely, become impossible. Instead, French cinema has become “bifacial,”
cloven between “the document and the fictive, the rough and the coded, the
random and the dispositif, in short between the raw and the cooked.” And
yet, Daney insists that French cinema “appears better armed than others
to tackle the future while remaining a site of aesthetic work,” and the critic
retains a belief in the ability of French cinema to “short-circuit” the duality
between “raw” and “cooked” cinema and create “documentaries on the state
of the material to be filmed.”41
“Le cru et le cuit,” however, represented Daney’s swansong with Cahiers,
his final article for the journal before leaving for Libération. For several
years already, Daney had been courted to join Libération by editor Serge
July—who, in Daney’s mind, “simply wanted there to be a film column
so that people could see a Libération review displayed out the front of
movie-theaters”42—and in the 1970s he had written occasional articles for
the newspaper. In 1981, Daney finally took up July’s offer and became the
newspaper’s chief film reviewer for the next decade. Libération had been
founded in 1973 by former leftist militants, and although it had entered the

39 Serge Daney, “Le cru et le cuit,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 323-324 (May 1981), pp. 11-14, here p. 11.
40 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
41 Ibid., p. 14.
42 Serge Daney, Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1999), p. 108.
612  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

cultural mainstream by the early 1980s, it still retained an identity that

was politically to the left of center and culturally daring. For Daney, the
marriage proved to be a particularly fertile one.

A Critical Liberation

Having often referred to Cahiers as a family, with its attendant constraints

and psychological pressures, where the importance of the group weighed
heavily on the individual, Daney considered his move to Libération as a
form of personal “liberation,” taking the promise offered by the newspaper’s
moniker in the literal sense. The passage from the monthly journal—where,
as a rule, “writing ‘at Cahiers’ has always meant writing ‘for Cahiers’”43—to
Libération was also a passage from “saying ‘we’” to being able to “say ‘I’” and
even, by the end of his life, “me, myself.”44 Paradoxically, then, publishing
his work in the comparatively anonymous, impermanent format of a daily
paper allowed Daney to develop a more personal, individualized approach
to writing on the cinema, where he could continue the legacy of the Cahiers
critical tradition without being encumbered by the journal’s manifold
historical baggage. As such, writing for Libération was, in Daney’s words,
“a sort of coming out.”45 This turn of phrase (Daney uses the English term)
can also be understood in the stricter sense: the film team Daney recruited
for Libération was “80% homosexual” and included fellow queer Cahiers
alumni such as Jean-Claude Biette and Louis Skorecki. Daney also recalls
the sensation of pleasure he felt in the work rhythms of a daily production
schedule, which entailed “spending the night [writing an article], bringing it
to the newspaper the next day, following it to the printing press and leaving
at 1am after seeing the layout, even helping the compositor add a title or a
caption.”46 It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Daney has spoken of his time
at Libération, especially the years 1981-1986, when his mental energies were
squarely focused on the cinema, as a personal “golden age.”47 In like fashion,
the texts he produced during this period represent one of the high points
of French film criticism. On a near daily basis, Daney wrote on the cinema,
but the critical practice he developed in these years was not confined to the

43 Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à mains (Lyons: Aléas, 1991), p. 93.
44 Daney, Persévérance, p. 103 [p. 84].
45 Ibid., p. 150 [p. 125].
46 Daney, Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils, p. 108.
47 Ibid.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 613

mundane acts of film reviewing, of mere evaluation or publicity. Instead,

each of his texts, no matter how brief, is centered on a fundamental idea of
the cinema and its place in the world. Daney’s Libération articles attest to
the encounter of a critical intelligence with the output of the medium in the
early to mid-1980s, and, taken in their totality, they present an encyclopedic
overview of the state of cinema at the time he was writing.
Despite the breadth and undeniable diversity of his textual output in the
first half of the 1980s, several through-lines in Daney’s treatment of film are
readily apparent. The first is a general concern with a regressive tendency
in the cinematic mainstream, which Daney variously gives the name “man-
nerism,” “academicism,” the “baroque age of cinema” or, most caustically,
“filmed cinema” and which was often the result of the corrosive effects of
television on film aesthetics. The fears raised in Cahiers about the prospects
for the cinema in the 1980s, therefore, seemed to have been realized. Here,
it was not so much the hegemonic rise of the Hollywood blockbuster that
was of the most concern. When faced with a box office hit such as E.T., for
instance, Daney responded to the enthusiasm his former Cahiers colleagues
expressed towards the film with wry detachment, remarking on its global
popularity: “We still don’t have the box office figures from Uranus. On
Mars, the film was a hit and the (reputedly demanding) audiences on the
rings of Saturn crowned the film a triumph. Neptune wants it for a festival
of Earthling cinema and Pluto has already snapped up the rights for it.”48
More troubling, for Daney, were those films which, despite being made
within the auteurist production model, appeared to resurrect what Truffaut
famously labeled the “tradition de qualité.” Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Iron was
critiqued both for its “‘ideological’ project” of “reconciling the maximum
number of people” and for its “academic” importation of the forms of the
American docudrama, leading Daney to dub the Pole “a great téléaste.”49
From Germany, Ulrich Edel’s Wir kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was labeled an “au-
diovisual simulation,” while Die Fälschung was criticized for the manner in
which the “empty and grandiloquent gesture with which Volker Schlöndorff
makes us a witness to the horrors of war and the pornographic nature of

48 Serge Daney, “Spielberg: On ne peut pas être et avoir E.T.,” Libération, December 1, 1982,
repr. in idem., Ciné journal vol. I: 1981-1982 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 [1986]), pp. 204-207,
here p. 204. The title of his article clearly signals it as a reply to a review for Cahiers by Narboni,
who had described it as “an intelligent, inventive, moving and funny film, the best one, to my
mind, to which Spielberg […] has lent his name.” See Jean Narboni, “Peut-on être et avoir E.T.?,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 342 (December 1982), pp. 25-29, here p. 25.
49 Serge Daney, “L’homme de fer (Andrzej Wajda),” Libération, August 19, 1981, repr. in Ciné
journal vol. I, pp. 48-54, here pp. 51, 53.
614  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the media ends up becoming a part of this same pornography.”50 Unsur-

prisingly, a high point of academicism can be found in English cinema.51
Michael Radford’s adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 was seen as “overpowering in
its academicism,” a tendency that is defined as the “aesthetics of nihilism”
and the “disabused seriousness with which one adopts the most traditional,
the most worn out form in order to signify that no content calls for being
exercised by the concern for a new form.”52 Made the same year, Julian
Mitchell’s Another Country was even understood as a site for the infiltration of
cinema by television, a process whereby filmmakers are reduced to “serious
managers of important subjects, pretexts for film-debates and cumbersome
refrains.” The cinema, in contrast to the “world ‘seen in mid-shot’ of the
televisual gaze,” is an “adventure in perception,” a “manner of seeing the
world from too far away or too closely, an art of accommodating the gaze,
inventing the distances needed to find its subject.” In a nutshell, the cinema
is never “on” a given subject, it is “with” it, and this is precisely, in Daney’s
view, what escaped the makers of Another Country.53
It is in response to Coppola’s work, however, that Daney most lucidly
interrogates the mannerist, academicist trend in the cinema of the 1980s.
Reviewing the director’s 1984 film The Cotton Club, he has no hesitation
in labeling it a case of “f ilmed cinema.” The term is drawn from Jean-
Claude Biette, who in a 1979 article for Cahiers defined this “new genre”
as a “veritable corned-beef of culture” and a “synthetic soup served on a
platter.”54 Just as the term “filmed theater” is disdainfully used with respect
to uninspired adaptations of theatrical works, “filmed cinema” applies
to works of cinema that refer exclusively to other, pre-existing films and
that have lost any sense of originality or anchoring in the real. The term
was immediately appropriated by Daney, who cited it in the same issue of
Cahiers.55 In Libération, he claims that “our time is that of filmed cinema,”
and this tendency even affects a figure such as Coppola, whom he considers

50 Serge Daney, “Moi, Christiane F., 13 ans droguée, prostituée (Ulrich Edel),” Libération, July 24,
1981, repr. in Ciné journal vol. I, pp. 32-35, here p. 35; and Serge Daney, “Le Faussaire (Volker
Schlöndorff),” Libération, October 29, 1981, repr. in Ciné journal vol. I, pp. 65-70
51 In this regard, Daney shares the low esteem Cahiers traditionally held for UK filmmaking.
52 Serge Daney, “1984 (Michael Radford),” Libération, November 15, 1984. Repr. in idem., Ciné
journal vol. II: 1983-1986 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 [1986]), pp. 177-181, here p. 179.
53 Serge Daney, “La télé anglaise fait du cinéma,” Libération, May 14, 1984. Repr. in idem. Ciné
journal vol. II, pp. 100-103, here p. 102.
54 Jean-Claude Biette “Gibier de passage (R.W. Fassbinder),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 301 (June 1979),
pp. 49-51, here p. 51.
55 Serge Daney, “Manoel de Oliveira et Amour de perdition,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 301 (June 1979),
p. 71.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 615

to be one of the most stimulating filmmakers working in the 1980s. Filmed

cinema, for Daney, “is neither the copy nor the imitation of the old cinema, it
is more like its ‘reading.’ The cinephiles who dallianced with the university
(UCLA) learnt to ‘read’ the films they loved, word by word, effect by effect.
Thanks to television, they did not re-watch films, they re-read them.”56 In
contrast with the classical era, there is no longer an organic link between
the writing (écriture) of a film and the contents of its script, and the result
is that Coppola swings back and forth between contemporary cinema’s two
“complicit ills”: academicism and mannerism.
Within this dismal state of affairs, Daney is nonetheless able to locate
certain zones of resistance, certain works that continue to attest to a vitality
in the cinema. For the most part, however, the filmmakers responsible for
such works are long-established members of the Cahiers canon. Daney
remains an intransigent supporter of the work of Straub/Huillet, Godard,
Rohmer, Rivette and Garrel. Other filmmakers are viewed in more ambigu-
ous terms: Truffaut has a “Jekyll-and-Hyde” quality to him, the films of
Fassbinder and Wenders bear traces of the dreaded malady of mannerism,
while Fanny and Alexander unites within it the “three states of the cinema:
classical cinema, modern cinema and baroque cinema.”57 Certainly, Daney
expanded the field of films in which he took an interest well beyond the
traditional inner circle of Cahiers favorites, showing appreciation for the work
of Lino Brocka, Theo Angelopoulos or Sergei Paradjanov. Andrei Tarkovsky,
for instance, a filmmaker to whom Cahiers had never truly warmed, found a
more rapturous reception in Daney’s Libération column, with Stalker hailed
for being both a “metaphysical fable” and a “realist film” about a nation that
was capable of producing the gulags.58
Above all, however, the group of directors championed by Daney are
notable for an absence: the near total lack of new, emerging filmmakers
capable of speaking to the present era. Whereas the late 1960s saw a flourish-
ing of “young cinema,” the 1980s appears to be the preserve of the old. To the
extent that there are exceptions—such as Leos Carax, who had attended
Daney’s lectures at Paris-III when still a teenager—these are few and far
between and are precisely exceptions to the rule. If there is any film that
truly typifies the decade, it is not a work in the vein of Boy Meets Girl, despite

56 Serge Daney, “Le chant du coton (Cotton Club),” Libération, January 3, 1985. Repr. in La Maison
cinéma et le monde vol. II, pp. 252-256, here p. 253.
57 Serge Daney, “Fanny et Alexandre (Ingmar Bergman),” Libération, September 26, 1983. Repr.
in Ciné journal vol II, pp. 46-50, here p. 49.
58 Serge Daney, “Stalker (Andrei Tarkovski),” Libération, February 20, 1982. Repr. in Ciné journal
vol. I, pp. 86-90, here p. 90.
616  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Daney’s admiration for Carax’s debut feature,59 but Ginger e Fred, a film
that is aptly described by Daney as “the new ‘last Fellini.’”60 More than a
nostalgic eulogy for a lost age of cinematic spectacle, Ginger e Fred is, for
Daney, part of a broader œuvre which, since La dolce vita, can be seen as “an
ironic, even cynical, anticipation” of what television programming will end
up becoming in the age of privatization and Berlusconi. In Daney’s view,
Fellini’s vivid disgust for television is ironic, given that the new medium
has realized the desire for a “universal spectacle” so evident in his films,
which are the “polite, slightly apologetic form of what TV and advertising
have transformed into a categorical imperative: nothing exists that is not
already an image.”61
As such discussions attest, writing on the cinema could no longer be
hermetically sealed off from a broader discussion of the contemporary media
landscape, in which television had relegated cinema to a marginal position.
Often, Daney’s treatment of films meditated on their refraction through
the prism of televisual aesthetics. In the latter half of the 1980s, in texts for
Libération collected in Le Salaire du zappeur and Devant la recrudescence
des vols de sac à main, this area came to dominate Daney’s thinking, leading
him to develop his concept of the “visual.” These writings will be further
discussed in Chapter 26. But already in the early 1980s, germs of this line of
thought were present in Daney’s writings. In an article with the indicative
title, “Comme tous les vieux couples, cinéma et télévision ont fini par se
ressembler,” Daney argued that the institutional divorce between the two
domains of the audiovisual has only resulted in the “colonization” of the
cinema by the forms of the telemovie. Elements of mise en scène such as
depth and distance have thus disappeared from film aesthetics, and, while
the cinema had traditionally developed the art of the hors-champ, it is now
being led by television towards a sovereign contempt for the frame. The
modern film viewer is now presented with the latently totalitarian “reign
of the single space [champ unique].”62 This assessment did not, however,
prevent Daney from making aesthetic judgements of television broadcasts.
He relished, for instance, the notorious “ritual of disappearance” unintention-
ally produced by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing when the departing president

59 See Serge Daney, “Leos Carax, première fois,” Libération, May 17, 1984. Repr. in La Maison
cinéma et le monde vol. II, pp. 738-740.
60 Serge Daney, “Ginger et Fred (Federico Fellini),” Libération, January 24, 1986. Repr. in Ciné
journal vol. II, pp. 244-250, here p. 244.
61 Ibid., pp. 248-249.
62 Serge Daney, “Comme tous les vieux couples, cinéma et télévision ont fini par se ressembler,”
Libération, January 18, 1982. Repr. in Ciné journal vol. I, pp. 104-112, here p. 111.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 617

exited the frame after his final televised address to the nation. The camera,
embarrassingly, continued to transmit the vacant scene he left behind,
yielding “an enduring void, a silence” that was “horrifying, an abomination.”
With this production of an “empty shot,” the ex-president, in Daney’s eyes,
at least managed to demolish, albeit inadvertently, “something of the false
good health of television.”63

The Passeur

Faced with a media situation in which cinema not only had to compete
against but was also insidiously infected with the aesthetics of television and
advertising, Daney was not averse to sounding notes of defiance, insisting at
one point that “there is a single world of images” that contains both Godard’s
Passion and and a mediocre product of the entertainment industry such
as Le Choc.64 In later years, however, he offered a more resigned outlook to
the fragmented state of image culture, stating:

The kind of cinema I defended was a single plane where you could find
Straub on the one hand, and Hawks or Hitchcock on the other. This situ-
ation does not exist anymore, audiences are parcelized, the people who
go and see Hollywood films have never heard of Straub, the people who
like Dreyer despise Hollywood, and it’s no longer interesting to write for
either of them.65

By the beginning of the 1990s, Daney’s position became more despondent,

his writing more severe. After excoriating high-profile nouveau philosophe
Bernard Henri-Levy and denouncing the cinéma du look of Jean-Jacques
Beineix and Luc Besson, Daney’s withering review of Claude Berri’s retro
film Uranus brought about the end of his employment with Libération.66
The filmmaker, incensed at the take-down, won a right-of-reply after two

63 Serge Daney, “Un rituel de disparition (Giscard),” Libération, May 21, 1981. Repr. in Ciné
journal vol. I, pp. 39-42, here, pp. 40-41. This moment is also discussed in the introduction to
Jacques Aumont’s Le Cinéma et la mise en scène, 2nd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), pp. 3-5.
64 Serge Daney, “Le Choc (avec Alain Delon),” Libération, June 28, 1982. Repr. in Ciné journal
vol. I, pp. 156-160, here p. 160.
65 Serge Daney, cited from a private conversation in Reynaud, “Introduction,” p. 39.
66 For the review, see Serge Daney, “Uranus, le deuil du deuil,” Libération, January 8, 1991, repr.
in idem., Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, pp. 153-156.
618  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

court cases, which he utilized to make homophobic remarks.67 Daney felt

betrayed by the perceived lack of support over the affair, stating: “I hoped
that, just like in the movies, friends would come out from everywhere, with
everything stopping, and saying, ‘What the hell is goin’ on here? We’re gonna
pummel the guy that’s hassling our friend.’ It wasn’t all that serious in itself,
but no one came out.”68 Editor Serge July’s unfulfilled promise to write a
text accompanying Berri’s reply defending his employee was particularly
hurtful for Daney, and it is a failure about which July was later self-critical:

Claude Berri took Libération to court, a tribunal decided in his favor and
forced us to publish his right-of-reply, despite my stubborn refusals. But
my hands were tied. The tribunal chose the date. It coincided with the
most dramatic moments of the Gulf War. Berri’s text appeared without me
publicly coming to Serge Daney’s defense. That day, I wrote about the war.
He would never pardon me for being absent from a battle that he judged to
be fundamental. I had let Berri “pass”—as we used to say. He was right.69

In the wake of this affair, Daney embarked on a new project, founding the
quarterly periodical Trafic, but he was also aware of his rapidly advancing
illness, from which he would die the following year, and the last twelve
months of his life were marked by a concerted mission to leave behind
a testament in the public domain. To this end, Daney carried out filmed
dialogues with Debray, Kané and Sanbar, as well as a conversation, intended
for publication, with his old Cahiers co-editor Toubiana, and he also spoke
at length on other occasions, such as at the launch of Trafic in the Jeu de
Paume gallery in Paris.70 In all these forums, Daney dedicated himself to the
project of exploring the multiple links between cinema, history and his own
biography. It is here that his notion of the ciné-fils was developed, fostered by
the critic’s recollections of his childhood growing up with a single mother
who let the local movie-theaters function as a surrogate parent. The attach-
ment Daney developed in these years for certain film characters—John
Mohune in Moonfleet, the children in Night of the Hunter—remained a

67 Berri signed off on his text with the remark, “So long, babe!” (Allez, salut ma poule!). For
more on this dispute, see Laurent Kretzschmar, “The ‘Berri Affair’ 3,” in Serge Daney in English,
January 25, 2014, sergedaney.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/the-berri-affair-3-berri-affair.html
(accessed January 1, 2021).
68 Daney, Persévérance, p. 148 [p. 124].
69 Serge July, “Serge Daney, dis voir…,” Libération, June 13, 1992.
70 The transcript of this speech was published as Serge Daney, “Trafic au Jeu de Paume,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 458 (July-August 1992), pp. 60-71.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 619

lifelong identification, and although his first article for Visages du cinéma was
titled “Un art adulte,” it has always been the parallels between the cinema
and childhood that have fascinated the critic. At the same time, there is a
tragic element to this affinity. As Daney mused in the notes that became
L’Exercice a été profitable, monsieur: “Thesis: the cinema is childhood. An
old thesis. But then: two suicides of children in Rossellini, between ’45 and
’51. The suicide of the cinema?”71 In a hypothesis that was developed in
synchronicity with Godard and Deleuze and which will be discussed further
in Chapter 25, Daney came to acknowledge that the birth of cinematic
modernism, in the shadow of the horrors of World War II, represented the
art form’s passage to adulthood, a loss of innocence and naïveté that would
culminate in the disabused cynicism of the 1980s. Paradoxically, writing for
a daily newspaper afforded Daney the opportunity to write more frequently
on film history, as he covered films by Lang, Hitchcock, Dreyer and others
when they were re-released in cinemas or screened on television. By the
same token, the critic also came to closely identify his own life trajectory
with that of the cinema, in a form of “cinephilic egocentrism.”72 Born the
same year as Roma città aperta, he came of age with films such as Nuit et
brouillard and Hiroshima mon amour, which represented the maturation
of the art form. As Daney stated: “It took me a while to develop this idea
that ‘modern’ cinema, born the same time I was, was the cinema of a kind
of knowledge of the camps, a knowledge that changed the ways of making
cinema.”73 More morbidly, Daney even entertained the idea that his own
impending death would be synchronous with that of the cinema, or at least
its modernist moment: “this part of cinema I was contemporaneous with
will disappear with me: the thirty glorious years of modern cinema.”74
Daney’s retrospective account of his biography and its relationship with the
cinema also led him to interrogate the role of travel in his life, his perennial
fascination for distant lands. From a young age, he was fascinated with maps
of the world and committed the names of capital cities to memory: “I can’t
remember a time in my life when I didn’t know with certainty that Tegucigalpa
was the capital of Honduras or Windhoek that of old South West Africa.”75
Reaching adulthood, he traveled compulsively, first at his own initiative, and

71 Daney, L’Exercice a été profitable, monsieur, p. 234.

72 Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, p. 92.
73 Daney, Persévérance, p. 54 [p. 47].
74 Ibid., p. 57 [p. 50]. The “thirty glorious years “(trente glorieuses) usually refers to the long
post-war economic boom in France, which lasted from the libération in 1944 to the oil crisis of
1973.
75 Ibid., p. 69 [p. 59].
620  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

then later as part of his duties at Cahiers and Libération. A trip to Haiti in 1973
even prompted Daney to write his first—and only—book-length work, a
political screed against the Duvalier regime titled Procès à Baby Doc (Duvalier,
père & fils), published under the pseudonym Raymond Sapène.76 Evidently,
there was a common impulse behind Daney’s Wanderlust and his cinephilia:
the urge to discover the world, to encounter its geographical and cultural
diversity, and to report back on these points of contact. This, indeed, is directly
thematized in the mid-length documentary Le cinephile et le village. Directed
by Pascal Kané, who interviews Daney at length, the film now stands as one
of the most penetrating dialogues between the two former Cahiers critics and
friends, with Daney castigating television precisely for failing in its vocation as a
“concrete apprenticeship of democracy,” instead becoming the communication
medium for a “global village” that is notable only for its mediocrity.77 Daney
never directed his own film, but the thousands of postcards he sent back
to friends and family from all over the world together constitute a sort of
personalized documentary of his life, as the critic himself recognized:

One day, having a very confused understanding of the chronological

unfolding of my life, I realized that the only line I could lay out to establish
my trajectory year by year was the some fifteen hundred postcards I sent
to my mother, which she was accustomed to conspicuously leave on a
piece of furniture, so that upon returning I would find them and right
away put them with the others.78

Daney’s willingness, in his last months, to speak of the cinema and his
life evinced a concern for transmitting a cultural knowledge—and more
pointedly, a way of seeing the world through the cinema—that was in
danger of being lost with the emergence of new media dispositifs at the
twilight of the twentieth century. In this mission, Daney saw himself as a
passeur, a smuggler clandestinely trafficking illicit goods across frontiers.

76 See Raymond Sapène [Serge Daney], Procès à Baby Doc (Duvalier, père & fils) (Paris: Société
encyclopédia française, 1973). There has been some speculation as to whether this book was
written by Daney or not, but the question now seems settled in favor of the hypothesis. In this
case, the publication by Cahiers of an interview with Haitian director Arnold Antonin in 1976,
with the questions credited to Daney, Thérèse Giraud and Raymond Sapène, may have been an
in-joke within the journal pointing to the identity of the author of Procès à Baby Doc. See Arnold
Antonin, interviewed by Serge Daney, Thérès Giraud and Raymond Sapène, “Entretien avec
Arnold Antonin (Haïti, le chemin de la liberté),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 262-263 (January 1976),
pp. 109-113.
77 Le cinephile et le village, dir. Pascal Kané, 1989.
78 Daney, Persévérance, p. 72 [p. 61].
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 621

The term itself, Daney acknowledged, came from an article Comolli had
written on Eric Dolphy for Jazz Magazine in 1965, in which he labeled the
saxophonist an “exemplary smuggler,” channeling earlier musical forms to
the free jazz of later decades.79 Daney had already used the term in 1983 to
speak of Bazin;80 later, in a 1991 interview with Philippe Roger, he assumed
the word passeur for himself. Passeurs, Daney asserts, “are strange: they
need frontiers, for the sole purpose of contesting them. They have no wish
to find themselves alone with their ‘hoard,’ and, at the same time, they are
not too preoccupied with those to whom they ‘pass’ something on.”81 The
passeur is “someone who remembers that true communication, of the sort
that leaves traces in your life, is not what is imposed on you (by school,
religious services, advertising, everything that is ‘edifying’) but that which
takes place in a furtive, transversal, anonymous fashion.”82
Moreover, the texts written by the passeur are conceived of as a part
of an intergenerational communication process, fueled by the hope that
future cohorts of cinephiles will receive the lessons learnt by one’s own
age group. Instead of writing for his peers and contemporaries, therefore,
Daney, at the end of his life, understood his critical practice as being aimed
at “that part of the readership of Libération that is twenty years old, people
who I don’t know and to whom I would like to transmit the sentiment
that all this had a tremendous existence for other people, before they were
around.”83 For the cinephiles of today, Daney’s writings on the cinema are
akin to messages in a bottle, set forth in the vast ocean of information that
characterizes the contemporary world in the forlorn hope that, sometime
in the future, in a distant land, a kindred spirit will receive the missive and
take succor from its words.

Works Cited

Arnold Antonin, interviewed by Serge Daney, Thérès Giraud and Raymond Sapène,
“Entretien avec Arnold Antonin (Haïti, le chemin de la liberté),” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 262-263 (January 1976), pp. 109-113.
Jacques Aumont, Le Cinéma et la mise en scène, 2nd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010).

79 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Éric Dolphy… le passeur,” Jazz Magazine no. 119 (June 1965), pp. 42-48.
80 See Serge Daney, “André Bazin,” Libération, August 19, 1983. Repr. in idem., Ciné journal vol.
II, pp. 41-46, here p. 45.
81 Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, p. 91.
82 Ibid., p. 94.
83 Ibid., p. 91.
622  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Pierre Baudry, “Un livre,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 228 (March-April 1971), pp. 64-65.
Alain Bergala, “Dora et la lanterne magique (Pascal Kané),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 287 (April 1978), pp. 52-54.
Jean-Claude Biette “Gibier de passage (R.W. Fassbinder),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 301
(June 1979), pp. 49-51.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Dora et la lanterne magique (P. Kané),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 276
(May 1977), pp. 41-42.
——— and Serge Daney, “L’écran du fantasme,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 236-237
(March-April 1972), pp. 30-40. Partially translated as “The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin
and Animals),” trans. Mark A. Cohen, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism:
Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 32-41.
Nicolas Bouchaud, La Loi du Marcheur (Besançon: Les Solitaires intempestis, 2011).
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Éric Dolphy… le passeur,” Jazz Magazine no. 119 (June 1965),
pp. 42-48.
——— and Jean Narboni, “Lettre au Monde,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 226-227 (January-
February 1971), p. 121.
Serge Daney, “Manoel de Oliveira et Amour de perdition,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 301
(June 1979), p. 71.
———, “Les films marquants de la décennie (1970-1980),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 308
(February 1980), pp. 45-46.
———, “Le cru et le cuit,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 323-324 (May 1981), pp. 11-14.
———, “Un rituel de disparition (Giscard),” Libération, May 21, 1981. Repr. in idem.,
Ciné journal vol. I: 1981-1982 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 [1986]), pp. 39-42.
Hereafter CJ I.
———, “Moi, Christiane F., 13 ans droguée, prostituée (Ulrich Edel),” Libération,
July 24, 1981. Repr. in CJ I, pp. 32-35.
———, “L’homme de fer (Andrzej Wajda),” Libération, August 19, 1981. Repr. in CJ
I, pp. 48-54.
———, “Le Faussaire (Volker Schlöndorff),” Libération, October 29, 1981. Repr. in
CJ I, pp. 65-70.
———, “Comme tous les vieux couples, cinéma et télévision ont fini par se res-
sembler,” Libération, January 18, 1982. Repr. in CJ I, pp. 104-112
———, “Stalker (Andrei Tarkovski),” Libération, February 20, 1982. Repr. in CJ I,
pp. 86-90.
———, “Le Choc (avec Alain Delon),” Libération, June 28, 1982. Repr. in CJ I,
pp. 156-160.
———, “Spielberg: On ne peut pas être et avoir E.T.,” Libération, December 1, 1982.
Repr. in CJ I, pp. 204-207.
———, “André Bazin,” Libération, August 19, 1983. Repr. in idem., Ciné journal vol.
II: 1983-1986 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 [1986]), pp. 41-46. Hereafter CJ II.
T WO CINÉ-FILS: PASCAL K ANÉ AND SERGE DANEY 623

———, “Fanny et Alexandre (Ingmar Bergman),” Libération, September 26, 1983.

Repr. in CJ II, pp. 46-50.
———, “La télé anglaise fait du cinéma,” Libération, May 14, 1984, repr. Repr. in
CJ II, pp. 100-103.
———, “Leos Carax, première fois,” Libération, May 17, 1984. Repr. in idem., La
Maison cinéma et le monde vol. II: Les Années Libé 1981-1985 (Paris: POL, 2005),
pp. 738-740. Hereafter MCM II.
———, “1984 (Michael Radford),” Libération, November 15, 1984. Repr. in CJ II,
pp. 177-181.
———, “Le chant du coton (Cotton Club),” Libération, January 3, 1985. Repr. in
MCM II, pp. 252-256.
———, “Ginger et Fred (Federico Fellini),” Libération, January 24, 1986. Repr. in
CJ II, pp. 244-250.
———, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à mains (Lyon: Aléas, 1991).
———, “Uranus, le deuil du deuil,” Libération, January 8, 1991. Repr. in idem.,
Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main (Lyons: Aléas, 1991), pp. 153-156.
———, “Trafic au Jeu de Paume,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 458 (July-August 1992),
pp. 60-71.
———, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993).
———, Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L., 1993). Translated as Postcards from the Cinema,
trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
———, Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1999).
Pierre Eugène, “Pascal Kané, à l’école du cinema,” Cahiers du cinema no. 769
(October 2020), pp. 62-63.
Paul Grant, “‘One More Effort, Americans…’: A Report on ‘Beyond Film Criticism:
A Symposium in Homage to Serge Daney,” Senses of Cinema no. 31 (April 2004),
sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-articles/serge_daney_symposium/ (accessed
January 1, 2021).
Serge July, “Serge Daney, dis voir…,” Libération, June 13, 1992.
Pascal Kané, “Le château vide (Cul-de-sac),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 187 (Febru-
ary 1967), p. 70.
———, “Everybody loves my baby (Rosemary’s Baby),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 207
(December 1968), pp. 81-82.
———, Roman Polanski (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970).
———, “Le secret derrière la peur (L’Exorciste),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 253 (October-
November 1974), p. 41.
———, “Taxi Driver; Un après-midi de chien,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 268-269 (July-
August 1976), p. 99.
———, “Note sur le cinéma de Brian de Palma,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 277
(June 1977), pp. 59-60.
624  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

———, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Daney, “Entretien avec Pascal
Kané,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 279-280 (August-September 1977), pp. 67-80.
———, “Pour un cinéma hétéroclite,” Libération, March 1, 1978.
———, “Réponse à ‘C.N.C.,’” Cahiers du cinéma no. 293 (October 1978), pp. 52-54.
———, “Revoir Mabuse,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 309 (March 1980), pp. 48-51.
———, “Généalogie de l’inspiration,” in Jacques Aumont (ed.), La Mise en scène
(Brussels: De Boeck, 2000), pp. 167-175.
———, Savoir dire pour vouloir faire (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2015).
Laurent Kretzschmar, “The ‘Berri Affair’ 3,” in Serge Daney in English, January 25,
2014, sergedaney.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/the-berri-affair-3-berri-affair.html
(accessed January 1, 2021)..
Jean Narboni, “Peut-on être et avoir E.T.?,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 342 (Decem-
ber 1982), pp. 25-29.
Jean-François Pigoullié, Serge Daney, ou La morale d’un ciné-fils (Lyons: Aléas, 2006).
Roman Polanski, interviewed by Serge Daney, Pascal Kané and Serge Toubiana,
“Entretien avec Roman Polanski,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 306 (December 1979),
pp. 4-11.
Bérénice Reynaud, “Introduction: Cahiers du Cinéma 1973-1978,” in David Wilson
(ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. IV: 1973-1978 History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle
(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-44.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Daney in English: A Letter to Trafic,” Senses of Cinema
no. 13 (April 2001), sensesofcinema.com/2001.f ilm-critics/daney/ (accessed
January 1, 2021).
———, “The Missing Image,” New Left Review no. 34 (July-August 2005), pp. 145-151.
Raymond Sapène, Procès à Baby Doc (Duvalier, père & fils) (Paris: Société encyclo-
pédia française, 1973).
Olivier Séguret, “Liberty Belle fait tilt,” Libération, September 17, 1983.
Louis Skorecki, “Contre la nouvelle cinéphilie,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 293 (Octo-
ber 1978), pp. 31-52.
 Part IV
Encounters with Ontology

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_part_04
PART IV: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONTOLOGY 627

As we saw in Part III, the Cahiers critics’ preoccupation with questions

of aesthetics in the cinema manifested itself in diverse, heterogeneous
ways and covered the output of a vast number of filmmakers. There was
an overarching question at the center of their critical output, however,
a question that reached to the heart of the cinema: namely, the unique
nature of the relationship that the cinematographic image entertains with
reality.1 Since the publication of Bazin’s 1945 text, “Ontologie de l’image
photographique,” this relationship has gone by the name of “ontological
realism.”2 Discerning the ontological nature of the cinema was the key
theoretical issue that exercised Cahiers from its founding by Bazin in 1951
until, at the very least, the end of Daney’s tenure as editor thirty years later,
and the journal’s Marxist period is no exception to this rule. Indeed, Daney
himself would come to define the “Cahiers axiom” as being, precisely, the
idea “that the cinema has a fundamental relationship with the real and that
the real is not what is represented—and that’s final.”3 This quote, dating
from 1990, has been marshaled by contemporary Bazin scholars such as
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin and Dudley Andrew to argue for a continuity
between Bazin and the later writings of Daney. 4 But it is worth noting that,
immediately prior to this passage, Daney himself specifically ascribes this
outlook to the “non-legendary years” of Cahiers, between the late 1960s and
the late 1970s: “The cinema is the art of the present—as, broadly speaking,
Bazin said—and axioms of this kind can be found in Cahiers, during these
ten years, under all kinds of signatures, within all kinds of theoretical
straitjackets, in all kinds of editorials, dressed up in all kinds of garb,
whether this be the tattered rags of militant film or the unisex uniform of
contemporary television.”5
In this vein, it is important to note that Cahiers never, strictly speak-
ing, repudiated cinematic realism per se. It was only elsewhere, in Screen

1 The term “cinematographic” is here used to denote moving images with a photographic
basis and thus excludes f ilms whose images derive from non-photographic sources, such as
animation, digitally generated imagery or the direct manipulation of celluloid (as practiced in
certain experimental films). In one sense, Cahiers under Comolli/Narboni’s editorship was more
dogmatically committed to the photographic nature of the cinema than even Bazin: whereas
the founder of Cahiers was not averse to writing about animated films, this sector of the cinema
was an absolute lacuna in the journal during the late 1960s and 1970s.
2 See Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique.” The term itself, however, does not actually
appear in this article.
3 Daney, L’Exercice était profitable, Monsieur, p. 301.
4 See Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil paradoxal, p. 33; and Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is!
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 5.
5 Daney, L’Exercice était profitable, Monsieur, p. 301.
628  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

for instance, that an antithesis between realism and modernism was

proposed.6 Cahiers itself never saw the two as being opposed. Instead,
it followed Brecht in arguing for a form of realism in art that was both
founded in a historical materialist outlook and drew from the formal
experimentation of aesthetic modernism. As the editors argued in an
interview with Politique Hebdo:

Brecht demanded of realism that it unveil “the complexity of social

causality,” that, when addressing a concrete situation, it take into account
all of its aspects, and the dialectical relations between these aspects,
insisting on the fact that, since realism was neither a question of form nor
a question of content, a film, a play or a novel could claim to be realist,
socialist, etc., could even privilege the social content at the expense
of the formal work, and be no less formalist, through infidelity to the
social reality, exposed in a unilateral, static and superf icial manner.
For this restitution of the social causality is neither a brief overview, nor
a mechanistic description of the events, but the reconstruction of the
power relations that demand of the filmmaker a practice, in his film, of
contradiction, struggles and history.7

In the same passage, the Cahiers editors cited Brecht to the effect that
“the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says nothing at all about this reality.
A photograph of the Krupp factories or the AEG works teaches us almost
nothing about these institutions. […] For whoever only gives of reality that
which can be directly experienced does not reproduce reality.”8 Hence
realism, for Cahiers, was not to be conflated with aesthetic mimesis or the
superficial reproduction of perceived reality. In Daney’s terms, “the real”
in the cinema is not “what is represented.” Instead, the true site in which
a relationship with the real can be determined was within the process of
cinematic representation itself.

6 See, in particular, Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian
Theses,” Screen vol. 15 no. 2 (Summer 1974), pp. 7-27. MacCabe has since renounced his earlier
position and adopted a far more favorable stance towards Bazin. See Colin MacCabe, “Bazin
as Modernist,” in Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds.), Opening Bazin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 66-76.
7 “Réponses à Politique Hebdo,” p. 62.
8 Ibid. The Brecht quotation is from Bertolt Brecht, Der Dreigroschenprozeß, in idem., Werke
vol. XXI, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf and Werner Mittenzwei (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988),
p. 469.
PART IV: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONTOLOGY 629

The conceptual machinery marshaled by the Cahiers writers in order

to explore this relationship was, however, drawn less from the historical
materialism of Marx and Engels than it was from Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory. Given the fusion between psychoanalysis and Althusserian Marxism
in the strand of “apparatus theory” developed by Cahiers, neatly divorcing
these two aspects of the journal’s theoretical arsenal would undoubtedly be
an unjustifiable abstraction. And yet it is notable that those Cahiers texts
that most squarely addressed the question of the cinema’s ontological realism
did so from a predominantly Freudian/Lacanian perspective. Moreover,
the influence of psychoanalysis represented one of the points of difference
within the Cahiers team itself. The journal was evenly divided between
those for whom Lacan and his followers were of major importance in their
own theoretical scrutiny of the cinema—notably, Oudart, Bonitzer and
Pierre Baudry, and to a lesser degree Daney and Kané—and those for whom
a reference to psychoanalytic theory was either intermittent or minimal:
Comolli, Narboni, Aumont, Pierre and Eisenschitz. In contrast with Screen,
whose editorial board ended up acrimoniously splitting on this question,
the contradiction between the Lacanians and the non-Lacanians in Cahiers
never became an antagonistic one, but it did produce a certain distinction in
the output of the different writers for the journal. As Aumont has recognized,
“there was a cleavage in the Cahiers group between a psychological point
of view, which was a relatively ‘normal’ point of view, I would say, […] and
an ideologico-politico-social point of view, which was, by contrast, much
more rigid and dogmatic.”9
It was a Lacanian framework that determined many of the theoretical
concepts from which the post-1968 Cahiers has gained its renown—includ-
ing Oudart’s notion of suture, the concept of the hors-champ worked on by
Bonitzer, the pertinence of the phrase “je sais bien…, mais quand même…”
(I know very well…, but all the same…) for spectatorial identification with
the cinematic image, and broader discussions of cinematic illusion, the lure
and the “impression of reality.” All these areas of theoretical investigation
refer back to the core question of the cinema’s relationship with the real,
but they also raise an underlying question. What, exactly, is the nature of
the real itself? For this, the Cahiers critics turned directly to Lacan and in
particular his three mutually dependent registers of the psyche: the Real,
the Symbolic and the Imaginary, which Lacan would later characterize
as relating to each other in the manner of a Borromean knot.10 For Lacan,

9 Interview with Jacques Aumont, May 5, 2014.

10 See Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XXII: RSI, Ornicar no. 2-5 (1975).
630  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the Imaginary is the realm of sensorial perception, the idea we have of

the universe based on what we perceive around us, while the Symbolic is
the realm of language, laws, rituals and social structures, the organiza-
tion of meaning through symbols or language. In semiological terms,
these two realms are therefore analogous to the relationship between
the signified and the signifier. But Lacan introduces a third term—that
of the Real—to the Saussurean dyad. The Real in Lacanian theory is a
notoriously thorny concept, and it underwent shifts in meaning over the
course of Lacan’s life, but this befits its innately elusive nature. The Real
is distinct from reality in the everyday sense of the term; in fact, it can
never be truly perceived or grasped. It is a state of absolute plenitude but
also an “impossibility” that can only be caught in glimpses, at points in
which the nexus holding the Imaginary and the Symbolic together breaks
down. It occurs as a momentary, fleeting, “unassimilable” trauma from
which the subject either quickly recovers or slides into psychosis. In his
Séminaire XI—whose discussion of the gaze, the image and anamorphosis
was of profound importance to the Cahiers writers11—Lacan dubs this
encounter with the real tyché, def ining it as “the essentially missed
encounter,” and sees an example of this missed encounter with the Real,
the tychic, in the transitory juncture that separates the dream state from
wakefulness.12 In the cinema, therefore, the Real can only be punctually
arrived at in those moments when the bonds between the signified and
the cinematic signifier are sundered, when the conventions of figurative
representation are undone, subverted or dismantled, jolting the spectator
out of their acceptance of the “lure” of the cinematographic image. It is for
this reason that many of the texts dealing with the cinema’s relationship
with the real also interrogate the system of representation upon which
f ilmic signif ication is based, including, most notably, the perspectiva
artificialis method developed by Renaissance painting. As such, the Cahiers

11 Both Comolli and Bonitzer single out the transcription of this seminar as having been
of particular importance to Cahiers’ adoption of Lacanian precepts. Séminaire XI , based on
lectures from 1963-64, was not published by Seuil until 1973, but they both claim to have been
exposed to its contents as early as 1971. See Comolli, “Yes, we were utopians (Part 1)”; Pascal
Bonitzer, interviewed by Stéphane Bouquet, Emmanuel Burdeau and François Ramone, “Nos
années non-légendaires: Entretien avec Pascal Bonitzer,” in Emmanuel Burdeau (ed.), Cinéma
68 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2008 [1998]), pp. 143-156, here p. 151. It is possible that the Cahiers
critics were privy to the material of these lectures before they were released in published form.
12 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux
de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 58. Translated as The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1981), p. 54.
PART IV: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONTOLOGY 631

critics’ theoretical preoccupation with the f igural genesis of cinematic

verisimilitude draws heavily on the work in this area carried out by Schefer,
Francastel and Foucault.
The pyschoanalytic basis of Cahiers’ approach to the relationship between
the cinema and the real had its flipside in the continued preoccupation the
journal entertained with Bazin’s ideas on the ontological realism of the cin-
ema. The argument that the Cahiers of the 1968-1973 period was influenced
by Bazin in anything other than a purely negative fashion is, perhaps, a higly
contentious one. Bazin’s key ideas in this area are widely seen as representing
the polar opposite to psychoanalysis-influenced theories of cinema such
as that of the post-1968 Cahiers. In contrast to the Freudo-Lacanian notion
of the impossibility of encountering the Real stands Bazin’s “naïve” belief
in the cinema’s ability to objectively reproduce existing reality. This was
the perspective adopted by Screen and other proponents of “1970s theory”
in the anglophone world, and even now textbooks in the field usually set
the two theoretical tendencies in opposition to each other. The Cahiers
critics, for their part, were not averse to critiquing the ideas of its founder.
But we have already seen that articles such as “Technique et idéologie” by
Comolli and “La vicariance du pouvoir” by Narboni took a far more favorable
stance towards Bazin than is often assumed, and even those texts where the
tone taken was more polemical—such as the journal’s 1970 interview with
Rohmer, or Bonitzer/Daney’s analysis of Bazinian film theory in “L’écran du
fantasme”—consisted, in Narboni’s words, of “amorous polemics” directed
towards a figure who could not but weigh heavily on those who wrote for
Cahiers.13 Such a critical grappling with Bazin’s ideas had a crucial influence
on the film theory developed by the Cahiers critics of the post-1968 era,
and his importance increasingly came to be recognized by these writers
after the Sturm und Drang of the journal’s Marxist period had subsided. As
Joubert-Laurencin has noted, the late 1970s and early 1980s represented a
“return to Bazin” by figures such as Bonitzer, Daney, Narboni and Comolli,
who would acknowledge the full extent of their debt to their elder, and even
came to unequivocally identify as Bazinians.14
It should be recognized, however, that Cahiers never fully “departed”
from Bazin in the first place. Moreover, his ideas share important traits with
a Lacanian framework and, by extension, the perspective underpinning
theories of the cinematic “apparatus.” As with the post-1968 Cahiers, Bazin’s
notion of cinematic realism was distinct from a conception of the film image

13 Interview with Jean Narboni, March 18, 2014.

14 Joubert-Laurencin, Le sommeil paradoxal, p. 32.
632  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

as superficially analogous with everyday perception and instead sought

to uncover a deeper relationship between the cinema and the real. Often,
his examples of ontological realism in the cinema were singular, fulgurant
events, encounters with the real that furtively captured extraordinary events
outside of quotidian reality such as death or trauma, at the precise moment
when the conventional formal structures of the cinema were disrupted or
abandoned. Bazin’s ideas on the image were substantially drawn from the
phenomenological tradition of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but this was also
the case with Lacan, whose discussion of the gaze in Séminaire XI evinces
a significant debt to these two philosophers. And while Bazin himself may
well have been an “idealist” in the narrow sense of the term (retaining a
belief in a divine, spiritual realm), the logic of his thinking on the cinema
could be utilized for materialist ends, whether in film practice, in the work
of directors such as Straub/Huillet, Godard and Rivette, or in film theory,
with the critical use to which they were put by the post-1968 Cahiers. Indeed,
Narboni himself now sees Bazin’s film theory as fundamentally materialist
in nature, stating: “We must revisit Bazin, in light of Joubert-Laurencin, for
whom he is a materialist thinker. This is true. We can say that the ontology
of the cinematic image is materialist.”15
Narboni was quick, however, to add the kicker, “but it’s complicated.”
Indeed, the relationship between Bazin’s ontological realism and the film
theory espoused by Cahiers in the years between 1968 and 1973 was, to
say the least, complex and shifting. In “L’écran du fantasme,” Bonitzer and
Daney argued that Freud’s concept of Verleugnung (denial)—denoted by
the symptomatic phrase “I know very well…, but all the same…”—applied
to Bazin’s understanding of the relationship between the cinematographic
image and the event represented.16 But the same rhetorical structure can
also be used to describe the post-1968 Cahiers’ understanding of cinematic
ontology. Far from contenting themselves with a denunciation of cinematic
illusion à la Cinéthique, the Cahiers critics’ investigation of the mechanisms
behind this illusion led them towards paradoxical conclusions. “I know very
well,” they said to themselves, that the image in a film is a mere illusion, a
lure, an ideological construction. “But all the same,” there is something of
the real embedded in it. It was this overriding aporia—between a Lacanian
“I know very well…” and a Bazinian “but all the same…”—that characterized

15 Interview with Jean Narboni, March 18, 2014.

16 For the origins of the “I know very well…, but all the same…” formulation, see Octave
Mannoni, Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969), especially pp. 9-33.
PART IV: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONTOLOGY 633

the theory developed by Cahiers. Indeed, this was explicitly admitted to by

Daney, who explained:

Writing for Cahiers meant inheriting, even without knowing it, Bazin’s
idée fixe, from which it was not easy to detach ourselves: the cinema is
a view [regard] of the world. […] And so we inherited the aporia that
resulted from this. For what allowed the gaze [regard] to be posed—the
screen—became an impossible object. Both mask [cache] and window,
orifice and hymen. Invisible, it renders things visible; seen, it renders
things invisible.17

The challenge for Cahiers was to transform this aporia of cinematic ontology
into a functioning dialectic, one that was able to account for the fact that the
cinematographic image is both an illusory lure and its opposite, a mechanical
reproduction of the pro-filmic reality.
In truth, this project never reached fruition, and the dialectic was
instead displaced onto the volatile convulsions of the Cahiers team’s own
conceptualization of the cinema, with the ramifications this had for the
organizational history of the journal itself. The following chapters will
therefore concern themselves with charting these theoretical vicissitudes.
An initial chapter will take a look at the sinuous relationship the post-1968
generation of critics had with Bazin’s theory, their “impossible rejection
of Bazinism,”18 followed by the later “return” to the ideas of the journal’s
founding father. This will be followed by discussions of the development
of psychoanalytically inflected film theory in three of the Cahiers critics:
Oudart, with his notion of suture and other related concepts; Baudry,
with his critical reflection on realism, psychoanalysis and f ilm genres;
and Bonitzer, with his deployment of Lacan, Bataille, Schefer and others
in a decades-long theoretical preoccupation with the cinema, and his
later turn to fiction filmmaking as both screenwriter and director. The
focus will then shift to look at the mutual influence governing Cahiers’
relationship with Deleuze’s philosophical diptych Cinéma, with special
attention given to the post-structuralist philosopher’s relations with
Narboni, Bonitzer and Daney. The final chapter, meanwhile, will address

17 Daney, La Rampe, p. 15.

18 The quoted remark comes from Serge Daney, “Le travelling de Kapò,” Trafic no. 4 (Autumn
1992), pp. 5-19. Repr. in idem., Persévérance, pp. 15-39, here p. 33 [p. 30]. Translated as “The
Tracking Shot in Kapò,” in idem., Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford:
Berg, 2007), pp. 17-35.
634  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the changed nature of the audiovisual image in the contemporary world.

Its permutations in the last three decades, Daney, Comolli and Aumont
have all argued, are profoundly rooted in the transformation of social
practices brought about by the global dominance of neoliberal capitalism.
New forms of reality, as the Cahiers axiom would have it, inevitably call
for new forms of the image.

Works Cited

Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

André Bazin, “L’Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que
le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 11-19.
Translated as “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in idem., What is Cinema?,
trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 3-12.
Pascal Bonitzer, interviewed by Stéphane Bouquet, Emmanuel Burdeau and François
Ramone, “Nos années non-légendaires: Entretien avec Pascal Bonitzer,” in
Emmanuel Burdeau (ed.), Cinéma 68 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2008 [1998]),
pp. 143-156.
Bertolt Brecht, Der Dreigroschenprozeß, in idem., Werke vol. XXI, ed. Werner Hecht,
Jan Knopf and Werner Mittenzwei (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988).
Jean-Louis Comolli, interviewed by Daniel Fairfax, “‘Yes, we were utopians; in
a way, I still am…’: An Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 1),” Senses of
Cinema no. 62 (April 2012), sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/yes-we-
were-utopians-in-a-way-i-still-am-an-interview-with-jean-louis-comolli-part-1/
(accessed January 1, 2021).
Serge Daney, “Le traveling de Kapò,” Trafic no. 4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 5-19. Serge
Daney, Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), pp. 15-39. Translated as “The Tracking
Shot in Kapò,” in idem., Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant
(Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 17-35.
———, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993).
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamen-
taux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Translated as The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).
———, Séminaire XXII: RSI, Ornicar no. 2-5 (1975).
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil paradoxal (Paris: Éditions de l’œil, 2014).
Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses,” Screen
vol. 15 no. 2 (Summer 1974), pp. 7-27.
PART IV: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONTOLOGY 635

———, “Bazin as Modernist,” in Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin

(eds.), Opening Bazin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 66-76.
Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
La Rédaction, “Réponses à Politique Hebdo,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May-
June 1971), pp. 61-64.
21. The Bazinian Legacy

Abstract
The focus of this chapter is the existence of a “Bazinian legacy” for Cahiers
du cinéma in its post-1968 guise. Whereas many have considered the era
of the journal under Jean-Louis Comolli/Jean Narboni’s editorship as one
in which André Bazin’s ideas were rejected, I argue that their relationship
with the journal’s founder is far more complex than that. While vocally
distancing themselves from his ideas, the critical thinking of this period
was profoundly indebted to Bazin’s notion of the cinema’s “ontological”
realism at the same time as it was combined with other strands of thought
from contemporary French critical theory and psychoanalysis. In chart-
ing Cahiers’ “impossible rejection” of Bazin (as Serge Daney dubbed it),
their encounters with Éric Rohmer (who embodied a more traditional
understanding of Bazin’s thinking) are also traced.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, André Bazin, ontological realism, Éric

Rohmer, Serge Daney, transparency

An Impossible Rejection: Bazin’s Film Theory and Cahiers du cinéma

The foundations of Bazin’s film theory were established very early in his ca-
reer. In 1945, at the age of 27, he published the landmark article “Ontologie de
l’image photographique.” In one of the first overviews of Bazin’s theoretical
as a whole, Rohmer labeled this text a “Copernican revolution” in the history
of film theory, in which a “new dimension” was introduced into the critical
analysis of the cinematographic image, one that is “metaphysical […] or, if
you prefer, phenomenological” in nature.1 The “Ontologie” essay is now one
of the canonical texts of film studies, widely anthologized and universally
known in the field. And yet it is curious that the argument of Bazin in
the text itself has so often been overlooked or misread and his position
equated to a naïve (and thus easily dismissed) credence in a straightforward
reproduction of perceptual reality through the process of photography.
Partly, Rohmer’s summation of Bazinian theory has contributed to this

1 Éric Rohmer, “La somme d’André Bazin,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 91 (November 1958), pp. 36-45,
here p. 38.

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch21
638  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

reduction of the complex, at times contradictory set of ideas espoused by

Bazin to a simplified position that Joubert-Laurencin has, with caustic irony,
dubbed bazinisme. Bazin’s successor as editor-in-chief at Cahiers insisted
on the centrality of “cinematic objectivity” to his predecessor’s theory, and
this has often been used to tar Bazin with a willful neglect or obfuscation
of the illusory nature of the cinema. In the “Ontologie” essay, however, it
is clear that when Bazin refers to the “essential objectivity” that is at the
heart of photography’s distinction from painting, he uses the term not in
the everyday sense (to mean impartiality, neutrality or fidelity) but with
its philosophical meaning in mind, to denote the absence of the subject in
the production of a photographic image. As Bazin explains:

For the first time, the only thing to come between an object and its rep-
resentation is another object. For the first time, an image of the outside
world takes shape automatically, without creative human intervention,
following a strict determinism. The photographer’s personality is at
work only in the selection, orientation and pedagogical approach to the
phenomenon: as evident as this personality may be in the final product,
it is not present in the same way as a painter’s. All art is founded upon
human agency, but in photography alone can we celebrate [ jouissons
de] its absence.2

Bazin stresses objectivity as a de-subjected process: it is the “automatic

genesis” of the photographic image that gives it a “power of credibility”
lacking in other manmade images. But Bazin is careful to clarify that this
“transfer of reality” is something that defies our critical faculties and con-
quers our belief through its “irrational power.” The camera lens (or objectif
in French) produces an image that, in Bazin’s words, is capable of “relieving
[défouler], out of the depths of our unconscious, our need to substitute for
the object something more than approximation.”3 It is notable, here, that
the modes of expression he adopts when addressing the ontological nature
of the photographic image—treating our relationship to the photograph
as a form of jouissance or défoulement, produced by the irrational power of
credibility it exerts over our unconscious—anticipates the psychoanalytic
vocabulary deployed in Cahiers’ later film theory and departs significantly
from the received understanding of Bazin’s “idealist” metaphysics, which
conceived of the cinema as a transparent “window onto the world.”

2 Bazin, “L’ontologie de l’image photographique,” p. 15 [p. 7].

3 Ibid, p. 16 [p 8].
The Bazinian Legacy 639

Moreover, the photograph’s ontological realism has little to do with

any visual verisimilitude with the “model” represented by the image. In
this respect, as Bazin points out, the blurry black-and-white images of
Nièpce and the Lumières had much to envy the lifelike ref inement of
nineteenth-century figurative painting. When, in one of the most oft-cited
passages of the “Ontologie” essay, he avers that the photographic image
“proceeds through genesis from the ontology of the model; it is the model,”
he takes pains to preface this claim by noting that this is the case even if
the image in question is “out of focus, distorted, devoid of color and without
documentary value”—that is, if its visual qualities depart markedly from
those the viewer would associate with the image’s referent.4 The metaphors
Bazin uses to describe the photographic image—as a trace, an imprint or
an embalmment—are of a categorically different order to the question of
its superficially “realistic” nature. Other theoretical categories are neces-
sary to understand his position. In this vein, Peter Wollen notably equated
Bazin’s thinking with the notion of indexicality in Peircean semiotics;
more recently, Louis-George Schwartz has drawn links with Derridean
deconstruction—as indeed, Narboni had already done in “La vicariance
du pouvoir.”5 In psychoanalytic terms, meanwhile, the ontology of the
photographic image can be understood as an encounter with the real. It
is noteworthy that, when discussing the relationship of the mechanically
produced image with twentieth-century art more broadly, Bazin does not
evoke naturalist aesthetic movements but rather turns to surrealism, whose
“aesthetic goal was inseparable from the machine-like impact of the image on
our minds.” In both photography and surrealist art, Bazin notes in a passage
that presages the different orders of being established by Lacan, “the logical
distinction between the imaginary and the real tends to be abolished.” In
a single, two-word phrase, Bazin encapsulates the paradoxical nature of
the photographic image (and a fortiori its cinematographic counterpart),
its status as both an irrationally produced illusion and an object sharing in
the being of the model, by defining it as a “true hallucination.”6
That the ontological realism of the cinema is in Bazin’s theory founded
on impossibly brief encounters with the real is evident in the examples he
selects as privileged instances of reality making itself felt on the screen.

4 Ibid.
5 See Peter Wollen, “‘Ontology’ and ‘Materialism’ in Film,” Screen vol. 17 no. 1 (Spring 1976),
pp. 7-25; and Louis-George Schwartz, “Deconstruction avant la lettre: Jacques Derrida Before
André Bazin,” in Andrew/Joubert-Laurencin (eds.), Opening Bazin, pp. 95-106.
6 Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” p. 18 [p. 9].
640  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

When discussing a documentary on the Kon-Tiki voyage (a sublime film

that “does not exist”), it was the “trembling, blurred images” captured during
the sea journey itself that captivated Bazin, as they denoted the “absolute”
identification between the conditions of filming and the nature of what
was being filmed. The barely distinguishable images of sharks in this film,
for instance, fascinated Bazin for being “not so much a photograph of the
shark but that of danger.”7 A similar sentiment governed his response,
in “Mort tous les après-midi,” to the 1948 newsreel footage of Chinese
communists executed by Chiang Kai-Shek’s ruling nationalist forces.8 In
“Montage interdit,” meanwhile, Bazin’s notorious prohibition on editing was
principally concerned with moments of mortal risk: the hunting of the seal
in Nanook of the North, a sequence shot of a crocodile catching a heron in
Louisiana Story, Chaplin placed in a cage with a lion in The Circus.9 If the
film theorist prized sequence shots and deep focus in fiction cinema, it was
because this aesthetic allowed filmmakers to take stock of the complex,
contradictory, “ambiguous” nature of social reality and capture events that
the conventions of “invisible” editing usually elided: the maid grinding
coffee in Umberto D, the disconnected images-faits of Paisà, the cruelty
and ugliness revealed in Stroheim’s films.10 In this sense, a later text by
Rohmer perhaps more adequately sums up Bazin’s understanding of the
deeper, more complex relationship between cinema and the real than the
former’s remarks on “cinematic objectivity” did in 1958. In 1995, writing for
Le Monde, Rohmer argued that, in spite of the fact that Bazin had at best
second-hand knowledge of Heidegger, his theory of ontological realism had
discernible roots in the German philosopher’s ideas in Sein und Zeit: “At the
risk of shocking philosophers, I would even say that the word ‘ontological’
is to be understood [in Bazin] in the strong sense of the term given to it by
Heidegger, in opposition to the ‘ontic’—that is, in relation to Being [l’être] and
not merely the ‘being’ [l’étant].”11 The cinema, in this reading, is not a device

7 André Bazin, “Le cinéma et l’exploration,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma vol. I, pp. 45-54,
here p. 52. Translated as “Cinema and Exploration,” in idem., What is Cinema? vol II, trans. and
ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 154-163, here p. 161.
8 Bazin, “Mort tous les après-midi,” p. 70.
9 Bazin, “Montage interdit,” p. 129 [p. 84]
10 Bazin was far from being unambiguously in favor of the long take and hostile to montage,
however. See in particular André Bazin, “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la
Libération,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. IV: Une esthétique de la réalité: le néo-réalisme
(Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), pp. 9-37. Translated as “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School
of the Liberation,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Barnard, pp. 215-249.
11 Éric Rohmer, “La révolution Bazin: Le mystère de l’existence,” Le Monde, hors-série Le siècle
du cinéma (January 1995), p. xi.
The Bazinian Legacy 641

for visually replicating the universe as we see it around us but a privileged

instrument for granting the viewer access to the nature of being itself.
This same problematic was a major determinant of the theoretical work
on the cinema carried out by the Cahiers critics in the journal’s Marxist
phase, but the extent to which their conceptual debt to Bazin was acknowl-
edged is an especially vexatious question. Certainly, the tone that was
adopted towards Bazin’s ideas was often a negative one. Two watchwords,
in particular, were deployed in almost talismanic fashion to ward off any
possible association with the journal’s father-figure. Bazin’s texts were
marked by their metaphysical idealism, which stood in stark opposition
to the historical materialism with which the Cahiers critics identif ied
during this period. In addition, his understanding of the cinema was seen
to be based on a notion of transparency, understanding the film image as a
“window onto the world.”12 Neither of these reproaches, it must be avowed,
were justifiable. The charge of idealism discounts the latent materialist
logic to Bazin’s ontological realism. Comolli himself is now highly critical
of his own past in this regard, confessing that “the epithet ‘idealist,’ which
was a kind of bogeyman for us, took precedence. When we said, ‘Bazin is
an idealist,’ it was an overly simplistic manner of distancing ourselves from
his thought, of course. I am very critical about this.”13 Reproaching Bazin
for espousing cinematic transparency, meanwhile, is similarly off-target. In
fact, Bazin himself rarely used the term, and it instead served to assimilate
his thinking with the macmahonien tendency of right-wing film criticism
in the early 1960s—from which Bazin was, in fact, both politically and
theoretically divorced. Indeed, Daney would later admit that the main
goal of Cahiers’ polemical stance was actually to “liquidate” this “dogmatic,
far-right off-shoot of bazinisme” rather than Bazin’s own thinking.14
In the texts that were most dominated by a grappling with the Bazinian
legacy—notably, the April 1970 interview with Éric Rohmer and the 1972
article “L’écran du fantasme”—an outwardly hostile stance critical of the
“idealism” ostensibly at the heart of Bazin’s supposed notion of “transpar-
ency” does indeed dominate the tenor of discussion. At times, particularly
in the latter text, this discourse can border on a hysterical excess that
could almost call for its own psychoanalytic interpretation (one to which

12 See André Bazin, “Théâtre et cinéma,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. II: Le Cinéma et
les autres arts (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1959), pp. 69-118, here p. 106. Translated as “Theatre and
Film,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans and ed. Barnard, pp. 161-214, here p. 201.
13 Comolli, “Yes, were utopians (Part 1).”
14 Daney, La Rampe, p. 15.
642  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

those who have viewed the post-1968 Cahiers as an Œdipal rejection of

the “law of the father” have not hesitated to articulate). But no critique is
entirely negative in nature. The very act of honoring a peer with a critical
analysis implies a recognition of the value of their ideas. The recurrence
with which the Cahiers critics turned to the writings of Bazin in the years
1968-1973, as well as the complex nature of their response to his ideas—in
stark contrast with the unambiguous invective directed at Cinéthique and
Positif—further underscores the affinity the critics had with the journal’s
progenitor. Narboni’s enigmatic statement in “La vicariance du pouvoir”
that “almost nothing” separates Bazin’s thinking (“idealism, in one of its
most coherent manifestations”) from the materialist film theory Cahiers
sought is thus an astute appraisal of the relationship he and his colleagues
had with Bazin. Comolli may well have strenuously argued against Bazin’s
conception of depth of field in the cinema, but he too, as outlined earlier,
ends up more favorable to Bazin than to Mitry or Leblanc on the matter.
Writing together in “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Comolli and Narboni
typified Bazin’s film theory as the first steps in “a necessary stage—but
one that it was necessary to overcome—of returning more closely to film
in the materiality of its elements, in its signifying structures, its formal
organization.”15 Indeed, much of the theoretical activity of the Cahiers
critics consisted in a process of dialectically superseding Bazin’s original
notions, which required an alternating series of critiques and reappraisals.
The rest of this chapter will therefore chart the zigzagging contours of this
engagement with Bazin’s ideas (and those of his successors such as Rohmer)
as the Cahiers critics followed Bazin’s lead in grappling with the cinema’s
encounters with the real.

An Interview with Éric Rohmer

Perhaps the most notable forum where the Cahiers critics teased out their
relationship with the Bazinian theoretical tradition came in the shape of a
10,000-word interview conducted with Éric Rohmer in April 1970. The former
editor-in-chief of Cahiers, having assumed the position upon the death of
Bazin, saw himself as something of a keeper of the flame for Bazinian film
theory, despite the fact that his conservative political views were at a remove
from Bazin’s liberal-left inclinations. Moreover, his transmission of Bazin’s
central ideas in texts such as “La somme de Bazin” played a determining role

15 Comolli/Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” p. 16 [p. 259].

The Bazinian Legacy 643

in their reception during this period. Though initially retaining a measure

of bitterness at his removal from Cahiers, Rohmer proved not to be averse
to being interviewed by his erstwhile colleagues. The 1970 discussion was,
in fact, the second time Rohmer had entered into dialogue with the younger
generation of Cahiers critics. In November 1965, the journal had already
published an interview with him, tellingly titled “L’ancien et le nouveau.”
Although Rohmer had, at this point, only completed a single feature film
(1960’s Le Signe de lion), the prefatory remarks to the exchange insisted that
his shift from criticism to filmmaking merely represented “the abandonment
of one form of writing for another, […] for, by leaving behind the marble of
Cahiers, has he not written his finest criticism on celluloid?”16
In comparison with the later interview, the 1965 discussion took place
in relatively calm, respectful conditions. This did not prevent Rohmer from
engaging in spirited polemics in “L’ancien et le nouveau,” such as his critique
of Pasolini’s “Il cinema di poesia,” published in Cahiers in the previous
issue.17 For Rohmer, if the cinema can indeed be “a means for allowing us
to discover poetry,” then this is principally the “poetry of the world” rather
than that of the filmmaker: “it is not the cinema but the object shown that
is poetic.” Rohmer is adamant that what makes the cinema interesting is
its capacity for being an “instrument of discovery,” and he sketches out an
opposition between cinematic representation and the signifying nature of
language: “the image is not made to signify, but to show.”18 Evidently, the
influence of Bazin on Rohmer’s conception of the cinema is never far, but
when he discusses the theorist by name Rohmer is surprisingly equivocal.
While accepting the value of his theory, Rohmer is more mitigated when it
comes to Bazin’s critical tastes, especially in comparison with the critical
jeunes turcs writing for Cahiers in the 1950s:

I think that Bazin had ideas, and that we had tastes. The ideas of Bazin are
all good; his tastes are very contestable. Bazin’s judgements have not been
ratified by posterity. […] We did not say much of any importance on film
theory, we merely developed Bazin’s ideas. But I do think that we found
the right values, and the people who came after us ratified our tastes.

16 Éric Rohmer, interviewed by Jean-Claude Biette, Jacques Bontemps and Jean-Louis Comolli,
“L’ancien et le nouveau: Entretien avec Éric Rohmer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 172 (November 1965),
pp. 33-42, 56-59, here p. 33.
17 For a deeper discussion of Pasolini’s text, see Chapter 14.
18 Ibid., p. 57.
644  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Furthermore, Rohmer reveals himself to be rather averse to Bazin’s emphasis

on deep-focus photography, arguing that it was the weakest component
of his theory. Although as a critic Rohmer had accepted a privileging of a
deep-focus, long-take aesthetic over a montage-based cinema, his turn to
filmmaking significantly altered his outlook: “I was led to act against my
theories (if I ever had any). What were they? The long-take and découpage
rather than montage. […] And yet, I have made films that are above all works
of montage.”19 Finally, Rohmer is vocal about his political views in the inter-
view: although he expresses a certain regret for the right-wing standpoint
of his early articles, he nonetheless relishes playing the provocateur: “I don’t
know if I am on the right, but one thing I am sure of, at least, is that I am not
on the left. Yes, why should I be on the left? […] Everyone knows that these
old categories of right and left are meaningless today.”20
Such remarks went uncontested in 1965, but in the heightened condi-
tions of 1970, the political and theoretical differences between Rohmer
and Cahiers could not but lead to a more combative encounter. The Cahiers
critics approached Rohmer after the critical and popular success of Ma nuit
chez Maud. Bonitzer had already reviewed the film for the July-August 1969
issue of Cahiers, and his remarks give a taste of the contretemps to come.
While the critic lauds Ma nuit chez Maud as a film of “admirable poetry,”
with an “exceptional erotic richness” and “astounding writing,” he cautions
that it is a “deliberately ideological” work and is “the first of Rohmer’s ‘moral
tales’ to allow its signs, its mechanisms and its concepts to come across
[transparaître] as such.” For Bonitzer, the film’s narrative—structured
around oppositions between love and desire, religious belief and Marxist
atheism—allows for a “double reading” depending on the spectator’s political
tendencies: “In the inevitable game of preferences, the left-wing spectator
will choose Maud in the name of desire and liberty, while the right-wing
spectator will choose Françoise in the name of love and conjugality.” In the
end, the narrative had preordained at least one loser, “Vidal, the communist
intellectual reading Marx via Pascal,” whose discourse is “neutralized and
recuperated by the Rohmerian order.”21
Bonitzer’s text signaled the potential for an ideological clash between
Cahiers and its former editor-in-chief but, as their reception of Bergman and
Fellini showed, in 1970 the critics were still willing to engage in dialogue

19 Ibid., p. 41.
20 Ibid., p. 58.
21 The quotes in this paragraph are from Pascal Bonitzer, “Maud et les phagocytes (Ma nuit
chez Maud),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 214 (July-August 1969), p. 59.
The Bazinian Legacy 645

with f ilmmakers who were politically at odds with them and to enact
counter-analyses of the films they made, reading them “against the grain.”
That the Cahiers team was fully aware of the extremity of their political
distance from the director of Ma nuit chez Maud was made clear in the
preface to the interview that Bonitzer, Comolli, Daney and Narboni carried
out with Rohmer. “Everything in this interview with Éric Rohmer,” they
write, “opposes us to him. So what is the point of these ten pages?” Their
answer is not only that “Rohmer’s films interest us against his declarations”
but also that “it is the impurity and complexity of our differences that have
retained our interest. […] In effect, we will see that in this second interview,
bitterer than the f irst, the mechanism of disavowal, so frequently and
essentially practiced by the characters, and especially the narrators, of the
“Moral Tales,” is far from being absent in the discourse of their author.”22
The resulting interview is one of the only published instances of a direct,
in-depth dialogue between adherents of a “Freudo-Marxist” approach to film
theory and the more conventionally Bazinian outlook that characterizes
Rohmer’s conception of the cinema. When discussion turns to more directly
political or ideological matters, the sense of an impasse between these
two viewpoints is palpable.23 In response to Cahiers’ question as to how
the “events” of May 1968 have affected his filmmaking, Rohmer is blunt:
“My ‘Moral Tales’ don’t seek their inspiration in the ‘event’ but I don’t claim
that you can’t take inspiration from the event, nor even that I won’t take
inspiration from it one day.”24
As the discussion turns to questions of film theory and more particularly
the relationship between the cinema and reality, the proceedings become
more enlightening. Rohmer is adamant, throughout, that “the cinema shows
real things,” explaining, “If I show a house, it’s a real, coherent house, not
something made out of cardboard.”25 When Cahiers insists on the historically
and ideologically determined nature of films, Rohmer parries by asking for
greater precision from his questioners. Returning to his claim in the earlier
interview that the cinema represents the “poetry of the world,” the filmmaker

22 Éric Rohmer, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Serge Daney and Jean
Narboni, “Nouvel entretien avec Éric Rohmer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219 (April 1970), pp. 46-55,
here p. 46. Translated as “New Interview with Éric Rohmer,” trans. Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema
no. 54 (April 2010), sensesofcinema.com/2010/feature-articles/new-interview-with-eric-rohmer
(accessed January 1, 2021). As was often the case, the questions were presented as coming from
“Cahiers,” so it is impossible to know which individual posed which question.
23 Ibid., pp. 49-50.
24 Ibid., p. 55.
25 Ibid., p. 49.
646  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

is unapologetic, asserting that “a film never allows us to admire a translation

of the world, but to admire, through this translation, the world itself. The
cinema is an instrument of discovery, even in fictional films. Because it is
poetry, it is revelatory and, from the fact that it is revelatory, it is poetry.” It
is here that the theoretical opposition sharpens. The Cahiers critics voice
their view that understanding the cinema as a window open to the world is
a position that “all of us are totally against” but that Rohmer’s films interest
them precisely as instances of cinematic “opacification.” Sensing that his
mentor is under attack, Rohmer comes to the defense of Bazin, pointing
to his “put[ting] the finger on what was unique about the art of cinema in
relation to all the other forms of art.” He clarifies, however, that Bazin’s
discussion of the cinema as a “window” should lead one to think less of
“transparency” than of “opening.” As Rohmer puts it: “‘Transparency’ is too
static. And I take ‘opening’ in its active sense: the act of opening and not
only the fact of being open. The art of cinema takes us back to the world.”26
For Cahiers, however, speaking of the cinema as a means for admiring
the world implies “an essential conception of the world as Beauty, as Order,
wherein the ‘concrete real,’ the ‘appearances,’ would be its visible manifesta-
tions.” That is, it belies a strictly idealist philosophical viewpoint and masks
the fact that the “objectivity” Rohmer seeks is always historically situated
and ideologically determined. They thus query the filmmaker as to whether
“joining the objective world entail[s] rediscovering your idea of the world,
your idea of the objectivity of the world.” Rohmer not only sticks to his
guns at this point but even heightens the polemical stakes, admitting to
the cardinal sins of idealism and teleology: “Seeing as you are pushing me
there, I will go further. Not only is there beauty and order in the world, but
beauty and order are only in the world. For how could art, a human product,
be the equal of nature, a divine work? At best, it is only the revelation, in
the universe, of the hand of the Creator. I’ll admit: there is no position more
teleological, more theological, than my own.” Everything, in Rohmer’s eyes,
has a miraculous nature, at which we humans can only wonder. In one of
his only conciliatory notes, the filmmaker nonetheless accepts that his
discussion with Cahiers represents “two fundamentally different attitudes
towards the cinema, and both are justified. I think that back in our time,
our attitude was justified, I hope that today your attitude is.”27 And yet,
when his interlocutors close the interview by asking for Rohmer’s thoughts
on Eisenstein’s declaration that “absolute realism” is “simply a function of a

26 The above quotes are from ibid., p. 51.

27 The above quotes are from ibid., p. 52.
The Bazinian Legacy 647

certain form of social structure,” Rohmer’s response is categorically blunt:

“Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s completely outside of my preoccupations.”28

The Rohmer Case

As stimulating as this discussion was, it nonetheless confined the two

strands of film theory represented on each side of the microphone to a
static, polarized dichotomy, exacerbated by the political gulf between
Cahiers and Rohmer and a certain theoretical rigidity from both parties. For
a more dialectical grappling with the productive contradictions within the
texts written by Bazin, we will have to turn to Daney/Bonitzer’s “L’Écran du
fantasme,” which appeared two years after the Rohmer interview, when the
influence of both Lacanian psychoanalysis and the French Maoist movement
had made themselves much more powerfully felt within the journal. But
first I will take a detour, exploring the peripeteia of Cahiers’ relationship
with Rohmer, the fourth, alongside Godard, Truffaut and Rivette, of the
quartet of nouvelle vague filmmakers and former critics at the journal whose
ties to and influence on the post-1968 Cahiers warrant a closer focus. In a
familiar trajectory, the discussions surrounding Ma nuit chez Maud led not
to a continued preoccupation with Rohmer’s work but rather to a period
of critical silence, as the journal’s political engagements of the early 1970s
thwarted the potential reception of films such as Le Genou de Claire and
L’Amour, l’après-midi. This reticence was broken with Bonitzer’s review of
La Marquise d’O… in November 1976. Out of all the Cahiers writers, it was
Bonitzer who has shown by far the greatest level of interest in Rohmer’s
work, and the critical dialogue formed by the series of articles with which
he greeted each new film by Rohmer was crowned by the 1991 monograph
Éric Rohmer, the last significant work of theoretical reflection on the cinema
completed by Bonitzer before filmmaking came to monopolize his activities.
Having come out of the other side of Cahiers’ Maoist adventure, the
Bonitzer of 1976 still retains a political judgement of Rohmer’s films, admit-
ting that the morality of his tales is undoubtedly “reactionary.” But this
is overshadowed, in La Marquise d’O…, by the fact that “Rohmer is one of
today’s rare filmmakers to consciously, explicitly film bourgeois being.” In
his Kleist adaptation, the documentary eye of Rohmer’s camera trains itself
on “the very body of the Christian, bourgeois woman,” and this leads the

28 Ibid., p. 55.
648  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

new film to be “indecent” to an unprecedented degree in Rohmer’s œuvre.29

Despite the fact that Rohmer had asserted that the governing principle of his
adaptation was “to follow, word by word, Kleist’s text,”30 Bonitzer focuses on
those significant moments in which the filmmaker departed from his literary
source. Here the influence of Bazin is palpable. Significantly, however, it is
not his theory of cinematic ontology but his views on adaptation that are
pertinent. Both the critic and the director evince a deep concern for the
“dialectical fidelity” of filmed versions of literary works, in which a film-
maker is most “faithful” to the source by respecting the innate resistance
that the text possesses to being transferred to the screen.31 Thus Bonitzer
highlights the deliberate citation of Füssli’s “Nightmare” during the scene of
the Marquise’s inferred rape by the Graf, albeit one in which the monsters
depicted by the painter are visually absent. For Bonitzer, this citation is not
simply a case of “a simple visual flirtation, a note of pure aestheticism: in
Füssli’s painting, the terrifying dream of the sleeping woman is represented
not only by a mare (‘nightmare’), his horrible muzzle protruding between
the curtains of the alcove, but also by an incubus demon squatting on the
chest of the recumbent beauty. It is this incubus, this demon, that the shot
allusively evokes.”32 Discussing the same shot in his later book Décadrages,
Bonitzer is more specific about the role the citation plays:

Is the allusion, one that is not necessarily made to be understood, simply

a case of cultural verisimilitude, or does it contain a necessity? […] Its
signification is at the very least complex, if we consider that the incubus,
present in the painting referred to, finds itself elided from the image—
from the shot—much as the rape is from the narrative. The nightmare
is an erotic nightmare, and, through this ellipsis in the image which
refers back to that of the narrative, the shot can be considered not only
as the metonym of the rape which follows, but also as the metaphor of
its ellipsis.33

29 Pascal Bonitzer, “Glorieuses bassesses (La Marquise d’O…),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 272
(December 1976), pp. 26-30, here p. 27.
30 Éric Rohmer, “Notes pour la mise en scène,” L’Avant-scène du cinéma no. 173 (October 1976),
pp. 5-6, here p. 5.
31 See André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson,” in
idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. II, pp. 33-53. Translated as “Diary of a Country Priest and the
Robert Bresson Style,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Barnard, pp. 139-159.
32 Bonitzer, “Glorieuses bassesses,” p. 28.
33 Pascal Bonitzer, Décadrages: peinture et cinéma (Paris: Seuil, 1985), pp. 31-32.
The Bazinian Legacy 649

Although Bonitzer does not explicitly credit the influence, it is clear, here,
that he is using Bazin’s concept of “dialectical fidelity” with reference to
Rohmer’s film. An exact cinematic equivalent to Kleist’s use of an ellipsis
to denote the rape of the Marquise is impossible. To create the same effect,
Rohmer had recourse to the citation of a well-known painting depicting
forbidden erotic desire, while, at the same time, excising a crucial component
of the painting. The absent incubus occupies the position of the ellipsis in
Kleist, more subtly yet effectively than a more direct transposition of the
grammatical sign could have achieved.
Bonitzer highlights a further jarring insertion into the text: in an early
scene taking place in the Russian military headquarters, as the Graf is
pressed by a general on the details of the attack on the Marquise, three
soldiers stand in the background, one of whom, without any lines of dialogue,
is played by Rohmer himself. For a filmmaker who doggedly refused to
give himself a visible profile inside or outside of his films, the appearance
is unnerving. Neither before nor since has Rohmer ever appeared in one
of his fiction films. Why should he feel the need to do so here? Bonitzer
proffers a suggested reason: “At the beginning of the film, after the ellipsis
of the rape, Rohmer himself, disguised as an officer, casts a judge’s stern
look on his guilty hero. In front of the Graf, embarrassed at denouncing his
troops, he slowly crosses his arms in a terrifying manner, as if in a secret
confession.”34 As the critic describes it, the characters in the film “evolve
under the gaze of a judge—an absent judge to whom the Author has lent
his countenance, but whose position outside of the game, outside of the
field (the absolute hors-champ) no less secretly adjudicates the drama.”35
In the 1980s, Bonitzer continued his critical dialogue with Rohmer by
penning reviews for Cahiers of La Femme de l’aviateur, Pauline à la plage
and Le Rayon vert, while an article in the psychoanalytic journal L’Âne in
1987 tackled “Le cas Rohmer” in Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle.36
The first of these articles summed up the point of view governing them all:
Rohmer’s “Comédies et proverbes” series rekindled the spirit of the nouvelle
vague by providing a twin lesson on the cinema: the reduced budgets of these

34 Bonitzer, “Glorieuses bassesses,” p. 29.

35 Ibid.
36 Pascal Bonitzer, “La carte cachée ou les absents ont toujours raison (La Femme de l’aviateur),”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 322 (April 1981), pp. 4-9; Pascal Bonitzer, “Une image peut en cacher une
autre (Pauline à la plage),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 346 (April 1983), pp. 44-46; Pascal Bonitzer, “Le
dernier venu (Le Rayon vert),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 387 (September 1986), pp. 30-31; and Pascal
Bonitzer, “Le cas Rohmer (Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle),” L’Âne: magazine freudien
no. 31 (Summer 1987), pp. 20-21.
650  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

films hinted at a new economic strategy for filmmakers while proving that
this need not come at the expense of narrative complexity and innovative
mise en scène.
The 1980s also saw collaboration between the filmmaker and Cahiers:
under Narboni’s auspices, the journal’s publishing arm released a collection
of Rohmer’s critical writings under the title Le Goût de la beauté in 1984. The
interview with Narboni that served as a preface to the book reprised many of
the terms under discussion in 1970, albeit in more amicable circumstances.
Here Rohmer, without resistance from his interlocutor, elucidates his view
that the cinema not only says things differently than the other arts but
in its essence says different things—a perspective he ascribes to having
“systematize[d] something from Bazin.” This, he insists, is the reason why
he was “quite opposed to the whole structuralist, linguistic tendency of
the 1960s. For me, in the cinema, what was important was ontology—to
use Bazin’s terms—rather than language. Ontologically, the cinema says
something that the other arts do not say.”37
The most signif icant homage Cahiers made to Rohmer, however,
came with the publication of Bonitzer’s monograph on the filmmaker in
1991. Alerting the reader that he was attempting a “diagonal” analysis of
Rohmer’s œuvre, Bonitzer refuses the commonplace view that his films
are Marivaudesque comedies and instead interprets them as crime films,
or whodunnits: “Their plots are always ordered around a secret. We might
even say that they are mysteries.”38 For Bonitzer, the key to understanding
Rohmer’s work comes in a passage from his preface to the written collection
of the Six Contes moraux: “My intention was not to film raw events, but
the story someone made of them. […] Everything happens in the head of
the narrator. Told by someone else, the plot would have been different, or
would not have existed at all.”39 In Bonitzer’s view, all of Rohmer’s films
are structured around this paradox: he strives to film both the world in its
documentary reality and a story that exists purely in the mind of a narrator
figure, a character prone to seeking refuge in their own dream world. As
Bonitzer puts it, “the cinema participates ‘ontologically’ in this dual nature
of dream and reality.”40 Hence the denial process that is at the heart of
all films—the “I know very well…, but all the same…” of the viewer faced
with the cinematographic image—is of particular resonance for Rohmer’s

37 Éric Rohmer, Le Goût de la beauté (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2004 [1984]), p. 25.
38 Pascal Bonitzer, Éric Rohmer (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991), p. 7.
39 Éric Rohmer, Six Contes moraux (Paris: Herne, 1974), cited in Bonitzer, Éric Rohmer, p. 11.
40 Ibid., p. 35.
The Bazinian Legacy 651

films, which are caught between the “truth” of reality and the “lie” of the
narrator. This lie occurs less through the “active deformation of the facts”
and more through acts of omission: the idea of the screen as a cache, dear
to Bazin’s theory, is thus crucial to Rohmer’s films; in them, the absent field
concealed by the screen, the hors-champ, activates the narrative to a degree
rarely attained elsewhere.
In an argument that picks up the train of thought developed in his 1969
review of Ma nuit chez Maud, Bonitzer thus argues that Rohmer’s films
are susceptible to a “double reading,” one based on the dialectic, in the
cinema, between showing and signifying: “It is indeed in the articulation
between these two heterogeneous operations that the dramatic system of
Rohmer’s films is constructed, since there is as much spoken in them as
there is shown—in fact, what is shown is, in a way, the act of speaking.”41 All
Rohmer’s films are, in a sense, literary adaptations whether the source text
exists or not, and his artistic activity, caught between literature and cinema,
can thus be typified by the paradox: “Why film a story, when you can write
it? Why write it, when you will film it?” This “falsely ingenuous debate,” in
Bonitzer’s view, highlights the fact that Rohmer’s work “speaks precisely
of the chiasm and the conflict between seeing and doing, between telling
and showing.”42 As a writer who himself was on the cusp of a transition to
filmmaking, Bonitzer’s words are prescient of the contradictions he himself
would face, and indeed, Rohmer’s work would prove to be a major point of
inspiration for Bonitzer’s own films.

The Screen of the Phantasm

While Cahiers’ reactions to Rohmer’s films and theoretical views constituted

a significant—albeit indirect—aspect of the journal’s engagement with
the Bazinian legacy, the critics also directly grappled with Bazin’s ideas
even during their most militant, Marxist-Leninist period. The most notable
instance of this confrontation came in the March-April 1972 issue with the
publication of the binomial article “L’écran du fantasme.” Co-authored by
Bonitzer and Daney, the piece consists of two columns of text, each penned
by one of the two critics (who engage in a dialogue not only with Bazin
but with each other), as well as a photo montage of stills from films by
Buñuel, Flaherty, Hawks, Renoir and Rouch. The sub-heading of Bonitzer/

41 Ibid., pp. 18-19.

42 Ibid., p. 27.
652  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Daney’s text given in the issue’s table of contents, “Les théories idéalistes
du cinéma: André Bazin,” certainly gives an indication of the oppositional
stance towards the journal’s founder that the Cahiers team had, outwardly,
adopted by this time, but the resulting text is far from the unambiguous
denunciation of Bazin’s ideas that it has usually been taken to be. Joubert-
Laurencin, for instance, writes that “L’écran du fantasme” exhibits “a rather
ferocious will to block out Bazin,” but he also acknowledges that “the leftist
struggle against ‘idealism’ is the pretext for a quite precise return to the
metaphorical network of Bazin’s writings.”43
Indeed, a close reading of “L’écran du fantasme” reveals it to be far from
the invective-laden diatribe against Cahiers’ own Nom-du-Père that it
has often been depicted as. Instead, Bonitzer/Daney’s dual texts enact a
symptomatic reading of Bazin, reproducing the mode of analysis adopted
for Hollywood films such as Young Mr. Lincoln and Morocco and using it
to analyze a corpus of film theory texts that can be productively mined at
their ideological fault lines. While Bonitzer and Daney demarcate points
of opposition to Bazin’s ideas, the fact of dedicating such a detailed reading
denotes an ambivalent attitude to his views that is analogous to Cahiers’
treatment of the classical Hollywood filmmakers whose work the journal
interrogated. As with Ford, Sternberg and Griff ith, Bazin incited both
homage and reproof, attraction and resistance at one and the same time.
This, at any rate, is Daney’s later view: “Critique was evidently an ultimate
form of homage, more or less avowed, that we paid to those whom we
had always loved. We wanted to re-read Ford, and not Huston, to dissect
Bresson and not René Clair, to psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael.
Critique was always this: an eternal return to a fundamental jouissance.”44
In subjecting Bazin to an analysis inspired by Freud and Lacan, Bonitzer/
Daney essentially read him as a hysteric, one whose writings manifest a
neurotic obsession for those “encounters with the real” that highlight, with
unrivalled intensity, the ontological stakes of the cinema: our relationship
with death and the Other.
Daney opens his contribution to the text with the articulation of a
two-part strategy for dealing with “idealist” film theory founded on the
twin themes of continuity and transparency. Rather than being satisfied
with merely protesting against these notions, he feels that it is incumbent
upon contemporary theorists to both “denounce them as myths and

43 Joubert-Laurencin, Le sommeil paradoxal, p. 103.

44 Daney, “Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977: Entretien avec Serge Daney,” p. 19 [p. 20].
The Bazinian Legacy 653

denials” and allow for “the reading of that which has thus been denied.”45
In the case of Bazin, recognized as both the most coherent and the most
phantasmal of the representatives of “idealist” discourse on the cinema,
Daney highlights one of the most palpably symptomatic elements of his
theory. When Bazin interrogates the nature of the cinema, he finds his
answers above all in minor film genres: documentaries, scientific films,
reportages or “poetic” f ilms whose marginalized status allows for the
clearest possible positing of the fundamental problematic of the cinema:
namely, the possible coexistence of two “heterogeneous” elements within
a single frame. Often, these two elements involve members of the animal
world, such that Daney is drawn to surmise that, in Bazin’s writings, “the
essence of the cinema becomes a history of beasts.” Daney thus recognizes
that Bazin’s infamous prohibition on montage is not an absolute law of
the cinema but rather is derived from the nature of what is being filmed.
The “fight to the death” between two violently incompatible beings—such
as, in the paradigmatic example, Chaplin and the lion in The Circus (a
scene that Daney likens to the figure of castration in Freud)—requires
representational continuity. Thus, for Daney it is “the possibility of filming
death that ‘in certain cases’ prohibits editing,” since the cut deprives the
obsessive of the fantasy of being able to seize the passage from life to death
as a kind of eternal present. 46
The cinema, then, has a strangely self-negating quality in Bazin’s concep-
tualization: its teleological horizon is its own disappearance, the vanishing
of all differences between film and reality, or, as Bazin described the goal of
the neorealist filmmakers, “no more actors, no more story, no more mise en
scène, that is to say finally the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality: no more
cinema.”47 But Daney also recognizes that Bazin, who was more astute
than some of the more naïve proponents of cinéma-vérité, has a tendency to
oscillate between the “all the same…” and the “I know very well…” phases of
denial. While arguing that the cinema has a “realist vocation,” for instance,
Bazin also recognizes that “some aspect of reality will always have to be

45 Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Daney, “L’écran du fantasme,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 236-237
(March-April 1972), pp. 30-40, here p. 31. Daney’s section of the text, although not the passage
cited here, has been translated as “The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals),” trans. Mark A.
Cohen, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002), pp. 32-41.
46 Ibid., pp. 31-32. [p. 33]
47 André Bazin, “Voleur de bicyclette,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. IV, pp. 45-59, here
p. 59. Translated as “Bicycle Thief,” What is Cinema? vol. II, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray pp. 47-60,
here p. 60. Cited in Bonitzer/Daney, “L’écran du fantasme,” p. 32 [p. 34].
654  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

sacrificed to reality.”48 What is sacrificed, in Daney’s reading, is the skin,

the hymen of the virgin, 49 the screen on which the phantasmal images of
the cinema are projected. The cinema championed by Bazin’s film theory
is thus, as Daney frames it, marked by an antinomy between the thematic
depiction of struggles, ruptures and differences and the “homogeneous,
continuous backdrop” on which these conflicts are represented. Daney
proceeds to elaborate a typology of these contradictions, grouped under
the two categories of, firstly, a “spatial” struggle between the One and the
Other (whether Man or Beast) and, secondly, a “temporal” transformation
between Before and After (exemplified by the passage from life to death).
The possible political conclusions Daney can draw from this classification,
however, remain in the form of tentative conundrums: “How to ‘film’ the
class struggle?” “How to film the ‘coming into consciousness?” The questions
he poses go unanswered.50
For Bonitzer, whose text responds to and comments on Daney’s, the act
of viewing a film is a “simulacrum of coitus” between the “living eye” of
the viewer on the one side and the “dead, photochemical memory of the
celluloid, traversed by the projector’s luminous rays” on the other.51 And
yet it is equally a “fantasy of incorporation.” If idealists such as Bazin and
“declared materialists” such as Jean-Louis Baudry both believe that “the
cinema, before anything else, technically, is concerned with the real,” then
they both logically envision that the real, that which is “totally heterogeneous
to the tissue of the dream, film or text,” can be swallowed up by the mouth of
the camera, captured in a box. But this fantasy of keeping the real encased,
of ingesting the Other, means that the violence that the cinema does to the
outside world not only occurs at the editing stage (which involves “cutting
and fragmenting the ribbon of visible reality”) but also intervenes during the
filming itself, which is characterized by fantasies of “devouring/disrobing
the real” or, in the case of the ethnographic cinema that fascinated Bazin,
being devoured in turn. Thus, in Bonitzer’s view, “the cinema/reality pairing,
which has nourished all the idealist obsessions in film theory and criticism,

48 Bazin, “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la Libération,” p. 25 [p. 232].

Cited in Bonitzer/Daney, “L’écran du fantasme,” p. 33 [p. 34].
49 Daney highlights Bazin’s dubious comment that “A violated woman remains beautiful, but
she is no longer the same woman” and argues that his view that the “fundamental ambiguity of
the real” is akin to the “doubt about virginity: this little almost nothing that changes everything.”
See ibid., p. 33 p. 35].
50 Ibid., pp. 38, 40 [pp. 38, 40].
51 Ibid., p. 31.
The Bazinian Legacy 655

contains a death-fantasy.”52 Noting Bazin’s proclivity for metaphors of the

cinema involving embalmment and mummification, Bonitzer highlights
the paradoxical nature of this analogy, revelatory of the neurotic nature of
attempts to comprehend cinematic ontology: “to seize and to hold onto this
unnameable thing, or rather the barely nameable phantom of this thing (the
real itself) which surges and immediately disappears, is eclipsed between the
stitches of the text, the uneven grains of the celluloid: this is the structure
of the obsessional phantasm, which is also the form of the metaphysical
dream.” The prohibition on montage thus stems from the need to inscribe
this mummified change onto the “reality” registered by the film rather than
the “tissue” of the film itself, which must be effaced in order to conserve “the
‘reality’ fallen onto the celluloid, peeled off, suppressed in its living presence
by the implacable, mechanical devouring of the camera.” The reason why
the wild animal is the “major paradigm” of the problematic uncovered by
Bazin is that, filmed in continuity, the “gain of reality” it lends a film derives
from the risk of death presented by the moment of filming. In such scenes,
the act of devouring can work both ways: either the cinema captures the
animal or the beast swallows up the cameraman. The spectator, meanwhile,
takes pleasure in the dialectical Aufhebung of this struggle to the death,
but only on condition that he forget the “transparent veil of the screen.”53
The essence of the cinema in Bazin’s theory can therefore be reduced to a
combination of filming in continuity, the “effacement of technique” and the
“epiphany of the sensorial real.” Bazin’s “gain of reality” comes at the price
of the incorporation (or devouring) of the Other. Intriguingly, however, this
dynamic also provides the basis, in Bonitzer’s argument, for the possibil-
ity of a truly political cinema. In the work of Straub/Huillet, for instance,
Bazin’s problematic is displaced onto more “radical,” more politicized stakes.
Instead of the audience taking pleasure in the resolution of a struggle to the
death, the spectator is inscribed into the active contradictions of the class
struggle. Taking from the metaphor of the mummy the vivid imagery of
the fraying bandages wrapped around its head (a metaphor for the “tissue”
of the celluloid), Bonitzer closes his text with a rousing address to militant
filmmakers, which serves, at least provisionally, to respond to the political
questions raised by Daney:

The struggle to the death is not only a phantasm of the filmmaker. Com-
rade filmmakers, do not suffocate it under the bandages of representation.

52 Ibid., pp. 32-33.

53 Ibid., pp. 36-37.
656  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

[…] A film is produced on the divided scene of the class struggle, and
not vice versa. You must not draw the ‘class struggle’ onto the screen, a
homogeneous scene of jouissance, in order to discharge militant energies.
Do not turn the struggle into an object, but turn your films into an object
of struggle.54

And yet there is something incongruous about this peroration, with its
sudden infusion of revolutionary politics into Bonitzer/Daney’s ruminations
on death, the real and the cinematographic image. The jarring shift in
registers at this point in the text is itself symptomatic of the contradictions
and disjunctions of Cahiers’ theoretical project as a whole, which was, in
the end, never fully able to reconcile politics and ontology.

The Return to Bazin

That Cahiers’ confrontation with Bazin was not as thoroughly antagonistic as

is often portrayed is abundantly evident in the fact that, from the late 1970s
onwards, virtually all of the critics of the post-1968 generation—indepen-
dently, but as if in lock-step with one another—enacted their own “returns”
to Bazin. In reality, as I have argued, the journal never really left Bazin in
the first place, as it was unstintingly preoccupied with the fundamental
problematic laid out by the theorist—that is, the cinema’s relationship with
the real. At the beginning of the 1970s, this attachment to Bazin took the
contradictory form of a vacillation between affirmation and denial, alternat-
ing between praising his coherence and quasi-materialism on the one hand
and denigrating him on the other hand as an idealist captivated by obsessive
neuroses.55 But as the decade progressed, the appraisal of Bazin’s work grew
more emphatically positive. The shift in attitudes towards bazinisme was
first made explicit in a deceptively brief and unassuming text: a half-page
review by Narboni of Rossellini’s Germania anno zero, on re-release in Paris
in mid-1978. Here, Narboni affirms that Cahiers had, for some time, been
trapped by the alternative “between a cinema of transparency, conserving
no trace of its process of production, and a cinema inscribing in itself the

54 Ibid., pp. 38, 40.

55 Serge Daney himself would claim that, “I think Cahiers oscillated several times between
several different ways of inheriting Bazin.” Serge Daney, interviewed by Michel Crépu, Gilles
Delavaud, Michel Mesnil and Olivier Mongin, “Passion de l’image: Des Cahiers du cinéma à
Libération: Entretien avec Serge Daney,” Esprit vol. 83 no. 11 (November 1983) pp. 111-133. Repr.
in Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. II, pp. 7-31, here p. 16.
The Bazinian Legacy 657

mark of its formative work.” The achievement of Rossellini’s film, made two
decades before the outbreak of the apparatus theory debates, was that it
“rendered vain or transcended this opposition, for, while it indeed does not
conserve a trace of anything, this is because it is, bit by bit, the act of canceling
out the traces of its passage.” The aesthetic radicalism of Germania anno zero,
its “extreme modernity,” allowed Narboni to discern the false opposition at
work in the polemics against cinematic transparency and instead conceive
of a unified stance towards the cinema common to Cahiers throughout its
history, one based on a film’s “inscription” of the real: “What cinema have
we not ceased to defend, and against what other cinema? A cinema of true
inscription, of the cruel stamp of the letter, of the ordeal of the passage to
the act and the seizing of the word, against the implicit and the implied,
the allusion and the metaphor.”56
This text professing its defense of “a cinema of true inscription” can now
be read as something of a clarion call for the Cahiers writers to unabashedly
avow their affinities for Bazin, and indeed this cry was heeded in the fol-
lowing years. In 1983, Narboni himself arranged for Dudley Andrew’s 1978
English-language biography of Bazin to appear in a revised French edition
under his Cahiers du cinéma imprint.57 The same year, Cahiers published
an “Hommage à André Bazin” on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of
his death, which contained a moving tribute to Bazin penned by Narboni,
who related the “violent pendulum effect of time, between proximity and
distance,” upon being reminded by Truffaut that Bazin was younger than
Renoir, Rossellini and Buñuel. Evoking Proust’s ruminations on temporality,
Narboni reveals his own “pain upon realizing that so much time has passed
[since Bazin’s death], so close does he remain to us, and pain upon realizing
that more time has not passed, so greatly has the landscape changed.”58
Other Cahiers writers followed Narboni’s lead and pursued the “return
to Bazin” in a more theoretically developed direction. Here, the goal was
not simply to regurgitate his major ideas in a mechanical fashion nor to
pursue the necessary task of scholarly exegesis but to critically utilize
the underlying logic of his reflection on film in order to elaborate new,
original theories taking into account the contemporary situation of the

56 Jean Narboni, “Allemagné année zéro (R. Rossellini),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 290-291 (July-
August 1978), p. 47.
57 See Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, translated into French by Serge Grünberg (Paris: Cahiers
du cinéma, 1983). Narboni has noted the role Truffaut played as an intermediary in this venture:
“Truffaut encouraged me to look at Bazin’s texts, and he let me know about Dudley Andrew’s
book.” Interview with Jean Narboni, April 2, 2014.
58 Jean Narboni, “À André Bazin,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 347 (May 1983), p. 53.
658  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

cinema. In this context, the two authors of “L’écran du fantasme” played

a key role. Bonitzer’s ideas on the cinema, evolving over the course of an
intermittent series of theoretically inclined articles published in Cahiers
and then reproduced in the books Le Regard et la voix and Le Champ aveugle,
gave increasing prominence to Bazin’s ideas as he interrogated notions of
the shot, the screen, the visual field and the position of the spectator in the
cinema. This work will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 24.
It is Daney, however, whose direct engagement with Bazin’s legacy was
the most enduring and the most thoroughgoing, to the point that he is
now invariably seen in France as the major heir to the critical method
promulgated by Bazin. Godard notably included them both in his geneal-
ogy of French criticism in Histoire(s) du cinéma,59 while the reception of
Daney’s work in Esprit, a journal for which Bazin had written, focused on
the affinities between the two figures.60 While he had progressively moved
closer to Bazin’s thinking throughout the 1970s, it was the publication of La
Rampe in 1983 that allowed Daney to show his hand, explicitly framing his
approach to the cinema as well as the Cahiers project more generally as a
form of “inheriting” Bazin’s legacy.61 The same year, a review of Andrew’s
Bazin biography for Libération gave Daney the forum to expand on his
relationship with his critical forefather. Following on from the discussion
of death and preservation in Bazinian film theory in “L’écran du fantasme,”
Daney proceeds to explain that Bazin’s “idée fixe” was to show that “the
cinema conserved the real, and that before signifying it, before resembling
it, the cinema embalmed it. He did not have metaphors beautiful enough
nor macabre enough to say it: death-mask, mold, mummy, footprint, fossil,
mirror—but a singular mirror ‘whose silvering retains the image.’ André
Bazin was, in a way, ‘in search of the lost silvering.’”62 While taking care to
outline the importance of Bazin and using Andrew’s biography as a guide
to place him in the historical context of post-war French culture, Daney

59 For more on the “Diderot to Daney” critical tradition, see Jean-Luc Godard, The Future(s) of
Film: Three Interviews 2000/01 (Bern: Gachnang & Springer, 2001), p. 21. The parallels between
Bazin and Daney extend from their criticism to their biographies: both died from illness relatively
young, and both were subject to a certain outpouring of hagiography from their friends and
followers following their deaths. In Joubert-Laurencin’s words: “We can probably say that [Daney]
was the new Bazin, right up to the suffering body and premature death that seem, in their two
fates, to be identified with the major themes of their own theory: a theory that took on a body.”
Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil paradoxal, p. 103.
60 See Michel Mesnil, “De Bazin à Daney: itinéraires,” Esprit no. 83 (November 1983), pp. 134-135.
61 Daney, La Rampe, p. 15.
62 Serge Daney, “André Bazin,” Libération, August 19, 1983. Repr. in idem., Ciné journal vol. II,
pp. 41-46, here p. 41.
The Bazinian Legacy 659

nonetheless also closes his review with a pessimistic take on the major
differences between Bazin’s time and his own. In contrast to the political
and cultural ebullience directly after the Libération, the 1980s in Daney’s
eyes was a decade marked by reaction and despair. The theoretical tumult
of the ciné-club debates of earlier times had, for Daney, definitively become
a “thing of the past,” as cinephilic culture has been largely annihilated
by television, the media and the ideology of neoliberal capitalism. The
“constructive criticism” that Bazin practiced, patiently testing hypotheses
about the art form against the available evidence of contemporary cinema,
has equally disappeared, leaving behind a conceptually impoverished,
debased critical discourse against whose omnipotence Daney was fighting an
increasingly solitary rearguard action. Still more crucially, the nature of the
cinematic image itself has changed since Bazin’s time: “What intrigues us is
that Bazin’s vision […] is today confronted with a state of the cinema where
the image is no longer necessarily extracted from the real. The electronic
image knows no silvering.”63
From this point on, Bazin’s legacy became increasingly prominent for
Daney, reaching a high point in his posthumous works Persévérance and
L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur, where he openly and unequivocally
identified as a “Bazinian.” As Daney wrote in the notes left on his computer
at the time of his death, the legacy of Bazin’s thinking for his own views
on the cinema came in the shape of two key ideas: f irstly, the demand
to “respect a certain solidarity of beings and objects plunged in a space-
time continuum,” and secondly, the “decidedly lively belief” that there is
“something ‘behind’ the image.”64 But Daney’s discussions of his “absent
father” were increasingly colored by a recognition that, as percipient as
they were for the period when the cinema played a dominant role in image
culture, some key aspects of Bazin’s theories were being rendered void by
the technological and sociological transformations taking place in image
culture as the twentieth century drew to a close. Daney would express this
sentiment when interviewed by Toubiana for Persévérance, stating: “I am
not even sure of what this idea of impure art means in Bazin, but I know
what it means for me: the truth of cinema is recording; moving away from it
is moving away from cinema.”65 The reality of the new world of the “visual,”
as Daney termed it, which became dominant from the 1980s on, was one
where the relationship between the cinematographic image and the real

63 Ibid.
64 Daney, L’Exercice a été profitable, monsieur, pp. 84, 53.
65 Daney, Persévérance, p. 159 [p. 132].
660  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

was severed. In a supreme historical irony, Daney’s full recognition of the

validity of Bazin’s theory of ontological realism came at the same time
that, as he was one of the first to discern, the foundations of this theory
were becoming outmoded. The conditions for an “irrational belief” in the
identity of image and model were fast being eroded, and this also meant
that many of Bazin’s observations on film style and technique were in need
of overturning. The full consequences of this epochal shift will be further
explored in Chapter 26.
The same dynamic of a renewed interest in Bazin’s ideas, at the same
time as recognizing the ways in which the contemporary media landscape
has altered many of their givens, can be detected in Comolli’s more recent
film theory. As his former colleagues were “returning” to a Bazin they had
never truly left in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Comolli himself was on
a self-imposed hiatus from film theory, writing little on the subject of the
cinema as he attempted to forge a path as a filmmaker. We have already
seen that his approach to documentary cinema, which has dominated his
activity since the 1980s, had a strongly Bazinian sense for a “respect of the
real.” From the late 1980s onwards, this was also evinced in his reflections
on the cinema: Comolli’s return to film theory was equally a return to Bazin.
Although Comolli has not abandoned the historical materialist outlook of his
younger days, the Bazinian color of his more recent theories shines through,
above all in his discussion of spectatorial belief in cinematic representation,
which he dialectically intertwines with the idea of the image as lure espoused
by psychoanalytic film theory: “At bottom, it is a matter of belief. I think
the question of the belief of the spectator is absolutely crucial. If there is no
belief, there is no lure. The lure only functions if there is belief. Belief and
the lure are fundamentally linked, if not identical.”66
When faced with the forcefulness of this recognition of the value of
Bazinian f ilm theory, two potential interpretations of the thinking of
the Cahiers critics of the post-1968 era are possible. In one reading, the
“rediscovery” of Bazin, as Joubert-Laurencin puts it, was a spectacular
volte-face by his “amorous ex-despisers,” an acceptance of the wisdom of
the “father” after the concerted effort to overthrow him had failed.67 A far
more credible explanation, however, is that the Cahiers critics were always,

66 Daniel Fairfax, “‘Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am…: An Interview with Jean-Louis
Comolli (part 2),” Senses of Cinema 64 (September 2012). sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-
articles/yes-we-were-utopians-in-a-way-i-still-am-interview-with-jean-louis-comolli-part-2/
(accessed January 1, 2021).
67 Joubert-Laurencin, Le sommeil paradoxal, p. 10.
The Bazinian Legacy 661

on a fundamental level, indebted to Bazin’s thinking in their attempts to

theoretically account for the cinema’s relationship with the real and that
this profound influence manifested itself in shifting ways, reflected in
the oscillations between disavowal and identification that marked their
responses to his work. Cahiers’ fidelity to Bazin’s ontological realism was,
therefore, a dialectical one, which was both tempered and dynamized by
being brought into relation with the critical theory of Althusser, Barthes and
Lacan. In the chapters that follow, it will be the last of the aforementioned
figures—Lacan and his variant of psychoanalysis—that will be of greatest
importance as the relationship between cinema and the real in the theory
and criticism of Oudart, Baudry and Bonitzer is discussed.

Works Cited

Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, translated into French by Serge Grünberg (Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, 1983).
André Bazin, “L’Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que
le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 11-19.
Translated as “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in idem., What is Cinema?,
trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 3-12.
———, “Le cinéma et l’exploration,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma vol. I: Ontologie
et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 45-54. Translated as “Cinema and
Exploration,” in idem., What is Cinema? vol II, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), pp. 154-163.
———, “Mort tous les après-midi,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie
et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 65-70.
———, “Montage interdit,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. I: Ontologie et
langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 117-130. Translated as “Editing pro-
hibited,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal:
Caboose, 2011), pp. 73-86.
———, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson,”
in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. II: Le Cinéma et les autres arts (Paris:
Éditions du Cerf, 1959), pp. 33-53. Translated as “Diary of a Country Priest and
the Robert Bresson Style,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy
Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 139-159.
———, “Théâtre et cinéma,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. II: Le Cinéma et les
autres arts (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1959), pp. 69-118. Translated as “Theatre and
Film,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal:
Caboose, 2009), pp. 161-214
662  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

———, “Voleur de bicyclette,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. IV: Une esthétique
de la réalité: le néo-réalisme (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), pp. 45-59. Translated
as “Bicycle Thief,” in idem., What is Cinema? vol II, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 47-60.
———, “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la Libération,” in
idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. IV: Une esthétique de la réalité: le néo-réalisme
(Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), pp. 9-37. Translated as “Cinematic Realism and
the Italian School of the Liberation,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed.
Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2011), pp. 215-249.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Maud et les phagocytes (Ma nuit chez Maud),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 214 (July-August 1969), p. 59.
———, “Glorieuses bassesses (La Marquise d’O…),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 272
(December 1976), pp. 26-30.
———, Éric Rohmer (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991).
Jean-Louis Comolli, interviewed by Daniel Fairfax, “‘Yes, we were utopians; in
a way, I still am…’: An Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 1),” Senses of
Cinema no. 62 (April 2012), sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/yes-we-
were-utopians-in-a-way-i-still-am-an-interview-with-jean-louis-comolli-part-1/
(accessed January 1, 2021).
———, interviewed by Daniel Fairfax, “‘Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still
am…: An Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 2),” Senses of Cinema 64
(September 2012), sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/yes-we-were-
utopians-in-a-way-i-still-am-interview-with-jean-louis-comolli-part-2/ (accessed
January 1, 2021)..
——— and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216
(October 1969), pp. 11-15. Translated as “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” trans.
Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and
Ideology Revisited (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 251-259.
Serge Daney, interviewed by Bill Krohn, “Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977: Entretien
avec Serge Daney par Bill Krohn,” in Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde
vol. I: Les temps des Cahiers 1962-1981 (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), pp. 17-31. Translated
as T.L. French [Bill Krohn], “Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968-1977: Interview with
Serge Daney,” The Thousand Eyes no. 2 (1977), pp. 18-32.
———, La Rampe (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983).
———, interviewed by Michel Crépu, Gilles Delavaud, Michel Mesnil and Olivier
Mongin, “Passion de l’image: Des Cahiers du cinéma à Libération: Entretien avec
Serge Daney,” Esprit vol. 83 no. 11 (November 1983) pp. 111-133. Repr. in Serge
Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. II: Les Années Libé 1981-1985 (Paris:
P.O.L., 2005), pp. 7-31.
The Bazinian Legacy 663

———, “André Bazin,” Libération, August 19, 1983. Repr. in idem., Ciné journal vol.
II: 1983-1986 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 [1986]), pp. 41-46
———, “Le traveling de Kapò,” Trafic no. 4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 5-19. Serge Daney,
Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), pp. 15-39. Translated as “The Tracking Shot in
Kapò,” in idem., Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford:
Berg, 2007), pp. 17-35.
———, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993).
———, Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L., 1993). Translated as Postcards from the Cinema,
trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
Jean-Luc Godard, The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews 2000/01 (Bern: Gachnang
& Springer, 2001).
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil paradoxal (Paris: Éditions de l’œil, 2014).
Michel Mesnil, “De Bazin à Daney: itinéraires,” Esprit no. 83 (November 1983),
pp. 134-135.
Jean Narboni, “Allemagné année zéro (R. Rossellini),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 290-291
(July-August 1978), p. 47.
———, “À André Bazin,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 347 (May 1983), p. 53.
Éric Rohmer, “La somme d’André Bazin,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 91 (November 1958),
pp. 36-45.
———, interviewed by Jean-Claude Biette, Jacques Bontemps and Jean-Louis
Comolli, “L’ancien et le nouveau: Entretien avec Éric Rohmer,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 172 (November 1965), pp. 33-42, 56-59.
———, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Serge Daney and
Jean Narboni, “Nouvel entretien avec Éric Rohmer,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219
(April 1970), pp. 46-55. Translated as “New Interview with Éric Rohmer,” trans.
Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema no. 54 (April 2010), sensesofcinema.com/2010/
feature-articles/new-interview-with-eric-rohmer (accessed January 1, 2021).
———, “Notes pour la mise en scène,” L’Avant-scène du cinéma no. 173 (October 1976),
pp. 5-6.
———, Le Goût de la beauté (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2004 [1984]).
———, “La révolution Bazin: Le mystère de l’existence,” Le Monde, hors-série Le
siècle du cinéma (January 1995), p. xi.
Louis-George Schwartz, “Deconstruction avant la lettre: Jacques Derrida Before
André Bazin,” in Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds.), Opening
Bazin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 95-106.
Peter Wollen, “‘Ontology’ and ‘Materialism’ in Film,” Screen vol. 17 no. 1 (Spring
1976), pp. 7-25.
22. Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture

Abstract
This chapter focuses on the life and critical practice of Cahiers du cinéma
critic Jean-Pierre Oudart. Oudart has long been associated with the notion
of suture, which he imported into film theory in his groundbreaking 1969
text. But the success of this term in film studies has obscured a larger
body of writings produced by Oudart while at Cahiers between 1969 and
1980 and stands in stark contrast to the mystery of his personal fate. With
a background more in psychoanalysis than cinephilia, Oudart was chief
among the Cahiers critics responsible for introducing Lacanian theory to
the film journal, but his texts were also marked by a stylistic inscrutability
and idiosyncratic critical judgement that was remarked upon by readers
and his fellow critics alike, tendencies that only became more exacerbated
later in his tenure at Cahiers. With a particular interest in the work of Fritz
Lang, Robert Kramer, Stanley Kubrick and, above all, Robert Bresson, his
writings nonetheless form a fascinating corpus of film criticism.

Keywords: Jean-Pierre Oudart, Cahiers du cinéna, suture, Jacques Lacan,

Robert Bresson, Stanley Kubrick

Cinema and Suture (1)

Within the theoretical constellation produced by Cahiers in the post-1968

era, Jean-Pierre Oudart’s writings represent a point that is both central
and peripheral. Central, because his attempts to import psychoanalytic
concepts into film theory were a core component of the Cahiers project
and gave rise to the concept of suture, one of the journal’s key legacies for
film theory. Peripheral, due to the thoroughly idiosyncratic nature of his
textual output, which invariably left his colleagues torn between admiration
and bewilderment. At times, he appeared to be the most theoretically
confident of the team: a note in the “Journal de la rédaction” dated July 23,
1971 even remarked that Oudart was “currently the only one capable of

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch22
666  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

quickly producing applied theoretical texts without disrupting the rest of his
work for the journal.”1 But the conceptual opacity and stylistic abstruseness
of his writing ensured that his work would always remain somewhat apart
from that of his fellow critics. Sylvie Pierre, for instance, considered him a
“kooky oddball” (drôle de zigoto) whose texts were intriguing and baffling in
equal measure.2 While Oudart signed his name to more than 80 articles for
the journal between 1969 and 1980, he never published elsewhere, and after
1980 the silence from the critic is total. Whereas his colleagues all forged
public identities beyond their status as Cahiers critics, Oudart is singularly
unknown outside of the context of the film journal—to the extent that, apart
from a single appearance in Eisenschitz’s film on Une partie de campagne
in 1969, no photographs of Oudart or recordings of his voice exist in the
public domain. Out of all the individuals under study in this book, the case
of Jean-Pierre Oudart is by far the most mysterious. Even the determined
researcher will find little information about Oudart’s biographical details
outside of his contributions to Cahiers, and his status today is the subject
only of speculative hearsay. The contrast with the renown garnered by his
concept of suture, with which his name is now indelibly linked, could not be
more glaring. It is as if there is a strange nexus between one and the other;
as if, in like fashion to the model in Poe’s The Oval Portrait, the theoretical
creation had gained its vitality at the expense of the theorist who devised
it and finished by devouring him.
First emerging in a pair of articles for Cahiers published in April and
May 1969, Oudart’s notion of suture represents the inaugural attempt
to apply Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory to an interrogation of the basic
functioning of the cinema. The precocity of Oudart’s article is underscored
both by the fact that it predates virtually all of the other landmark texts in
“apparatus theory”—albeit by a matter of months rather than years—and
that it was only the critic’s fourth piece for Cahiers, appearing a mere three
months after his first published item of film criticism. Oudart’s suture
theory also jumpstarted a deeper concern for Lacan in Cahiers, whose
thinking become indispensable to the journal during its “Freudo-Marxist”
phase. The after-effects of Oudart’s signal text have resonated well after
this period, but with each iteration of the notion of suture, from Oudart to

1 Cited in Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma: histoire d’une revue vol. II: Cinéma,
tours détours 1959-1981 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991), p. 230.
2 Interview with Sylvie Pierre, May 26, 2014. Bonitzer likewise said of Oudart that he wrote
“articles that were fascinating and totally opaque. But fascinating all the same, for me. Perhaps
not for everyone, and not for the readers.” Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 667

Daniel Dayan, Stephen Heath, Kaja Silverman and Slavoj Žižek, a conceptual
slippage takes place and the original terms in which it was discussed have
been progressively displaced, such that Oudart’s original text has become
increasingly dispensed with, his contribution forgotten. Today, “suture” is
an indisputably influential notion in the field of film studies, having been
adopted widely and in diverse ways, to the extent that it has even acquired
a certain banality. But, as this chapter will outline, the spectacular fame
of the concept is in inverse proportion to the far more ignominious fate of
the individual who introduced it into film theory.
Suture has its origins in Lacanian theory, but it was never expounded
upon in detail by Lacan himself, appearing in an off-hand manner in his
1964 seminar when he describes the “moment of seeing” as “a suture, a
conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic,” which “is taken up again
in a dialectic, that sort of temporal progress that is called haste, thrust,
forward movement.”3 Instead, it was left to the psychoanalyst’s principal
acolyte, Jacques-Alain Miller, to flesh out the notion in his 1966 article for
the psychoanalytic journal Cahiers pour l’analyse, “Suture (éléments de la
logique du signifiant).” For Miller, the concept of suture is key to understand-
ing Lacanian theory and is “constantly present in his system.”4 In Lacan’s
conception, the logic of the signifier is a general logic concerned with the very
relation of the subject to the “chain of discourse.” This relation, the “point of
least resistance” in the signifying chain, is characterized by Miller as a form
of suture. Drawing on Gottlob Frege’s discussion of the zero in arithmetic,
he describes suture as the moment in which “you can see articulated the
structure of the subject as a ‘flickering in eclipses,’ like the movement which
opens and closes the number, and delivers up the lack in the form of the
1 in order to abolish it in the successor.”5 It is this sense of the suture—as
a permeable, frangible point of connection between the subject and the
logic of the signifier—that will be of importance for Oudart’s importation
of the concept of suture to the signifying processes at work in the cinema.
This move was far from a self-evident one: as Rodowick notes, “the silence
of Miller’s essay on the question of aesthetic uses of language is deafening.”6
The opportunity to relate the notion of suture to an artistic medium was

3 Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 107 [p. 118].

4 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (éléments de la logique du signifiant),” Cahiers pour l’analyse
no. 1 (January-April 1966), pp. 37-49, here p. 39. Translated as “Suture (elements of the logic of
the signifer),” Screen vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-1978), pp. 24-34, here p. 26.
5 Ibid., p. 49 [p. 34].
6 D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), p. 193.
668  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

nonetheless open for Oudart, and there is evidence that he had harbored
this idea before the publication of his seminal text. One month before the
appearance of “La Suture,” for instance, his review of L’Enfance nue speaks
of Pialat’s cinema as being “deliberately non-sutured, yawning open” and
as “excavating between each shot a void that the imaginary of the spectator
is never authorized to fill.”7 After this sneak preview of the term, Oudart
subsequently devoted a pair of theoretically substantial articles to the
concept of suture. The fact that “La Suture” was originally two pieces rather
than a single text is often overlooked in discussions of the concept—not
least due to the fact that its otherwise generally reliable English translation
by Kari Hanet is usually published with the two articles merged together.
Far from being complementary halves of a harmoniously integrated whole,
however, the two installments of “La Suture” in fact exhibit an uneasy
tension with one another. From one part to the next, Oudart reiterates his
argument, repeating the main points while at the same time introducing
variations in their exposition.
Following Lacan and Miller, Oudart’s considerations on suture in the
cinema center on the absorption of the subject into a signifying discourse.
For Oudart, this subject is the spectator in the movie theater watching
images on the screen, whom he dubs the “filmic subject,” in contrast with
the “filmed subject” (the on-screen character with whom the viewer may
come to identify). He opens the first installment of his article on suture by
defining it as “the closure of the cinematic énoncé in line with its relation-
ship with its subject […] which is recognized, and then put in its place as
the spectator.”8 It is the suturing function that allows the viewing subject
to “read” a succession of filmic images not as isolated, atomized spatio-
temporal units but as articulated with one other, as operating within the
same imaginary field. For Oudart, every “filmic field” (the ensemble of
objects captured in the camera’s viewfinder and subsequently projected onto
the screen) is echoed by its counterpart, an “absent field,” which, produced
by the sense of lack in the spectator when confronted with the boundaries
of the filmic image, embraces everything outside of its frame. This absent
field is a phantomic presence, a spectral double of the spectator produced
by their imaginary, which Oudart dubs l’Absent. Oudart’s term is usually

7 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Au hasard Pialat (L’Enfance nue),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 210 (March 1969),
pp. 55-56, here p. 56.
8 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “La Suture (1),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), pp. 36-39, here
p. 36. Both this text and part 2 of “La Suture” are translated as “Cinema and Suture,” trans. Kari
Hanet, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III, pp. 45-56, here p. 45.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 669

rendered in the English translation as the “Absent One,” but care should
be taken to keep away from an excessive reification of l’Absent, a trap that
some of Oudart’s exegetes fall into, or from too closely identifying l’Absent
with on-screen characters.9
The floating nature of cinematic signification allows for multiple ways
for films to utilize or relate to the suture, three of which are proposed by
Oudart. In the first and most preponderant category, which the writer labels
“subjective cinema” (evidently referring to the products of the Hollywood
studio system in the classical era), suture is present but remains “undefined
theoretically,” having only been produced by the intuitive experiments
of filmmakers who were beholden to a “confusion of the filmic subject
with the filmed subject.” In these films, shots initially tend to remain as
“autonomous cells” and are primarily sutured with one another through
extra-cinematic means, such as a linguistic énoncé (a voiceover, for instance)
or through the presence of “common signifying elements” in each shot of a
sequence. The formation of a cinematic syntagm out of the juxtaposition
of independent shots thus requires a degree of redundancy in the signified,
which results in “a substantial loss of ‘information’ and a real fissure between
the elements forming the chain of the discourse and those unarticulated,
excessive elements which end up forming a magma which paralyzes the
film by its inertia.”10
Against this dominant mode of cinematic suture, reliant on extrane-
ous mechanisms in order to create a signifying chain, Oudart posits two
potential alternatives, both of which are represented by European modernist
filmmakers. In the first possibility, typified by films of Godard such as La
Chinoise, the fissure between what Oudart tentatively calls “the ‘thing’ of
the image” and its “fragile and precious signs” is “poetically exasperated.”11
What we could thus call “films of the fissure,” however, are purely negative in
nature. In challenging and dismantling the suturing mechanisms developed
by the “subjective” cinema, they also end up repressing the properties of the
cinematic image revealed by these mechanisms and therefore dishabitu-
ate the viewer from the practice of “reading” a film as a signifying chain.
Contrasted to the work of Godard are the films of Bresson, who has no less

9 Although Bordwell is generally antipathetic to the theoretical tendency that gives rise to the
suture, he is correct to note that “the shot does not suggest a perspectival point of vision, only
an off-screen field or zone. The shot is not the record of a glance but the sign of an absence. The
Absent One is not a character, only an off-screen presence constructed by the viewer.” David
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 113.
10 Oudart, “La Suture (1),” p. 36-37 [pp. 45-46].
11 Ibid., p. 37 [p. 47].
670  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

radically “put the filmed subject back in its place as signifying object” but,
in doing so “gives more than he took away.”12 Oudart goes so far as to credit
Bresson with the “discovery” of suture, initially foreshadowed in Pickpocket
and then fully deployed in a theoretically aware fashion for the first time
in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc. In the latter film, shots are articulated with
each other purely through the suturing mechanism of the cinema, which
Bresson himself describes in uncannily Marxist terms as the “exchange
value” between two shots.13
While many later commentators have equated cinematic suture with
the shot/reverse-shot sequence in the system of continuity editing, Oudart
argues that a true shot/reverse-shot sequence, in which the camera angles
are perfectly aligned with the perspective of the on-screen characters, only
occurs rarely in the classical era of the cinema, appearing in “aberrant”
works such as Lang’s Kriemhilds Rache. In order to forestall an avowal of
the fictional character of the filmic signified, a more standard approach in
“subjective” cinema is to introduce a slight décalage or obliquity between
the point of view of the character and the position of the camera (and, by
extension, the viewpoint of the spectator). The innovation of Le Procès
de Jeanne d’Arc is that, for the first time, the camera’s obliquity is “openly
admitted and established as a system.” The combination of a radical alterity
between the spatial fields of the film (including the complete absence of
establishing shots), the syncopation produced by the slight temporal disjunc-
tions in the transitions between images, a tendency towards abstraction
precipitated by the director’s fondness for fragmented, isolated images,
and the use of excessively skewed camera angles enables the syntax of
Bresson’s film to be aligned with “the cinema’s necessary representation
of the subject’s relation to its discourse,” thereby revealing “by and for
whom the operation of suture works: the filmic subject, the spectator.” It
is at this point, concluding part one of his article on cinematic suture, that
Oudart explicitly turns to Miller’s evocation of a “flickering in eclipses”
that defines the structure of the subject, which “delivers up the lack in the
form of the 1 in order to abolish it in the successor.” For Oudart, it is the
eclipse of l’Absent as “the direct demand of the signifier to be represented
in an énoncé subjected to its order” that ensures “the suturing function of
the subject of the discourse.”14

12 Ibid., p. 36 [p. 45].

13 Ibid., p. 38 [p. 47].
14 The quotes in this paragraph are from ibid., pp. 38-39 [pp. 47-50].
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 671

Cinema and Suture (2)

At the end of his initial article, Oudart explicitly declares that the transi-
tion from the f irst to the second part of his commentary on cinematic
suture will consist of a shift away from casting light on “the truly scenic
play of the cinematic signifier” and towards an examination of its “effects
of signification.”15 In reality, however, the relationship between the two
installments of “La suture” is not so clear-cut. To a large degree, the second
part consists of a replay of the first, where the same broad argument is
cast but in different terms, using new examples and enacting a subtle but
perceptible displacement in the text’s frame of reference. It thus does not
seem intemperate to claim that there is a performative aspect to Oudart’s
article, and, more specifically, that the two sections of the text, published
in a diachronically fragmented manner (a month apart from each other,
in succeeding issues of Cahiers), function in analogous fashion to a film
sequence where two images, taken from divergent camera angles, capture
the same signified but do so in an oblique relationship with one another.
Those who have treated the two articles as seamless segments of a single
discursive act have thus operated their own suture on Oudart’s text, eliding
the différance that exists at its heart. Moreover, there is every possibility
that this was the author’s intention, thereby highlighting the nature of
the phenomenon he describes through his very act of writing. It is thus
profitable to reproduce, here, the disjunction at play in Oudart’s text and
treat the second half in relative isolation from the first, in order to register
the shifting nature of his discussion of suture.
The second text begins with a description of a brief moment from Buster
Keaton’s The General, the formal qualities of which allow it to function as
a metaphorical place-holder for the spectator’s response to the cinematic
image, unveiling the nature of image as if in slow-motion. In the shot under
question, a group of Unionist soldiers can initially be seen in a high-angle
long shot crossing a river. At this stage, however, as Oudart describes it,
the spectator “does not perceive either the framing, or the distance, or the
camera’s position” and instead takes the images to be no more than an
animated photograph. All of a sudden, Confederate troops emerge from
the bottom frame of the image, appearing inordinately larger than their
adversaries. Compared by Oudart to a Poe character who mistakenly sees a
butterfly as large as a ship, the spectator’s recognition that the soldiers are
standing on a rise overhanging the riverbank is momentarily delayed. For an

15 Ibid., p. 39 [p. 50]

672  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

instant, the viewer experiences a sense of jouissance, of “vertiginous delight,”

at the “unreal space” presented on the screen, and they feel themselves to be
“fluid, elastic and expanding.” Before long, however, the boundaries of the
image, the presence of a screen and its frame, are sensed by the spectator,
who then questions its existence. It is this questioning, Oudart argues,
that “will radically transform the spectator’s mode of participation.” In
quasi-Heideggerian terms, he outlines the transfiguration of the image
from a “being-there” (être-là) to a “being-there-for” (être-là-pour). The objects
on the screen have come to form a unified, closed, indivisible signifying
Sum, but the “haunting presence” of the absent field remains, and it is the
revelation of this absence to the spectator that inducts the film image into
the order of the signifier.16
Oudart is careful to signal, however, that the moment of spectatorial
jouissance, when the cinematic image is perceived as an inexhaustible
plenitude, does not actually take place but is a “hypothetical and purely
mythical period.”17 The vacillation of the spectator’s attitude towards the
image between the jouissance of an open field and the reading of a delimited
sign should thus not be understood as a temporal phenomenon but as taking
place on a purely logical plane, in the “always-already” time of mythic
structures (such as Lacan’s mirror-stage). Moreover, the image itself is
ineluctably unstable, ungraspable and composed of “structurally opposite
and mutually eclipsing elements.”18 The suturing of the “present field” of
the cinematic image with its absent field brought about by this vacillation
leads to cinematic discourse being “enveloped” within the Imaginary order
of Lacanian theory, and it is the production of this totalizing imaginary
field that, in the final instance, differentiates a truly cinematic mode of
signification from a mere moving image. As in part I of “La Suture,” Oudart
broaches a range of possible strategies that filmmakers have deployed when
faced with the suturing mechanism embedded in the articulation of shots:
either the cinematic signification produced by the suture can manifest itself
as a “frozen letter” or it can become a “terroristic and subversive speech” by
directly penetrating the spectator. Again, a distinction between Bresson’s
Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc and Au hasard, Balthazar is made by Oudart,
leading him to dub Bresson “without doubt the most ambiguous figure in

16 The quotes in this paragraph are from Jean-Pierre Oudart, “La Suture (2),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 50-55, here p. 50 [p. 50-51].
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 51 [p. 52].
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 673

modern cinema.”19 For the most part, Au hasard, Balthazar is marked by a

“continually noticeable decomposition of syntagmas” which prevents the
spectator’s imaginary from suturing the film’s discourse.20 By contrast,
Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc remains the model of a cinematic practice that
allows a deliberately syncopated discursive structure to be sutured, and
the infinite modulation of the camera angles the film deploys (from frontal
images of the on-screen characters to highly oblique angles) gestures towards
the possibility of a formally emancipated cinema, one “free of subjective
illusion.” This is the utopian element of Oudart’s text, which posits that
in such a putative cinema—nascent elements of which the writer also
detects in a shot/reverse-shot sequence from Rouch’s La Chasse au lion à
l’arc showing a group of hunters who, having pursued a lioness, now stand
in prayer before the dying beast—suture would take place purely through
the exchange of visual fields on the level of the signifier rather than the
signified. Outside of exceptional cases, such as the work of Hitchcock, Lang,
Mizoguchi and Bresson, the cinema has hitherto predominantly existed
as a “privileged means of embodying a fiction.”21 In the cinema Oudart
dreams of, by contrast, filmic speech would be based first and foremost
on the formal properties of the images themselves. In Lacanian terms,
such a cinema would witness the emergence of the Symbolic order and its
detachment from any anchoring in the Imaginary.
Oudart’s recourse to Lacan’s notions of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, at
this point, suggests the possibility of an ontological reading of the suturing
mechanism that most, if not all, of the later commentators on the concept of
suture have studiously avoided. For Lacan, as was noted earlier, an encounter
with the order of the Real was only possible in those fleeting moments
when the Symbolic slips away from the Imaginary, as in dreams, jokes or
parapraxes. As a weak link in the chain of discourse, suture is thus also a
potential site for an encounter with the Real. The threads that bind images
together in the imagination of the spectator, encompassing them in the
signifying chain, are also the sites where the Imaginary order breaks down,
allowing flickering chinks of the Real to shine through. Far from being, as the
received understanding of suture in later “apparatus theory” would have it,
an elaboration of the innately illusionistic nature of the cinematic dispositif,
Oudart’s notion of suture is implicitly a theory of cinematic ontology, albeit
one that, rooted in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, can only conceive of

19 Ibid., p. 52 [p. 53].

20 Ibid., p. 53 [p. 53].
21 Ibid., p. 54 [p. 55].
674  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the Real as a traumatic encounter that is impossible to render into com-

municative language. Indeed, this aspect of his argument is made explicit
by Oudart at the conclusion of his text when he speaks of the eroticism at
the center of the films of Bresson and Lang. This eroticism, one of the most
tangible sites of an encounter with the real, is produced to a large degree by
their conscious articulation of the limits of the cinema’s signifying power.
In the “subjective” cinema, the erotic had existed merely on the level of the
signified. In the suturing mechanisms developed by Bresson and Lang, by
contrast, it passes to the level of the signifier and thus incorporates the
spectators themselves within the field of the erotic. As Oudart puts it, the
recognition that “the cinema, in speaking itself, speaks of eroticism, and is
the privileged space where eroticism can always be signified” is a discovery
that “engages the whole cinema.”22

Suture after Oudart

In the above outline of Oudart’s account of suture in the cinema, it must be

admitted that a concern for intelligibility has sometimes entailed a smooth-
ing over of the contradictions of Oudart’s text, an extrapolation from the
gaps in his argument and an elision of the points at which the terms of his
arguments shift. “La suture” remains an inescapably enigmatic text whose
paradoxes and mysteries cannot, in the end, be eliminated or explained
away. Even an advocate of the concept like Stephen Heath concedes that
there is “a certain slide in the terms of the article” and a “wavering mesh
of formulations.”23 Many of the claims contained within are contestable if
not impossibly abstruse, and the value judgements made on specific films
are, to say the least, peculiar. The privileged position, for instance, given
to Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc—which has otherwise gone down as a minor
entry in Bresson’s œuvre and had received a rather more muted response
from Cahiers when Comolli had initially reviewed the film24—is difficult
to credit, while the stark opposition registered between this film and Au
hasard, Balthasar is a judgement unique to Oudart. These are only the
most overt signs that Oudart’s text was too idiosyncratic, too conceptually
recondite for his notion of suture to truly be useful to others. And yet, once

22 Ibid., p. 55 [p. 56].

23 Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture,” Screen vol. 18 no. 4 (Winter 1977-1978), pp. 48-76, here
pp. 59, 61.
24 Jean-Louis Comolli, “L’autre ailleurs (Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 143
(May 1963), pp. 42-49.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 675

freed from the clutches of the writer who first gave voice to it, the concept
at the core of his article would embark on a life of its own. The success
of the notion, however, led to a certain betrayal of Oudart’s thinking; its
dissemination—to the point where it has become more widespread than
any other single concept produced by Cahiers in the post-1968 era—has
come at the expense of a taming of the moments of theoretical wildness in
Oudart’s original article.
The key text responsible both for the popularity of suture within film
studies and its transformation into a serviceable theoretical object at a
remove from Oudart’s original exposition is Daniel Dayan’s article “The
Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema.” Even today, Dayan’s piece—more straight-
forward, more accessible, and less rhetorically daunting than Oudart’s—is
invariably used as an introduction to the notion of suture. Dayan presents
his text as an introductory gloss to Oudart’s writings on suture, but this
is fundamentally misleading. In fact, the French-Israeli scholar operates a
major transformation of Oudart’s original argument, one which, in the end,
reduces it to a Manichaean opposition between “sutured” and “non-sutured”
cinema that Oudart is generally careful to avoid. There is a significant
theoretical value to Dayan’s text in its own right, but when reading him,
we should not assimilate his views to those of Oudart. Rather, we should
read Dayan contra Oudart, taking care to pinpoint those moments when
his text departs from or distorts the argument of its predecessor.
The first such deviation is an excessive emphasis on the role of point-of-
view in classical cinema and, concomitantly, the importance of the shot/
reverse-shot procedure in the functioning of suture. Although Dayan is
careful to stress the necessity, in narrative cinema, of obliquity between
the camera angle and the perspective of the diegetic characters in the
transformation of a vision of film into a reading of its discourse, he overplays
the degree to which narrative film can be reduced to a series of point-of-view
shots. While accepting that “there are also moments when the image does
not represent anyone’s point of view,” Dayan insists that “in the classical
narrative cinema, these are relatively exceptional” and “soon enough, the
image is reasserted as somebody’s point of view.”25 The oblique distance
between the character’s viewpoint and the camera angle adopted in classical
filming methods is thus akin to the novel’s use of third-person prose for the
central character’s experiences—the intended perspective to be adopted
by the reader/viewer is still abundantly clear. Similarly, whereas Oudart

25 Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn
1974), pp. 22-31, here p. 29.
676  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

uses the shot/reverse-shot sequence in a broadly metaphorical sense, Dayan

makes a more straightforward equation between the editing technique and
the process of spectatorial immersion in the visual field of the film. Despite
a footnote cautioning that “shot/reverse-shot is itself merely one figure in
the system(s) of classical cinema,”26 it comes to play an outsized role in his
understanding of normative editing practices such as those observed by
Hollywood in the studio era. As such, the vacillation between jouissance
and reading observed by Oudart is ascribed to a more literally chronological
process in Dayan, with the first image in a shot/reverse-shot sequence giving
rise to spectatorial pleasure, only for shot two to produce a suture effect.
A further distinction between Dayan’s and Oudart’s presentations of
suture is in the ideological value given respectively to sutured and non-
sutured modes of cinematic enunciation. For Dayan, suture is explicitly
identified with the narrative closure of classical cinema. It is thus essentially
illusionistic and laden with the ideology of bourgeois representation. While
he notes that there are a multiplicity of other signifying systems in the
cinema besides that based on the suturing mechanism, Dayan only gives
one example: the f ilms of the Groupe Dziga Vertov, and more particu-
larly, Vent d’est. In this radically non-sutured film, the shot itself tends to
constitute a complete statement, the spectator is made to be perpetually
aware of the existence of the “absent-one,” and the reading of the shot is no
longer “suspended” but “contemporary” to the shot itself; it is “immediate,
its temporality is the present.”27 In contrast to Dayan’s binary model of
the cinema, Oudart’s article does not tar suture per se with the brush of
bourgeois ideology but merely its untheorized deployment by conventional
commercial cinema.28 Dayan may well attack the classical cinema for being
a “ventriloquist of ideology,” but in “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema”
he becomes a ventriloquist of Oudart, claiming to speak on behalf of the
Cahiers writer but instead twisting the argument of the original text in order
to present a simplified account of suture that can more easily be inserted
into a dualistic vision of the cinema, bifurcating the medium into bourgeois
and revolutionary modes of film practice. In importing the concept of suture
into English-language academia, Dayan is principally responsible for its
wider fame, but this dissemination came at the cost of straitjacketing the

26 Ibid., p. 31.
27 Ibid.
28 It is notable that, whereas Oudart places the greatest value on the theoretically aware
usage of the suturing mechanism in films such as Le Procès de Jeanne d’arc, Dayan refrains from
discussing Bresson’s films entirely.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 677

elusive mercuriality of Oudart’s original thinking. In the wake of Dayan’s

article, therefore, the concept of suture substantially gained a life of its
own. Rarely referred to by Oudart himself in his own later texts, it migrated
across linguistic and institutional boundaries and was central to many of
the key debates in film studies in the 1970s and beyond.
“The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema” quickly incited rebuttals from those
within the field such as William Rothman and Barry Salt, who, hostile to a
psychoanalytic approach to cinema, espoused a more pragmatic analysis of
film form. Here, however, Dayan was the main polemical target, and there
is little evidence that either was directly familiar with Oudart’s (then yet to
be translated) text.29 To counteract such admonitions, the editors of Screen
came to the defense of the notion of suture. A 1977 dossier dedicated to the
topic included English translations of Miller’s and Oudart’s articles, providing
readers of English with access to previously unavailable material. At the same
time, a series of articles penned by Stephen Heath—including “Narrative
Space,” “Anata mo” and “Notes on Suture”—dealt at length with the concept.
By a large margin, Heath’s remarks on suture represent the most conceptually
fertile application of Oudart’s thinking. His account of suture gives, for the
first time, a retrospective overview of the evolution of the idea, tracing the
process of conceptual displacement that characterized the passage from
Miller to Dayan via Oudart and the “muddled state of the concept” that
resulted. In contrast to Miller’s strictly descriptive understanding of the
functioning of suture within the logic of the signifier, Heath detects the
germs of an evaluative stance towards suture in Oudart, who speaks of the
phenomenon in terms of “tragedy” and “loss”—a trait that is accentuated
in Dayan with his more straightforward identification between suture and
bourgeois ideology. He writes: “In Miller and some Oudart, suture is descrip-
tive of the very possibility of signification; in some Oudart and most Dayan,
suture is an ideological operation, which the ‘privileged example’ of shot/
reverse-shot demonstrates and resumes.”30 Heath, indeed, seeks to distance
suture from a too close association with shot/reverse-shot, which he sees as
an unfortunate side-effect of Dayan’s article, and instead reaffirms its role
in subject formation and the production of cinematic enunciation. Heath’s
chosen counter-model to classical narrative cinema, Chantal Akerman’s
News from Home, may share with Dayan’s account of Vent d’est a status as a

29 See William Rothman, “Against ‘The System of the Suture,’” Film Quarterly vol. 29, no. 1
(Autumn 1975), pp. 45-50; and Barry Salt, “Film Style and Technology in the Forties,” Film Quarterly
vol. 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1977), pp. 46-57.
30 Heath, “Notes on Suture,” here p. 62.
678  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

work of political modernist cinema, but the Screen writer’s defense of the
film hews more closely to Oudart’s outlook. What distinguishes News from
Home, in Heath’s understanding, is “not that the film did not suture but that
it did not suture in the way of the system, that it posed differently—indeed
posed the problem of—the functioning of suture.”31
At the same time, the growth of a feminist strand of film studies derived
from the Screen theory of the 1970s saw suture play a significant role in the
early writings of many of the proponents of this tendency. Laura Mulvey’s
account of the “male gaze” in classical narrative cinema, although it does
not make reference to Oudart by name, evinces many similarities with his
notion of suture.32 This affinity is recognized by Kaja Silverman in her 1983
book The Subject of Semiotics, chapter 5 of which focuses on the concept of
suture. Mulvey’s argument, Silverman writes:

bears a striking resemblance to the suture theory. Both posit a cinematic

adventure in which plenitude is fractured by difference and lack, only
to be sealed over once again. For the theoreticians of suture, the salvage
activity is carried out by means of the movement from one shot to the
next. For Mulvey, as for the many feminist film theoreticians who have
worked along similar lines, the lack which must be both dramatized and
contained finds its locus in the female body.33

Silverman seeks counter-models to suture not in the politically radical work

of Godard or Akerman but in certain Hollywood films, most notably Psycho
by Hitchcock. For Silverman, Psycho “deliberately exposes the negations
upon which filmic plenitude is predicated” and “unabashedly foregrounds
the voyeuristic dimensions of the cinematic experience, making constant
references to the speaking subject, and forcing the viewer into oblique
and uncomfortable positions vis-à-vis both the cinematic apparatuses
and the spectacle which they produce.”34 In weaving a critical tapestry
from psychoanalytic, semiotic and feminist concepts, the formal analysis
Silverman produces of this film stands as one of the most assured deploy-
ments of suture theory.

31 Ibid., p. 69.
32 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen vol. 16 no. 3 (Autumn
1975), pp. 6-18.
33 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 222-223.
34 Ibid., p. 206.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 679

In the following years, the notion of suture was widely disseminated

throughout academia, spreading from film studies to other fields in the hu-
manities such as literary theory and art history, but its organic development
as a theoretical idea essentially halted with Silverman, as psychoanalytic film
theory in general came to be sidelined in this era. In 2001’s The Fright of Real
Tears, Slavoj Žižek could even speak of “the case of the missing Lacanians,”
claiming that, with the exception of Joan Copjec and a handful of fellow
Slovenians, he knew of “no cinema theorist who effectively accepts Lacan as
his or her ultimate background.”35 In defending the honor of psychoanalytic
film theory, Žižek also revives the concept of suture, most notably by relating
it to the “function of the interface,” which arises “when the exchange of
subjective and objective shots fails to produce the suturing effect.”36 The
paradigmatic example of this phenomenon is the electoral rally scene in
Citizen Kane, when Welles is accompanied by his own image on a gigantic
poster hanging behind his campaign stump: the reality of the event, here,
is guaranteed by its own reduplicated image, and the “interface-screen
field” thus emerges as “the direct stand-in for the ‘absent one’” of suture
theory.37 The effervescence of Žižek’s writing has contributed more than a
little to the persistence, up to the present day, of scholarly interest in suture
theory,38 but this is not matched by interest in Oudart himself, whose fate
has gone largely neglected by those who have reaped harvests from the
theoretical terrain he first ploughed. It is through a return to his broader
set of writings, however, that we can gain both a deeper understanding of
the critic and give contextual “flesh” to the concept with which his name
has been enduringly linked.

Theories of Representation

The contrast between the fame of the concept of suture initiated by Oudart,
now able to be name-checked by any first-year film studies student, and the
near-total anonymity of Oudart the individual could not be more glaring.
While the suture debates were raging without any input from the concept’s
progenitor, Oudart himself continued to produce critical and theoretical
work for Cahiers over the course of more than a decade. These articles have

35 Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001), p. 2.

36 Ibid., p. 39.
37 Ibid., p. 52.
38 See, for instance, Seung-hoon Jeong, Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media
(London: Routledge, 2013); and Sulgi Lie, Die Außenseite des Films: Zur politischen Filmästhetik
(Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012).
680  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

received nothing like the same level of attention that his suture text has.
And yet the corpus of texts written by Oudart is particularly stimulating,
his writing both rigorous and erratic, illuminating and opaque, attesting
both to his precocious interest in contemporary theorists such as Lacan and
Schefer and to his capricious critical judgements on contemporary films.
Moreover, it is a serial body of work, with each new text building on its
predecessors, producing both continuities and discontinuities with them.
In exploring, in diverse ways, the relationship between psychoanalytic
theories of subjectivity and the techniques of representation adopted by
cinema and other visual mediums, it is a set of writings that unquestionably
merits our attention.
Oudart’s contribution to “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” a collaborative text
co-written with Daney, follows on from the questions raised in “La suture.”
Both his and Daney’s sections focus on the “ideology of the visible” in the
cinema, the nexus in the Western philosophical tradition between vision
and belief, pleasure and meaning. In the case of the three segments penned
by Oudart—titled “Phantasme,” “Symptôme” and “Scènes”—the question of
the cinema’s relation with the Real, left at the level of a logical implication
in “La suture,” is explicitly tackled. Here, the starting point for Oudart is the
recognition of the collapse of a representational system—classical narrative
cinema—that had been both perfected and subverted by the “old masters”
of Hollywood’s studio era. This cinema was undeniably a popular art, but
by the early 1960s it had “exhausted all its fantasies and all the resources of
the imaginary hoard it had inherited from the nineteenth century.” It had
been able to speak about the world but only “between the lines” and for this
reason was first and foremost a cinema of paranoia and neurosis, which
originated, Oudart argues, in a “neurotic sublimation” of its aesthetic, erotic
and political taboos. Thus, the classical cinema had a double character:
it was both “an object dedicated to transmitting ideology” and a cultural
artefact that “best pointed up its symptomatic fact,” and it was thus the most
compromised of all the modes of representation in successfully occluding
its status as a vehicle of ideology.39
This dual nature of the major works of classical narrative cinema is
subtended by the paradoxical nature of the cinematographic image: it is both
a visual object whose codes are modeled on the principles of verisimilitude
in post-Renaissance painting and a fictional form, with narrative structures
drawn from literary traditions. Thus, the spectator is irrevocably torn be-
tween experiencing the cinema as an “analogical representation,” founded

39 Daney/Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” p. 44 [p. 124].

Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 681

in the continuity of the projection, and as a mode of writing, or écriture,

based on the discontinuity of montage. In order to occlude the aporetic
nature of spectatorial experience, the cinema must invent a “prodigious
apparatus”—the suturing mechanism. While this echoes the argument of
Oudart’s earlier text on suture, “Travail, lecture, jouissance” introduces a
new element: the phantasmal status of the figure of the director himself
within the representative system. The director is granted the status of a
“Master of the representation which society has always made for itself of
the relation between the real and the representation (its imaginary),” and
a link is thereby established between the “absolute mastery” of the director
and the “limitless jouissance” enjoyed by the spectator. 40
It is here that Oudart turns more specifically to the work of Hitchcock
and Lang. Far from being a cinema of transparency, the films of these two
auteurs have held a ceaseless discourse on the question of the sign, which
is not simply a visual reproduction of the profilmic object but the “signifier
of something invisible, whose unmasking is delayed.” Moreover, because
the cinema is produced within a representational system founded on the
ideological equation between the real and the visible, this aberrant strand
of Hollywood filmmaking is founded on “the most radical misrecognition”
of “any relation between the real (the concrete reality) and the imaginary
(the ‘world’ of representation, the concrete imaginary).”41 The aesthetic
force of the cinema of Hitchcock and Lang comes from its anchoring in
an “obsessional discourse,” which was not present at the level of theme or
content but inscribed into the very formal practices of the films they made,
a phenomenon particularly noticeable in late films such as Moonfleet or
Marnie. The result is a breakdown in both the notion of filmic transparence
and the system of écriture imposed in Hollywood (that is, continuity edit-
ing). In its place, modern cinema haplessly flounders between a poetics of
suspicion and the “deceptive representation” of advertising imagery. Having
lost, under the weight of its contradictory nature, any reference to the real,
the image has become a pure sign, which “filmmakers no longer dare use
except by designating it as belonging to an ‘other,’ to the cinema (culture,
the common good), or to the enemy (the industry, bourgeois ideology).”
Thus, Oudart concludes his text on a dispiriting note that goes against
the grain of the optimism his colleagues held for formally radical cinema.
Films such as Méditerranée pose as revolutionary, but they end up reducing
“the practice of a revolutionary écriture to the internal deconstruction of

40 Ibid., p. 45 [p. 126].

41 Ibid., p. 48 [p. 131].
682  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

a myth,” and the resulting “polysemic liberation” is merely a dead end that
produces nothing but “suicidal specular reflection.”42 If the revolutionary
potential of such modernist cinema should indeed prove to be possible, it
will come not in the form of deconstructionist écriture but in a symptomatic
return of what the “obsessional cinema” of Lang and Hitchcock had sought
to repress: the scene of the political.
While both “La suture” and “Travail, lecture, jouissance” were primar-
ily concerned with the cinema, other texts by Oudart during this period
offered a theoretical interrogation of representation more broadly and
of the relationship between cinema and other figurative mediums, most
notably post-Renaissance European painting. It was primarily the system
of monocular perspective developed in Renaissance Italy that was the
main prism through which Oudart and his Cahiers colleagues explored the
influence of painting on the representational system that has dominated
the cinema since the Lumières. In this area of theoretical investigation,
the work of theorists such as Pierre Francastel (Peinture et société) and
Jean Louis Schefer (Scénographie d’un tableau). on the function played by
quattrocento art in the constitution of the modern bourgeois subject was
of supreme importance and was relayed to Cahiers via Tel Quel and short-
lived journals such as VH 101 and Peinture, Cahiers théoriques. 43 In Oudart’s
writings, this work was combined with Lacanian theory, a synthesis that
was most effectively crystallized in the series “Notes pour une théorie de
la représentation,” left unfinished after the publication of two installments
in mid-1971. Here the inscription of the subject into the scenic structure of
a visual object is explicitly linked to the notion of interpellation advanced
by Althusser. Oudart characterizes the present-day film spectator as being
prone to a specific form of interpellation in which the auteur-director plays
the role of a phantasmal subject with whom the viewer is led to identify. 44
This specific transformation of cinematic écriture can be witnessed in
European modernist cinema and forms the prism through which Oudart
discussed the work of Visconti and Bresson in subsequent articles. Here,
by contrast, he takes a longer view of the history of visual representation,
outlining the persistence of ideological effects across diverse figurative
systems. In attempting to do this, Oudart refutes in advance the later attacks

42 Ibid., p. 50 [pp. 134-135].

43 See Pierre Francastel, Peinture et société (Paris: Seuil, 1965); and Jean Louis Schefer, Scénog-
raphie d’un tableau (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
44 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Notes pour une théorie de la représentation [1],” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 229 (May-June 1971), pp. 43-45, here p. 43. Translated as “Notes for a Theory of Representation,”
trans. Annwyl Williams, in Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III, pp. 203-212, here p. 203.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 683

on “apparatus theory” for presenting bourgeois ideology as a monolithic

entity bereft of historical determination; here, in fact, he speaks of “successive
representational systems between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth
century.”45 Key, for the Cahiers critic, is the passage from the theological,
feudal model of representation in the medieval era, typified by the paint-
ings of Giotto, and the secular, bourgeois schema presented in Velázquez’s
work, a product of the dawn of modern capitalism. At stake here is the
class-determined ideological status of painting, which shifts from a strictly
hierarchical mise en scène in the Middle Ages, addressed to an all-powerful
God or Sovereign and structured around a symbolic debt owed by the Son to
the Father, towards a visual system founded on the “egalitarian ideology of
the bourgeoisie,” which represses “the discourse on the debt of the producer
to the prince or divinity” and leaves only the controlling eye of the painter
as the figure of the Master, thereby foreclosing the social and theological
origins of bourgeois realist painting in medieval figurative systems.46 With
its “double play of signifiers,” which both preserves and subverts the central
position of the king within the visual field, Las Meninas represents a key
moment in this historically determined dialectical leap in the dominant
mode of representation and is a potent augury of the figurative system that
would determine film production in the twentieth century.

The Hors-champ of the Auteur: Oudart on Bresson

Oudart had intended to pursue the line of investigation opened in “Notes

pour une théorie de la représentation” further, but it is at this point that his
text is cut short, and in his subsequent writings a historical discussion of
pre-cinematic representational systems would be largely secondary to the
task of critically responding to contemporary films. As was suggested by the
Olympian status of Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc in “La suture,” Robert Bresson
was by far the most important filmmaker for Oudart, whose interest in the
author of Notes sur le cinématographe endured throughout the critic’s time at
Cahiers. From his 1969 review of Une femme douce to his 1977 response to Le
Diable probablement, “Modernité de Robert Bresson,” Oudart accompanied
each of the filmmaker’s releases with probing critical responses. No doubt

45 Ibid. [p. 204].

46 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Notes pour une théorie de la représentation [2],” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 230 (July 1971), pp. 43-45, here p. 45. Translated as “Notes for a Theory of Representation,”
p. 211.
684  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

it was the enigmatic status of Bresson’s unique approach to the cinema—at

once classical and modernist, contemporary and archaic, traditional and
radical, spiritualist in content and materialist in form—that appealed to a
critic whose own thinking similarly refused such neat categorizations. At
any rate, Oudart’s articles on Bresson represent some of his most stimulating
writing on the cinema and can now be seen as a coherent series marking
the repeated encounter between a critic and a filmmaker’s work.
After first responding to Une femme douce in the 1969 article “Bresson
et la vérite,” in which he argued that Bresson is the only filmmaker to have
interrogated the ideological nature of “the Truth” first broached by Van Gogh
and Gauguin in painting, 47 Oudart presents the film, in the 1971 piece “Un
discours en défaut,” within the context of a broader tendency in modern
European cinema that has incommunicability and the impossibility of
forming communities at its thematic and formal core. For Oudart, this wave
of films represents the status of the contemporary (European) spectator,
who is “in a position of ideological (not political) rupture in relation to
bourgeois institutions, practices and ethics.” Although these films do refer
to contemporary social and political realities, they end up producing a
discourse that the spectator receives merely as a “fantasy of rupture,” which
is produced in the “violent, irreducible antagonism” between a lone outsider
figure and the other characters. As opposed to the narrative resolution of
classical Hollywood, these films see no progression in the relations between
characters and instead consist of “a repetitive series of equivalent scenes
at the conclusion of which the child is still not integrated.”48 As such, they
are explicitly made in order to produce an effect of trauma in the spectator,
primarily through the lack of inscription of the situations depicted in a
discourse that would repress the social contradictions they pose.
Having been one of the first of the post-war filmmakers to openly avow
his practice as a rupture with Hollywood, Bresson’s f ilming technique
presents a possible scenographic model for this cinematic tendency. Films of
his such as Mouchette and Une femme douce center on a solitary individual
who “rejects communication, an economic relation, or a sexual relation,
in the name of a categorical refusal to be defined in terms of social status
by the other characters, or to be transformed into an object of desire.”49
Correspondingly, the formal representation of these characters is typified

47 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Bresson et la vérité (Une femme douce),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216
(October 1969), pp. 53-56.
48 The above quotes are from Oudart, “Un discours en défaut,” pp. 4-5 [pp. 276, 280].
49 Ibid., p. 8 [pp. 280-281].
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 685

by the use of fragmented frames, with multiple characters barred from oc-
cupying the same shot, and the privileged figure at the center of the scenario
is designated as the object of the gaze of another figure, thereby connoting
them as an object of desire against which status they resist. Bressonian mise
en scène, however, has the effect of obscuring the real references in which the
fiction is placed (erotic desire and economic exchange, specifically) in favor
of an ideological proposition concerning the irreducibility of the protagonist
to the determinations of their social or sexual situation. Thus, while the
ideological goal of Bresson’s films differs from that of Hollywood, they are
marked by the same effects of transparency (in their formal structure)
and transitivity (in their discourse) as their North American counterparts.
This stance towards Bresson—showing, in equal measure, fascination
towards their formal practice and suspicion about their ideological ef-
fects—is also evident in “Le hors-champ de l’Auteur,” a 1972 response to
Quatre nuits d’un rêveur. For Oudart, Bresson’s 1972 film continues and
accentuates the hystericized eroticism that has characterized the rest
of his œuvre. As with “La suture,” Oudart highlights a turning point in
Bresson’s work with Au hasard Balthazar: from this point on, the ideological
writing effects that had marked Bresson’s films are progressively effaced,
such that by the time of Quatre nuits d’un rêveur they have completely
disappeared. The fictional system of Bresson’s latest film retains the triangle
of petty-bourgeois erotic intrigues that operates in so much of classical
narrative cinema and forecloses any inscription of the film into a broader
economic or sexual context. Although it would appear to have an anchoring
in contemporary politics, with its depiction of disaffected youth in a Paris
marked by the aftermath of the 1968 uprising, this belated reference to
social practice is “the last recourse of idealist cinema, its final attempt to
give itself the semblance of a political position.” Since Bresson’s work no
longer finds itself on the frontline of ideological struggle, he responds by
giving a “live” relay of a “social practice that is deemed to actively reflect
the contradictions of the filmmaker’s real milieu” (namely, the intellectual
haute-bourgeoisie) but which in fact radically censors the real economic
nature of class society. In addition to this censorship, the true hors-champ
repressed by the film is the figure of the Auteur himself, and in particular
the sadistic relationship between the filmmaker and his actresses, which
is displaced onto the relations between the characters of the film. This
relationship “overdetermines” Bresson’s narration and is “invariably inscribed
in terms of the hysterical intrigue, in which a young girl is divided by the
fact that her sexual desire and her need for love are not addressed to the
same man.” The figure who receives the heroine’s non-erotic love is, in
686  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Oudart’s analysis, presented as psychotic and castrated by the disavowal

of the sadistic relationship between Bresson and his actresses. Owing to
the economic and sexual foreclosure of this character, the Sadian fantasy
of Quatre nuits d’un rêveur thus represents an “extreme point of regression
for the Bressonian ideological inscription.”50
Two articles published by Oudart later in the 1970s also responded
to new releases by Bresson. A 1975 text compared Lancelot du lac with
Herzog’s Aguirre der Zorn Gottes, for their common use of the medieval era
to serve as a referent for twentieth-century fascism. Here Oudart combines
his traditional psychoanalytic approach with Deleuze’s concept of the state
apparatus as a “desiring machine.” Although Lancelot du lac fascinates with
its lure of revealing the “intimate ‘truth’ of the fascist pleasure machine
[machine à jouir],” it is nonetheless marred by Bresson’s blithe je-m’en-
foutisme and right-wing dandyism, which ends up bringing him close to
the “retro” aesthetic of Cavani and Malle, whose nihilistic ideology was
decried by Cahiers at the time.51 1977’s “Modernité de Robert Bresson,”
meanwhile, compared Le Diable probablement to Claude Goretta’s La
Dentellière for their common obsession with an “adorable body.” Whereas
in Goretta’s f ilm, the physique of Isabelle Huppert, playing a hapless,
innocent working-class girl, is a “photogenic incarnation” of the Platonic
idea of the good, Bresson’s film is emblematized by a bourgeois body fated
to evil through its own sense of self-certainty. The modernity of Bresson
comes from the fact that, rather than treating evil as the antinomy of good,
Le Diable probablement twists such abstract ideas into a “tourniquet of
non-sense,” and as a consequence Oudart relates the “Bressonian body” to
Barthes’ notion of the “third meaning.” The image of the body, in Bresson,
is an “impossible semantic object,” which undoes language, suspends
meaning, subverts value systems and even effaces the distinction between
being and non-being. In an assertion that could apply to the role that all of
Bresson’s films have had in the development of Oudart’s film theory, the
Cahiers critic thus maintains that Le Diable probablement is “a lesson of

50 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Le hors-champ de l’Auteur: l’idéologie moderniste dans quelques

f ilms récents,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 236-237 (March-April 1972), pp. 86-89, here pp. 87-88.
Translated as “The Absent Field of the Author,” in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship: A
Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 261-270, here pp. 265-266.
51 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Un pouvoir qui ne pense, ne calcule, ni ne juge? (Aguirre, Lancelot),”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 258-259 (July-August 1975), pp. 36-41, here p. 38. For more on the retro
mode, see Chapter 11.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 687

écriture that echoes far and wide: do not adore images, do not appropriate
the images of others to yourself, do not encage these vagabond angels.”52

The Unknown

While Oudart’s writings on the cinema frequently broached questions of

politics and ideology, they tended to do so only in a highly abstract sense.
Concrete, day-to-day militant politics was remote from Oudart’s field of
concerns. As a result, after his theoretical activity reached a high point in the
years 1970-1971, publishing a series of influential articles and participating in
the group analyses of Young Mr. Lincoln, La vie est à nous, Morocco and New
Babylon, the years 1972-1973 witnessed a rarefaction in Oudart’s published
output. During the Front culturel project, he refrained from playing a central
role in organizational duties or the task of drafting its platforms and other
communiqués.53 Once Daney and Toubiana had pulled the journal back
from the abyss to which its Maoist orientation had led it, however, Oudart
returned to regularly writing for Cahiers. His critical texts of the latter half
of the 1970s nonetheless attest to a distinct shift from earlier in the decade.
While Lacanian psychoanalysis remains the dominant prism through which
he reads films, Oudart’s writing style becomes less conceptually abstract
and more lyrically expressive in nature.54 Moreover, there is also a change
in the filmmakers that find favor in Oudart’s eyes: Godard and Straub/
Huillet are seen in an increasingly negative light, while the critic takes a
vivid interest in the works of Kubrick, Kramer and Syberberg. The rejection
of some of Cahiers’ totemic directors would come at a price, however. As the
decade came to a close, Oudart found himself increasingly marginalized
within the journal, a lone voice at odds with the critical consensus that
otherwise prevailed.55

52 The above quotes are from Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Modernité de Robert Bresson,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 279-280 (August-September 1977), pp. 27-30, here p. 30.
53 Between April 1972 and December 1974, he only published one article, a review of Loach’s
Family Life co-written with Daney for the February-March 1973 issue. See Serge Daney and
Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Sur Family Life (de Kenneth Loach),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 244 (February-
March 1973), pp. 44-48. This article is discussed in Chapter 9.
54 Indeed, on two occasions, Cahiers published poems written by Oudart. See Jean-Pierre
Oudart, “Milestones (poème),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 262-263 (January 1976), p. 99; and Jean-Pierre
Oudart, “Mai 76,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 266-267 (May 1976), p. 100.
55 Toubiana noted that, during this period, “with Oudart it was more complicated. He was
so ‘present-absent.’ He only functioned with objects unique to himself.” Interview with Serge
Toubiana, April 29, 2014.
688  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

In the incendiary article “À propos d’Orange mécanique, Kubrick, Kramer

et quelques autres,” the differences between Oudart and his colleagues came
out in the open in spectacular fashion. While Robert Kramer’s work had won
general approbation in the journal, Kubrick was far from being a Cahiers
director.56 With Barry Lyndon, however, Oudart became enamored of the
American filmmaker, enthusing of Kubrick’s Thackeray adaptation that it
is marked by “an excess of heterogeneity in its form,” with a hyperrealism
that produces a “coefficient of (ethnographic) estrangement.”57 Similar
considerations governed Oudart’s response to A Clockwork Orange, which he
re-watched several years after its initial release. The critic was relieved not
to encounter, as he had feared, “a grand mythological parade of violence” but
instead found it to be a “desperate meditation on violence and its modern
repression” that attains the status of an “absolute anti-fiction de gauche.”58
Comparing Kubrick’s film at length to Kramer’s Milestones, Oudart considers
the two works to be exemplary alternative models to contemporary Hol-
lywood cinema: the one through a surfeit of spectacle and visual splendor,
the other through its radically pared-back documentary approach.
To have praised Kubrick so abundantly and associated his films with
those of Kramer was an idiosyncratic position to hold within the editorial
board of Cahiers, but if this had been the sole content of Oudart’s article,
it may not have been as contentious as it was. It was his accompanying
attacks on “Saint Jean-Marie” and “Saint Jean-Luc” that proved to be truly
unacceptable. In insisting that Straub and Godard were “moralists of the
imaginary,” Oudart also criticizes the theoretical practice of Cahiers in its
post-1968 phase in terms that are distinctly more forceful than his fellow
critics—despite their own processes of introspective auto-critique—were
willing to allow:

For ten years, what has prevailed is a valorization—let us quickly say—of

an over-working [sur-travail] of the signifier, […] in the vertiginous icono-
clasm of the deconstruction of the impression of reality. […] There has
been a politico-moralist fallout of the problematic of the filmer-filmed

56 On one of the few occasions in which the journal discussed his films, Eisenschitz referred to
2001: A Space Odyssey as “a film without a message” whose main effect is to “send critical sense
to sleep.” Bernard Eisenschitz, “La marge (2001: A Space Odyssey),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 209
(February 1969), pp. 56-57, here p. 56.
57 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Barry Lyndon (S. Kubrick),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (November 1976),
pp. 62-63, here p. 62.
58 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “À propos d’Orange mécanique, Kubrick, Kramer et quelques autres,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 293 (October 1978), pp. 55-60, here p. 55.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 689

contract and its fetishism of the coulisses, without speaking of the old
materialist sing-along on the semiotic productivity of montage. We were
all part of this vogue, but it is high time we left it behind. Because it ended
up costing us too much blindness.59

In the following issue, Oudart continued his one-man war machine against
“politico-semiological” film criticism with his article on Syberberg’s Hitler,
ein Film aus Deutschland, again coming to focus on Cahiers’ legacy:

We are surveilled cinephiles, critics that keep watch on each other,

theorists, to varying degrees, who became the guardians of a dogmatico-
aesthetic temple. Syberberg has spoken of Hitler as a mourning which
has not been done. In Cahiers too, there is a mourning which has not
been done. Hitler is about the cinema of Godard, much like the images
of fascism are about dogmatic gauchisme. This is why Syberberg’s film
interpellates us too.60

Against the terrorizing didacticism of Godard, Oudart calls for a cinema of

“magic, dream, fascination,” which he finds in Syberberg’s rear projections
and superimpositions, defined as an “interspace between dream-effects
and media-effects, the novelistic and the televisual.”61
The sharply critical tenor of Oudart’s comments, bringing the entire
Cahiers critical project into question at the same time as harshly rebuking
the two filmmakers who were most important to the journal, incited a
response defending Straub and Godard by the Dutch video artist Johan van
der Keuken, which Cahiers ran in French translation after initial publication
in Skrien.62 Given a right of reply, Oudart does not waver in his judgements:
Kubrick and Kramer continue to be vaunted, while the critic is adamant
that “the aesthetic of the ‘did-you-see-that, did-you-hear-that, admit that I
caught you out’ is not to my taste.”63 Only Straub/Huillet’s œuvre warrants
nuancing, as Oudart ponders that a Straub film “disconnected from the
dogmatic scenario that demands to see the work within it” could produce

59 Ibid., p. 58.
60 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Notes de mémoire sur Hitler, de Syberberg,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 294
(November 1978), pp. 5-16, here p. 5.
61 Ibid., pp. 7, 9.
62 See Johan van der Keuken, “Tribune: une lettre de Johan van der Keuken,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 296 (January 1979), pp. 60-61.
63 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinéma, fragments d’expérience,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 297 (Febru-
ary 1979), pp. 64-67, here p. 65.
690  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

a “qualitative difference in his écriture,” one where his “strident music and
material violence would make of it a curious object.”64
This pacifying gesture towards Straub/Huillet did nothing, however, to
prevent Oudart’s increasing alienation from his fellow writers at Cahiers,
nor, it seems, the deterioration in his mental health. His swan song at the
journal came in the November 1980 issue, when Oudart’s last articles of any
significance were published. His response to Kubrick’s The Shining, “Les
inconnus dans la maison,” sheds the most light into Oudart’s critical views
at the twilight of his involvement with Cahiers as well as, symptomatically,
revealing his own parlous psychological condition. Oudart relays that he
received The Shining as “a kind of video-film, a television broadcast that had
escaped from the TV, a giant video that would be a horror film programming
the story of a family escaping from social delirium,” and this explicitly
determines the manner in which he speaks of it. Kubrick’s film is, in his
reading, a “wild, schizo-psychoanalytic meditation on the family, society,
the cinema and the media.” Each of the three main characters represent a
different ingredient in a stew of mental disorders: the father Jack is paranoaic
(“the ordinary paranoia of a white American male, with his delirium about
America’s society, its power, and its racism”), the mother Wendy hysterical,
and their young son Danny schizophrenic.65 At many points throughout
this extraordinary text, it is hard not to read it in a self-referential vein.
Just as Oudart’s analysis of the film places an emphasis on the role of the
written word in programming Jack’s murderous psychosis, so too does his
film criticism begin to cross over the threshold of comprehensibility that
he had always uneasily skirted: the film’s signature phrase “Work and no
play make Jack a dull boy [sic]” appears repeatedly in Oudart’s article,
written in bold majuscules at random moments in the piece, as if attesting
to his own fragile state of mind. Kubrick’s genius, for Oudart, consists in
turning the “writing-machine” into a “wild operator of the symbolic and
sexual disjunction of the couple, of their lunacy, their hysteria, and the
murder-program, in a simulation of an ordinary scenario, a ‘normal’ fam-
ily scenario.”66 Concluding his piece, Oudart recognizes that The Shining
represents both a nostalgic “adieu to the old cinema” and a “flight towards
a giant video-cinema” that will inexorably form the future of the medium.67

64 Ibid., p. 67.
65 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Les inconnus dans la maison (Shining),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 317
(November 1980), pp. 4-11, here pp. 4-5.
66 Ibid., p. 8.
67 Ibid., p. 11.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 691

Oudart’s article on The Shining, where both the object of the text and its
writing occupy a liminal zone between lucidity and mania, prefigured his
departure from Cahiers after more than a decade with the journal. Sliding
into paranoia, he violently broke with his colleagues, sending threatening
letters to the Cahiers off ice.68 A position organizing the Committee of
Ethnographic Film at Jean Rouch’s Musée de l’Homme was short-lived.69
Later, according to Pierre, Oudart was interred at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric
hospital. After this point, the trace goes cold. There are rumors that, upon
the release of L’Argent in 1983, Oudart submitted an article to Cahiers on the
film, which would have capped his long-running series of texts on Bresson’s
œuvre, but the article was refused by the Cahiers editors, and whether the
manuscript still exists today is unknown.70 In any case, after the early 1980s,
Oudart never again published film criticism or any other writing.71 Today,
Oudart’s whereabouts are a mystery, and none of his former colleagues can
even say with any certainty whether he is presently alive or dead. The critic
was just one of many of those involved in post-1968 militant politics and
radical theory to have succumbed to mental breakdowns, who now form
the psychological debris of one of the most spectacular confrontations with
state power in modern history. Oudart could even be seen as something
of a modern-day Hölderlin, immured in his own Tübingen tower, blithe
to the status that his most well-known texts have had in the field of film
studies. Indeed, Louis Skorecki—a steadfast supporter of Oudart whose
relationship with Cahiers was similarly fractious—speaks of him in these
terms: “Let us pass quickly over the case of Jean-Pierre Oudart,” he writes,
“heretical ex-theorist (‘La suture,’ ‘Milestones’) and isolated slanderer exiled
from himself, no doubt unaware that he is one of the two or three greatest
film theorists of the century.”72

68 This was conf irmed in interviews with both Serge Toubiana (April 29, 2014) and Sylvie
Pierre (May 26, 2014).
69 Oudart’s last published text of any kind was a brief notice publicizing an event on the Dogon
people at the Musée de l’Homme. See Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Les Dogon à Paris,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 321 (March 1981), p. xvi.
70 This text was discussed by Louis Skorecki and Bill Krohn on Skorecki’s blog. See Louis
Skorecki, “Où es tu, JPO?”, skorecki.blogspot.com.au /2012/07/ou-es-tu-jpo.html (accessed
January 1, 2021).
71 Skorecki evoked a book by Oudart titled Lettres sur le cinéma, published by “Éditions du
Tigre” in 2002, and even quotes a passage from it: “What I find rather annoying in the cinema is
the automatic ‘miracle’ of the impression of reality. Most of the time, this magic bores me.” See
Louis Skorecki, “Mon Oncle d’Amérique,” Libération, November 18, 2003, p. 28. There is, however,
no other evidence for the existence of this book.
72 Louis Skorecki, “L’Ombre rouge de Jean-Louis Comolli,” Libération, October 1, 1997, p. 47.
692  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Works Cited

Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma: histoire d’une revue vol. II: Cinéma,
tours détours 1959-1981 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991).
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985).
Jean-Louis Comolli, “L’autre ailleurs (Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 143 (May 1963), pp. 42-49.
Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 39-46. Translated as, “Work, Reading, Pleasure,”
trans. Diana Matias, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972
The Politics of Representation (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 115-136. Hereafter
CDC III.
———, “Sur Family Life (de Kenneth Loach),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 244 (February-
March 1973), pp. 44-48.
Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly vol. 28, no. 1
(Autumn 1974), pp. 22-31.
Bernard Eisenschitz, “La marge (2001: A Space Odyssey),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 209
(February 1969), pp. 56-57.
Pierre Francastel, Peinture et société (Paris: Seuil, 1965).
Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture,” Screen vol. 18 no. 4 (Winter 1977-1978), pp. 35-47.
Seung-hoon Jeong, Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (London:
Routledge, 2013).
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fonda-
mentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 58. Translated as The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book
XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).
Sulgi Lie, Die Außenseite des Films: Zur politischen Filmästhetik (Zurich: Diaphanes,
2012).
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (éléments de la logique du signifiant),” Cahiers pour
l’analyse no. 1 (January-April 1966), pp. 37-49. Translated as “Suture (elements
of the logic of the signifer),” Screen vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-1978), pp. 24-34.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen vol. 16 no. 3 (Autumn
1975), pp. 6-18.
Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Au hasard Pialat (L’Enfance nue),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 210
(March 1969), pp. 55-56
———, “La Suture,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 211 (April 1969), pp. 36-39, and Cahiers
du cinéma no. 212 (May 1969), pp. 50-55. Translated as “Cinema and Suture,”
trans. Kari Hanet, in CDC III, pp. 45-56.
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Suture 693

———, “Bresson et la vérité (Une femme douce),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216 (Oc-
tober 1969), pp. 53-56.
———, “Notes pour une théorie de la représentation,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 229
(May-June 1971), pp. 43-45, and Cahiers du cinéma no. 230 (July 1971), pp. 43-45.
Translated as “Notes for a Theory of Representation,” trans. Annwyl Williams,
in CDC III, pp. 203-212.
———, “Le hors-champ de l’Auteur: l’idéologie moderniste dans quelques films
récents,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 236-237 (March-April 1972), pp. 86-89. Translated
as “The Absent Field of the Author,” in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship:
A Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 261-270.
———, “Un pouvoir qui ne pense, ne calcule, ni ne juge? (Aguirre, Lancelot),”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 258-259 (July-August 1975), pp. 36-41.
———, “Milestones (poème),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 262-263 (January 1976), p. 99.
———, “Mai 76,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 266-267 (May 1976), p. 100.
———, “Barry Lyndon (S. Kubrick),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (November 1976),
pp. 62-63.
———, “Modernité de Robert Bresson,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 279-280 (August-
September 1977), pp. 27-30.
———, “À propos d’Orange mécanique, Kubrick, Kramer et quelques autres,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 293 (October 1978), pp. 55-60.
———, “Notes de mémoire sur Hitler, de Syberberg,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 294
(November 1978), pp. 5-16.
———, “Cinéma, fragments d’expérience,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 297 (Febru-
ary 1979), pp. 64-67.
———, “Les inconnus dans la maison (Shining),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 317 (No-
vember 1980), pp. 4-11.
———, “Les Dogon à Paris,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 321 (March 1981), p. xvi.
D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994).
William Rothman, “Against ‘The System of the Suture,’” Film Quarterly vol. 29,
no. 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 45-50.
Barry Salt, “Film Style and Technology in the Forties,” Film Quarterly vol. 31, no. 1
(Autumn 1977), pp. 46-57.
Jean Louis Schefer, Scénographie d’un tableau (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Louis Skorecki, “L’Ombre rouge de Jean-Louis Comolli,” Libération, October 1, 1997, p. 47.
———, “Mon Oncle d’Amérique,” Libération, November 18, 2003, p. 28.
———, “Où es tu, JPO?”, skorecki.blogspot.com.au /2012/07/ou-es-tu-jpo.html
(accessed January 1, 2021).
694  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Johan van der Keuken, “Tribune: une lettre de Johan van der Keuken,” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 296 (January 1979), pp. 60-61.
Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001).
23. Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre
Baudry

Abstract
This chapter highlights one of the more obscure critics of the post-1968
Cahiers du cinéma: Pierre Baudry. Although he only wrote for the journal
for three years, quitting after its conversion to Maoism, his articles dur-
ing this time attest to a theoretical precocity and critical acuity, which
manifested themselves in articles including “Sur le réalisme,” “Figuratif,
matériel, excrementel” and “L’Idéologie du western italien.” After departing
Cahiers, Baudry made abortive attempts to become a director but only
truly found his footing in his involvement in the Ateliers Varan filmmaking
workshop and as editor of the journal La Revue documentaires, where he
pursued his line of thinking on the question of realism in the cinema.

Keywords: Pierre Baudry, Cahiers du cinéma, psychoanalysis, documentary

cinema, Spaghetti Western

On Realism

Although his fate was less tragic than that of his colleague, Pierre Baudry
is, like Oudart, one of the less heralded of the post-1968 Cahiers critics.
During his three-year stint in the editorial team, however, Baudry’s articles
centered squarely on the presiding problematic of the journal: the cin-
ema’s relationship with the real and the multiple theoretical perspectives
through which this relationship was explored—whether in the legacy of
Bazin’s film theory, the Marxism of Althusser and his contemporaries, or
Lacanian psychoanalysis—and this was continued in his diverse activities
after leaving the journal in 1973. As early as his second article for Cahiers,
reviewing Fellini Satyricon in April 1970, Baudry not only made abundant
use of psychoanalytic tools to offer an interpretation of the film, he con-
tended in a nota bene appended to the article that “this reading of Fellini

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch23
696  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Satyricon, with its psychoanalytic allures, has no other function than that
of a hypothesis, since Cahiers has not yet defined the status of the concepts
that they are importing from Freudian discourse.”1 Little more than a year
later, at the same time as undertaking the mammoth project to produce
a shot-by-shot description of Intolerance, Baudry embarked on a major
theoretical text interrogating the nature of realism in the cinema. “Sur le
réalisme,” appearing in the August-September 1971 issue, was intended as
a series incorporating planned discussions of German realist cinema in
the Weimar era and Italian post-war neorealism. In the end, however, only
the first installment was published, treating Jacques Tati’s Trafic—a film
whose talismanic status for the Cahiers writers was such that it later lent
its name to the journal founded by Serge Daney in 1991. Tati had long been
a filmmaker cherished by Cahiers: from Amengual’s article on “L’étrange
comique de Monsieur Tati” in 1954 to the dossier on Playtime published in
March 1968, the release of each Tati film was a major event for the journal.2
Fieschi had already broached the subject of Tati’s relationship with the
cinema’s ontological realism, arguing that although the “system of écriture”
in his 1967 film was such that “Tati, instead of copying the world, invented
it from scratch,” even the most hallucinatory formal variations in Playtime
nonetheless required a “necessary ‘realist’ anchoring.”3 A recognition of the
dialectic between artifice and realism similarly governed Baudry’s article,
but his analysis of this dynamic was distinctly more grounded in critical
theory than Fieschi’s ruminations.
Baudry begins his text by asserting that Trafic inscribes two fundamental
and intimately linked problematics: on the one hand, the status of the real in
representation, and on the other hand, the definition of cinematic realism.
More lucidly than any other writer at Cahiers, however, he recognized
that the journal had not yet rigorously defined concepts like “the real,”
“reality” and “realism,” despite the theoretical advances it had made since
its turn towards Marxism. Not only were the two areas of theory from
which Cahiers was substantially drawing its conceptual armory (histori-
cal materialism and psychoanalysis) demarcated from the “metaphysical
hypostasis” of the real in earlier, “idealist” approaches towards the cinema
(such as that of Bazin), but there is also, even between these two theoretical

1 Baudry, “Un avatar du sens,” p. 57.

2 See Barthélemy Amengual, “L’étrange comique de Monsieur Tati,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 31
(February 1954), pp. 31-36. For the dossier on Playtime, see Cahiers du cinéma no. 199 (March 1968),
pp. 6-31.
3 Jean-André Fieschi, “Le carrefour Tati,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 199 (March 1968), pp. 24-26,
here p. 24.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 697

currents, a discrepancy in the status of the real, which has ramifications

for aesthetic production. Whereas Marxism had traditionally seen ideology
as the “reflection of reality,” and more recent works on aesthetics such as
that of Badiou have inverted this connection to describe art as “the reality
of reflection,” Lacan’s tripartite schema of the Real/Imaginary/Symbolic
substantially alters and complicates this nexus, while Freud’s writings on
literature evince an understanding of art as “both the site of phantasmal
work and the site of a knowledge of desire.” Despite the fact that Althusser’s
writings on ideology attempted to produce a bridge between Marxism and
psychoanalysis on this matter, Baudry asserts that it would be an error to
elide or occlude the distinctions between the two philosophical systems
on the status of the real or to believe that “between these two sciences the
difference in the concepts of the real is only a matter of investment, a dif-
ference that an epistemological discourse would reduce to a unified origin.”
Such a step would only serve to surreptitiously reintroduce a neo-Cartesian
metaphysics. Instead, Baudry proposes a dual concept of the real, and this
heterogeneity should not be nullified under the guise of a “unification” of
diverse theoretical currents but understood as what Lacan himself calls a
“governed relationship” (relation réglée). 4
This conceptual heterogeneity is amplified by the recent theoretical
discourse on questions of figuration and representation (Baudry namechecks
Francastel, Schefer and Oudart in this context), which produces its own
concept of the real, determined by its specific field of research. For Baudry,
however, the critique of standard conceptions of realism produced by Fran-
castel and company is only an “insufficient approximation” of the concrete
functioning of realism in film and other visual mediums; the specific ways
in which the system of cinematic realism is invested by ideologies (in the
plural) must still be analyzed and defined. Although analyzing the nature
of filmic realism as an artistic strategy may appear to be divorced from or
secondary to the more underlying question of the status of “the real” in the
cinema, in fact, films proclaiming themselves to be “realist” play a central
role in the apparatus producing this sense of reality in the spectator. This
question is further complicated, Baudry cautions, by the fact that “realist”
film movements, and the notions of realism they tend to spawn, produce
their own ideological discourse on the nature not only of the cinema but of
reality itself, often falling back on idealist metaphysics when doing so. While
Baudry acknowledges that, as with the real, a definition of realism will not

4 The quotes from this paragraph are from Pierre Baudry, “Sur le réalisme: I. Trafic,” Cahiers
du cinéma no. 231 (August-September 1971), pp. 35-41, here p. 35.
698  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

be found by “seeking out what these realist theories may have in common”
(which would, at best, only produce a “concept of realism” consisting of
the minimum basis of these multiple ideologies of realism), he argues that
“the possibility of discrepancies [décalages] between the film practices in
question and their theories and manifestoes” can be a productive avenue
of research.5
It may therefore be a surprise that Baudry begins his study not with one
of the canonical landmarks of realist cinema, such as Paisà or La Règle du
jeu, but with Trafic, a film Baudry himself openly characterizes as a work
of science fiction. But this is a deliberate move. As the critic asserts: “We
have an interest, therefore, rather than initially working on one or several
films that are recognized as realist, in choosing as our point of departure
a film that has every chance of not being so.” Baudry agrees that Tati’s
œuvre depicts a parallel universe that functions according to its own laws
and principles. And yet the resulting films are far from being bereft of
a relationship with the real. On the contrary, they have the potential to
speak all the more clearly on this matter precisely because “the relations
they entertain with the ‘real’ would be comparable to inversions or spectral
duplicates, they would be like those of antimatter to matter.”6 Baudry finds
an avatar of this relationship in the poster used to promote Trafic’s run at the
Gaumont-Champs-Elysées theater in Paris, which consisted of a mirror tilted
at such an angle as to reflect the traffic of the capital’s major thoroughfare
to the viewers as they enter the auditorium. A “gag-object” that absorbs the
street into the spectacle, the mirror misleads the spectator as to the nature
of Trafic’s relationship with the real, a miscomprehension that would reduce
the Tati universe to a reconstruction of “reality” founded on the director’s
renowned “gifts of observation.” Rather, Baudry is interested in the film’s
combination of two heterogeneous types of sequences, which consist of
two “levels” of reality: a recognizable fictional plot centering on Monsieur
Hulot’s exploits and a series of supposedly “documentary” scenes which
in fact represent a “fiction of the documentary” and which, in provoking
ruptures in the fictional continuity of the film as whole, reduce fiction
to a “degree zero” state. Presented in alternation with each other, the two
fictional orders nonetheless bear witness to a process of “interlacing and
contamination,” in which “the passage from one to another is operated by
the resumption of the themes of the latter in the ‘syntax’ of the former.”7

5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 38.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 699

While the ideological effect this achieves is to “lighten or reduce the

fantasy-effects” of the main narrative, the result is a structural complexity
that produces the stratified, spatially segmented long shots of Tati’s mise en
scène, which themselves incorporate a multiplicity of discrete, simultaneous
actions (as symbolized by the appearance of a multitude of Hulots in the
final shot of the film). Baudry follows Comolli’s comments in “Technique
et idéologie” that, contra Bazin, the use of depth of field should not be seen
as producing a “gain of reality” in the cinematic image. In fact, he notes, it
leads to a “false liberty” for the viewer, who is always constrained to a partial,
selective vision of the film, privileging certain areas of the screen over others
at a given point in time. In doing so, however, Playtime and Trafic gain a
status as being “among the very rare films that demand genuine work of
the spectator.” Tati’s films make clear to the audience that “what we see in
them is not the world, but its analogical reproduction, of which each element
belongs to a signifying chain.” Thus, rather than intensifying the illusion
of reality engendered by the classical system of representation, the visual
strategy adopted by Tati effectively undermines this system by converting
it to a form of play and thereby producing knowledge in the spectator about
the functioning of the system. As Baudry puts it: “By depriving, so to speak,
the referents of its representation of their immediacy, Trafic ceaselessly
subverts its effects of the real.”8

Figurative, Material, Excremental

Although projected as an ongoing series of texts, “Sur le réalisme” was not

continued beyond its first installment. In the May-June 1972 issue, eight
months after the original article appeared, Baudry nonetheless returned to
the issue of the cinema’s relationship with the real in his article “Figuratif,
matériel, excrémentiel.” He begins the new piece with a set of preliminary
remarks that recall the problematic of his earlier analysis. The introduction
of “Sur le réalisme,” Baudry retrospectively admits, foreshadowed an ambi-
tious program that nonetheless had “the inconvenience of inscribing the
examination of filmic realism as the end-point of a long analysis, preceded by
numerous abstract generalities (on the real in ideology, the unconscious…).”
Such an approach ran the risk of neglecting the stake of the work in question,
namely: “what is the situation ‘in’ the cinema.” Without lapsing into the lure
of an empiricist method based on “concrete reality,” it is this stake that will

8 The quotes in this paragraph are from ibid., pp. 40-41.

700  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

form the center of Baudry’s reflections in the latter text, even if he is aware
that, in “Figuratif, matériel, excrémentiel,” “the progressive extraction of
these questions here will only be the mark of the difficulties this work
has in determining the limits of its field.”9 There is one way, however, that
“Figuratif, matériel, excrémentiel” remains in keeping with his earlier article:
as with “Sur le réalisme,” Baudry’s focus remains trained on the genre of
physical comedy, with the baton passing here from Tati to Buster Keaton
and Jerry Lewis.
Before analyzing the functioning of the gag in these filmmakers, Baudry
gives a brief analysis of the “economy of the figure” in realist representation.
For Baudry, realist schools are characterized by a parsimonious deployment
of figured objects, a tendency that is particularly acute among avowedly
Marxist artists such as, in the theater, Meyerhold and Brecht. The cinema,
meanwhile, is marked by a dialectical opposition between two kinds
of figures—the on-screen characters and the set—which in Hollywood
and other classical modes of representation functions as a “system of the
reciprocal guarantee of reality.”10 When one or the other are shown in
isolation, however, they tend to acquire the status of a rhetorical figure.
The distinction between “bourgeois realist cinema” and a materialist film
practice taking inspiration from Brechtian sources can be discerned in
the antithetical status that camera movements such as pans and tracking
shots over an empty set produce in each system. In the first case, they more
forcefully assert the illusion of reality embedded in the objects figurally
represented. By contrast, in f ilms such as Tout va bien (with its “doll’s
house” tracking shot revealing the artifice of the factory set, itself inspired
by a similar shot in The Ladies Man), the use of the technique serves to
reveal the scenic character of the set, highlighting rather than occluding
its materiality.
From here, Baudry undertakes an analysis of two gags in American
slapstick cinema: the moment in The Navigator when Keaton shuffles a deck
of wet cards, which transform into a disgusting magma of cardboard in his
hands, and the moment in The Ladies Man when Lewis wipes the lipstick
off the face of a portrait of boarding house mistress Mrs. Wellen-Mellon.
Both of these gags play with the materiality of the on-screen objects. In the
former, the handling of the cards “transforms them into something strictly

9 The quotes in this paragraph are from Pierre Baudry, “Figuratif, matériel, excrémentiel,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 238-239 (May-June 1972), pp. 75-82, here p. 75.
10 Ibid., p. 76.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 701

unnameable, their character as a practical object is abolished.”11 Lewis’ gag,

meanwhile, with the shifting status of the portrait (a representation inside
a representation) and the material supplementarity of the lipstick, is more
structurally complex and overtly transgressive, but it too centers around
a destruction of the “practicality” of the object. Baudry moves into more
Bataillean territory when he shifts to another common element of the two
gags. They both “highlight something in the order of anality: in them, the
objects destroyed become, in a way, like excrement.”12 In this sense, they
bear similarities to recent arthouse films such as Pasolini’s Decameron
and Widerberg’s Joe Hill which, breaking a nearly-universally observed
prohibition in classical cinema, explicitly depict excrement on screen. With
their resemblance to the cream-pie fights that form one of the tropes of
slapstick cinema, the scenes in Widerberg’s film showing excrement thrown
at the screen create a momentary disruption to the normal functioning
of the cinematic apparatus. By violently interpellating the audience qua
spectator, these scenes prevent them from believing in the “reality” of the
representation and from denying its fictive nature. The “I know very well,
but all the same…” mechanism of the cinema is thus disrupted, and, in a
line of reasoning that borrows significantly from Oudart, Baudry argues
that scenes such as this, apparently showing projectiles launched “towards”
the screen (in reality, they are always “on” the screen from the first moment
they are visible), highlight both the fictive nature of depth in the cinematic
image and the limits of the filmic frame. But this transitory collapse of
the “fourth wall” is eliminated (sutured, Oudart would say) by a cut that
“re-places this limit in the representation and in the fiction; the match-cut
shows us, in the image, the place where the projectile arrived.”13 Rather than
the viewer themselves, it is an on-screen figure (an object or a character) who
is shown to receive the missile launched at the screen. After a momentary
spectatorial thrill at this vacillation in the status of the representation, the
fiction is thus resumed, the spectators reassured as to the fictional status
of what they are viewing.
A parallel effect takes place in the case of film styles founded on “dirty”
images, particularly in the use of degraded film stock in cinéma-vérité works
in the 1960s or neorealist films in the 1940s, which explicitly take a stance
against the slick, “academic” glossiness of Hollywood or fascist cinema.

11 Ibid., p. 78.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 81.
702  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Here, the dirty image is produced as a sign of documentary veracity. It is a

stylistic citation by which a “gauge of reality” is exhibited:

The filming, which can be fantasized as a digestion of the filmed real, is

here the site of a dissociation: the dirtiness of the image is produced as
a supplement of the figuration, and functions as its material guarantee.
In the digestion of the f ilming, nothing of the real has been lost, the
excremental remainder has not even been wiped away—the proof being
that it is still there on the screen.14

Thus, representations that produce a “material effect” also result in dif-

ficulties in their viewing. In a turn of phrase that gives a scatological twist
to one of Bazin’s favored metaphors for the cinema, Baudry states that a
“thin veil of excrement” presents itself between the spectator and the filmed
objects. By replacing the smooth patina of Hollywood with its repressed
opposite (shit), these films may well prove to be “hard to swallow.” And yet,
Baudry insists, we continue to “gobble” them up: “The excremental screen,
as the transgression of a prohibition, presents this transgression—and the
jouissance it implies—as a trace of the truth of its discourse, and naturalizes
it.” The widespread use of a “dirty image” is only one part of a broader reversal
of aesthetic hierarchies in modernist cinema—with the ignoble, the vulgar,
the ugly and the sordid valorized at the expense of the noble, the beautiful
and the pleasant. But this has the effect of displacing and occluding the
real contradiction at the heart of representation in contemporary capital-
ism—just as, in Oudart’s “Un discours en défaut,” the erotic occupies the
repressed site of the economic in classical American cinema. The limitations
of modernist ideology thus derive from accepting the illusion that, “to repeat
Bataille’s formula, since ‘the heads of the bourgeois’ are ‘noble and sexless,’
the intrusion of sexual organs as figures will certainly have a revolutionary
sense.”15

Ideology of the Italian Western

If the burlesque film dominated Baudry’s considerations of the cinema’s

relations with the real, his eye was also trained on another “lowbrow” film
genre during his time at Cahiers: those Cinecittà-produced films by the

14 Ibid.
15 The above quotes are from ibid., p. 82.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 703

likes of Sergio Leone, Sergio Sollima and Sergio Corbucci from the late 1960s
and early 1970s that adopted and subversively distorted the generic tropes
of the Hollywood Western and which, having not yet acquired the slightly
derogatory label “spaghetti Western,” Cahiers dubbed le western italien. While
Baudry’s enduring concern for genre cinema was a distinguishing feature of
his criticism for Cahiers, he was not quite a solitary figure when it came to
an appreciation of Italian Western films, the critical analysis of which was
inevitably colored by the approach the journal had taken to the American
Westerns of Ford, Mann and Boetticher in the 1950s. In October 1969, Daney
wrote of the “immense” interest of Leone’s cinema when reviewing C’era una
volta il West…, primarily due to its status as “the first even remotely rigorous
attempt at a critical cinema, that is to say no longer directly grappling
with ‘reality’ […] but with a genre, a film tradition, a global text, the only
one that has known a worldwide circulation: the Western. That’s no small
thing.”16 If série B films formed a kind of “lumpencinema,” which only found
appreciation out of a kind of critical slumming or “cinephilic workerism,”
the work of Leone and his compatriots represented its prise de conscience,
effectuating a “euphoric work of deconstruction” in the process.17 But such
work could only be continued if this strand of filmmaking retained its mass
character and avoided being recuperated by the “cinema of quality”—a
trap that, Daney was acutely aware, Leone risked falling into. Despite their
variance with the dominant tendency within Cahiers at this time, which
tended to neglect the subversive work of “low” genres in favor of a politically
radicalized version of “high” modernism (embodied by Godard, Straub and
Duras), Daney’s comments set the template for the journal’s considerations
of Italian Westerns in the years to come. In March 1970, Pierre returned
to C’era una volta il West. For Pierre, the Hollywood Western, whose own
history was now closed, had been a privileged site for the “‘realist’ relations
that cinema entertains with history and ideology” and represented “the
trace of ideology’s work on history, with the former inventing a kind of
moral justification for the latter by means of mythology.”18 If the Italian

16 Serge Daney, “Once Upon a Time in the West…,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216 (October 1969),
p. 64.
17 Ibid. Lumpencinema is a portmanteau of the word “cinema” with Marx’s notion of the
lumpenproletariat, the class of beggars and petty criminals whose social standing was beneath
even that of the industrial working class. Workerism (ouvriérisme) was a political strategy within
the Marxist movement, criticized by Lenin, that advocated an exclusive focus on the proletariat
and its political demands, to the exclusion of all other social groupings.
18 Sylvie Pierre, “Clio veille (C’era una volta il West),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218 (March 1970),
pp. 53-55, here p. 53.
704  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Western had borrowed the “rhetoric” of its American counterpart, Pierre

argued, it reproduced neither the history nor the ideology embedded in it
and thus deracinated the “tics and tropes” of the Western, allowing it to
function freely as a “gratuitous code,” serving other ideological goals than
those programmed by its original model.19 In the case of Leone, however,
this consisted chiefly of a “shameless cinematic narcissism,” as his work
is absorbed by the cinema’s own mythology and mired in a “masochistic
contemplation” of the death of European cinema (itself symptomatic of a
wider trend towards cynical introspection in the continent’s filmmaking).
Appearing in the same issue, Baudry’s first article for Cahiers subjected
the more radical work of Sollima to analysis. While the Italian Western in
general had achieved its formal autonomy from its Hollywood predecessor
by “abandoning the Frontier ethic in order to produce a space that is just
as moral, but transgressive,” Baudry here claimed that the displacements
of meaning enacted by Sollima were even more sweeping.20 In films such
as La resa dei conti, the conflict between “civilization” and “savagery” that
characterized the traditional Western is replaced by a conflict between
two nations: Mexico and the United States. Moreover, while the figures of
the heroic Gringo and the Mexican Bandit are retained, the processes of
spectatorial identification and empathy are inverted, such that the Mexican
characters (who are, for domestic Italian audiences, the “guarantors of
latinity”) become central to the film, while the American characters, despite
being connoted with virility, are reduced to amoral creatures concerned
only with the acquisition of money. Sollima also, more overtly than other
filmmakers in the genre, introduces the historical/political context into the
discourse of his films: in the case of La resa dei conti, this consists of Benito
Pablo Juarez’s revolutionary anti-monarchist movement, whose resonances
for the contemporary political situation in Italy and Latin America are
unmistakable. Although there are limits to the allegorical readings offered
by Sollima’s films, Baudry comes to the conclusion that their discourse is far
more politically charged than that of Leone’s work, in which “the characters
traverse the storyline without changing or becoming aware of the political
character of this traversal.”21
Baudry was the only one of the Cahiers critics to continue pursuing
a critical reflection on the Italian Western beyond these early articles

19 Ibid., p. 55.
20 Pierre Baudry, “Trois films de Sollima,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218 (March 1970), pp. 59-61,
here p. 59.
21 Ibid., p. 61.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 705

and did so even well into the journal’s Maoist phase. A 1972 review of Giu
la testa registered Leone’s turn away from the vanguard of the Italian
Western’s critique of American cinema towards adopting a critical stance
towards this lumpencinema itself. Not only is the formal structure of Giu
la testa based on “a series of tableaux, a succession of ‘strong moments’”
each of which effects a re-organization of the totality of the film, but the
film’s relation with history has also shifted from that of C’era una volta
il West. Here, the revolution is given as the “absent meaning” of the film
and is the “impossible community” between the two protagonists. Thus,
rather than being repressed as the “outside of the fiction” (as was the case
with Leone’s earlier work), history is the film’s “unthinkable rationality.”22
Before this review, however, Baudry had already dedicated a longer text
to a more wide-ranging scrutiny of the ideological nature of the Italian
Western, attempting a typology of its different variants on the basis of
the Marxist film theory being developed by Cahiers. In this study, he not
only distinguishes between the Italian Western (given the short-hand
appellation IW) and the American Western (AW) but also between two
classes of the Italian variant of the genre. Virtually all IWs are “constructed
on the principle of the variation (borne by the names of the characters, the
sets, the faces, the ‘ruses of the script’) of a topological schema distributing
invariant symbolic-f ictional places to groups of characters.” But while
Type A, the “first age” of the IW (typified by Leone), presented a constel-
lation of characters consisting of “the Gringo/Mexican bandits/Mexican
victims,” a newer Type B, exemplified by the work of Corbucci, shifts this
schema to a more politicized system consisting of “the Gringo/Mexican
revolutionaries/Mexican counter-revolutionaries.”23 The ideological effects
of this symptomatic introduction of the “discourse of Revolution” into a film
genre are thus the object of Baudry’s analysis. Following the argument of
Pierre’s earlier article, he identifies the relationship between the AW and
the IW as one in which the “rhetorical mechanics” of the former have been
appropriated by the latter in order to relay a discourse that re-inscribes
a colonization process (the European settlement of North America) as
a myth. A déjà-vu effect is thus created, as the IW presents itself as the
“repetition or reduplication” of the AW, but at the same time, elements
of the AW’s rhetorical system (for instance, the status of the hero in the

22 Pierre Baudry, “Il était une fois… la révolution,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 238-239 (May-June 1972),
pp. 93-95, here p. 93.
23 Pierre Baudry, “L’idéologie du western italien,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (November 1971),
pp. 55-56, here p. 55.
706  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

storyline) are transformed, and the “extra-cinematic ideological themes”

that supported the AW as a genre—such as the myth of the “self-made
man” or the polarity between “good” and “bad”—find themselves voided
and made inoperable. Moreover, the liberty of the hero in the IW is not
given as the result of a process; rather, from the very start of the fiction,
he possesses an autonomy by dint of his extra-territoriality. A Gringo on
Mexican soil, motivated by financial gain and thus free of the social or
political determinations that govern the conflict structuring the film, the
hero’s insertion into the narrative allows for a resolution of the conflict to
take place. In Type B films such as Corbucci’s Compañeros, however, the
coding of the protagonist as guided by revolutionary rather than merely
pecuniary motivations produces an “investment of the conflict situation
in Type A by political positions.”24
And yet this insertion of a revolutionary discourse into the genre of the
Western is far from having unambiguously positive effects. The irruption of
“revolutionary speech” means that bourgeois ideology, rather than repressing
this speech as it usually does, instead appropriates its vocabulary in order
to produce a false likeness that, by miming the revolutionary discourse,
in fact annuls it through a process of misrecognition. Thus, the opposition
between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in Corbucci’s film is
calqued onto that between the “goodies” and the “baddies” in the traditional
Western, and its political character is nullified through the reduction of the
criterion of discrimination between the two to that of popular sentiment.
Although Compañeros is replete with expressions of revolutionary idealism,
these are devoid of substance, and the hero (Franco Nero) only engages in
political struggle out of libidinal desire, in the absence of any mercenary
outlet for his skills.25 Thus the supposed opposition between the discourses
of revolution and capitalist enterprise structuring the film in fact mask
another opposition: that between revolutionary ideals and the jouissance
of the mercenary. Given the vacuity of the former, the field is left open
for the latter to produce the film’s meaning. More than any other Italian
Western, Compañeros inscribes revolutionary themes into its rhetorical
structure, but it does so, Baudry concludes, in such a way that the result
is a “petty-bourgeois fantasy of mastery, which, in the last instance, has
fascistic tendencies.”26

24 Ibid., p. 56.
25 Indeed, the role of erotic jouissance in the actions of Franco Nero is, as Baudry maintains,
clearly enunciated in the long slow-motion shot closing Corbucci’s film.
26 Ibid.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 707

Leaving Cahiers

Baudry’s membership of the Cahiers team did not endure far beyond the
moment in which his most important articles were written. Having always
been lukewarm about the proposed Front culturel project and feeling him-
self targeted in certain comments in “Quelles sont nos tâches sur le front
culturel?,” he tendered his letter of resignation from the Cahiers editorial
board on February 9, 1973, after nearly three years of involvement with
the journal. Questions both of politics and theory were at issue for Baudry.
While affirming his general adherence to a Marxist-Leninist outlook, he
voiced his opposition to a strategy that effectively made the fight against the
“revisionism” of the PCF the principal revolutionary activity at the expense
of the struggle against capitalism. On the level of theory, Baudry was critical
of the shift away from research into the specificity of the cinema and was
wary of the tendency towards a dogmatic abandonment of theory tout
court: “In the preceding phase of Cahiers’ history, the general aspect of the
‘theoretico-formal avant-garde’ left the field open to a great deal of political
omissions [impensés]. We should indeed place politics in the command post:
but must this be done at the cost of such a regression (or deviation) of the
journal on the role of theory?”27 Baudry concluded his letter with the incisive
observation and mordant humor that were characteristic of his writings for
Cahiers. Aware, in the wake of the earlier departures of Delahaye, Pierre
and Eisenschitz, that there existed “a phantasm of periodic exclusion that
seems to me to govern the group that is Cahiers, with the excision of a
member sanctioning the last transformation in order to provide an objective
guarantee of it,” Baudry signed off by wryly admitting, in a self-referential nod
to one of his major texts for Cahiers, that “to play the role of the excrement
in this anal castration does not disturb me.”28 Narboni’s response remained
firm in rebutting the criticisms issued by Baudry, but, in contrast to the
more combative tone of other departures, he was almost apologetic when
it came to the circumstances of Baudry’s departure, regretting the fact that
his letter entailed a rupture rather than the opportunity for positive debate
and accepting that the Cahiers editors had their share of the responsibility
for the situation coming to a head in this manner.29

27 Pierre Baudry, “À propos de la démission de Pierre Baudry,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 245-246
(April-May-June 1973), pp. 88-89, here p. 89.
28 Ibid.
29 Jean Narboni, “Réponse à P.B.,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 245-246 (February-March 1973),
pp. 89-92, here p. 89.
708  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Baudry’s letter had given a further reason for his resignation: having joined
Cahiers due to his interest in “a writing practice that gives the intellectual
tools for cinematic practice (filmmaking),” he confesses that “journalism as
such has ceased to interest me” and that it had proven difficult to combine
the practice with “other parallel activities (films, for example).”30 This,
indeed, would be the initial focus of his energies in the period after leaving
Cahiers. Two short works, Le Piège diabolique and Les Deux Cervelles, were
complemented by La Loi du cœur, a moyen-métrage that had its premiere on
opening night at the 1974 Cannes film festival. From this point on, although
Baudry bubbled with ideas for film projects, he generally had difficulty
in realizing them, and a prospective career as an auteur director did not
materialize. Only irregular assignments ensued, which included writing and
acting for a Charles Bitsch television program on Jerry Lewis in 1974, writing
and producing the France 3 series Paris, clin d’œil in 1981-82 (on the lives of
migrants in the capital), and collaborating on the script for Angelopoulos’
1984 film Voyage à Cythère.
At the same time, Baudry intermittently returned to f ilm criticism
and, in doing so, further explored his interest in the industrial output
of audiovisual media. The only work he published in Cahiers after his
resignation consisted of a pair of articles in 1977 on TV gameshows. In
these texts, Baudry, characterizes television through two types of speech:
that of the “technicians” (announcers, anchors, interviewers) and that of
the “authorities” (politicians, artists, experts). A possible third speech,
that of the audience (the vulgum pecus) is excluded from the discourse
of mass media, which—as Baudry, citing Baudrillard’s Pour une critique
de l’économie politique du signe, states—is “intransitive” and tasked with
producing “non-communication.”31 There is, however, an exception to this
“monopolized speech,” albeit a derisory one: the gameshow. The presence
of the vulgum pecus in this format leads the public to believe in a “great
democracy of speech in the media”—but this comes at a price. Speech is
only “conceded” to the gameshow candidate if they systematically obey
the rules of the dispositif established: they must answer the question posed
to them, with the lure of financial gain forestalling any temptation for
transgression. In the end, therefore, the opportunity to speak is only given
to a simulation of the place of the common people rather than the public

30 Baudry, “À propos de la démission de Pierre Baudry,” p. 89.

31 Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972),
p. 208. Cited in Pierre Baudry, “Économiques sur les média: remarques sur la télévision, la radio
et le cinéma [1],” Cahiers du cinéma no. 274 (March 1977), pp. 48-54, here p. 49.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 709

as it really exists, which remains subject to monopolized discourse. The

agonistic relationship between the contestant and the gameshow host (an
omniscient Master figure and a place-holder for the monopolized discourse
of television) is thus subject to a mise en scène of confrontation which, in
the end, is nothing but a lure whose function is to guarantee the adherence
of the public to their status as spectators. The exchange of knowledge for
a monetary prize or consumer good, meanwhile, gives televisual speech
an economic status, thereby entrenching the stranglehold of free-market
ideology. Thus, for Baudry, leftist intellectuals are misguided when they
critique TV for its “dumbing-down” effect; in fact, the predominance of
such “mindless dross” has the purpose of “mim[ing], within a program, the
differences in use-value of which the market is the theater,” and this itself
is merely a symptom of a broader development. With the dismantling of
the ORTF state monopoly in 1975 and the rise of private television stations,
we have now entered “an economistic age of the dominant ideology in the
media.”32
What Baudry termed an “economistic ideology” also informed his
contribution to Raymond Bellour’s 1980 anthology Le Cinéma américain,
which focused on the Hollywood super-production and its relationship
with the real. In “Production de la réalité, réalité de la production,” Baudry
argues that the status of these films as something of a meta-genre comes
not from their thematic or formal unity but from the effects produced
on the filmic text itself by the reference to the economic sphere. More
specifically, the “indices of expenditure” in blockbuster films also serve as
“the production of effects of the real: the ‘grand spectacle’ is, above all, the
attempt to furnish, in film images, an equivalent to the density of the real
world.”33 Thus the work of these films consists of producing an equivalency
between their economic discourse (on the reality of their cost) and their
ontological discourse (film as a replica of the world), and it is notable that the
super-production has traditionally been the site where technical advances
aimed at conferring the cinema with a “gain of reality” have been pioneered.
These films are also determined by the incommensurable relationship
between the lavish sums expended on their production and the meagre
amount spent by the spectator in order to witness the resulting spectacle,
a discrepancy that not only leads the audience to take pleasure in this

32 Pierre Baudry, “Économiques sur les média: remarques sur la télévision, la radio et le cinéma
[2],” Cahiers du cinéma no. 277 (June 1977), pp. 15-28, here p. 28.
33 Pierre Baudry, “Production de la réalité, réalité de la production,” in Raymond Bellour (ed.),
Le Cinéma américain vol. II (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), pp. 261-274, here p. 266.
710  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

“imaginary profit” but also ties them into a ritual relationship with the
cinema that has similarities with Bataille’s description of potlatch (the
ritualistic destruction of signifiers of wealth) in primitive societies. While
earlier forms of the super-production prized historical reconstitution (such
as in the works of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille), the 1970s saw the rise
of the disaster movie ( film-catastrophe), which Baudry reads as an allegory
of the global economic downturn precipitated by the 1973 oil crisis and as a
reaction by the film industry to the phenomenon of audience segmentation.
Of particular interest for Baudry is John Guillermin’s 1976 remake of King
Kong. Due to the pre-existing cultural awareness of the 1933 Schoedsack/
Cooper original, the pleasure the spectator takes from the film lies not
in its narrative suspense (we know that Kong will die) but in “witnessing
the shattering of a machinery, the destruction of which we know about in
advance,” and the death of the ape that concludes the film accomplishes “the
metaphor of economic expenditure necessary for its mise en scène.”34 The
new wave of super-productions, therefore, is qualitatively different to that
of classical Hollywood. It is no longer a copy of the world that the cinema
produces but a copy of itself: with the remake of King Kong, “the cinema is
authorized by itself, much like the twin towers of the World Trade Center
reduplicate each other through their exact resemblance, in a closed system
of equivalence. Representation gives way to the simulacrum.”35

The Man of Varan

Despite the theoretical promise of these texts, the late 1970s and early 1980s
were nonetheless years of uncertainty for Baudry, who lived mainly on
irregular positions teaching film at various institutions in Paris. In 1983, he
gained notoriety in the public eye, but for unwanted reasons. His address
book, lost on the rue des Martyres, was discovered by Sophie Calle, who
turned it into an art project: on a daily basis, Libération published Calle’s
accounts of the contacts she made with the names included in the book, in
order to create a portrait of its owner without ever meeting him.36 In this
column, Baudry’s name is given as “Pierre D.,” but for anyone in his social

34 Ibid., p. 273.
35 Ibid., p. 274.
36 The Libération column was published in book form in English in 2012. See Sophie Calle, The
Address Book (Los Angeles: Siglio, 2012). The original texts appeared in the French newspaper
between August 2 and September 4, 1983.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 711

milieu his identity was unmistakable. His former colleagues Pierre (Sylvie
B.), Bonitzer (Paul B.) and Narboni (Jacques O.) are easily recognizable in
Calle’s reports, while Cahiers itself is frequently mentioned, albeit simply as
“the film journal.” Baudry, who was in arctic Norway when the series ran,
reacted with fury when he belatedly found out about this invasion of his
privacy, and as a retributive act resorted to publishing a naked photograph
Calle had sent him.37 Indeed, the picture Calle paints of Baudry in “Le Carnet
d’adresses” is not an overly flattering one: her Pierre D. is a whimsical yet
solitary individual living in a cramped apartment in the migrant district of
Barbès-Rochechouart, who has many acquaintances but few close friends
and whose frustrated ambitions of making films mean that, at the age of
35, he is already something of a has-been, with his best days behind him.
In the same year, however, Baudry found a new purpose by joining, and
eventually playing a leading role in, the Ateliers Varan, a micro-studio
founded in 1981 with the support of Jean Rouch and Jean-Pierre Beauviala.
Specializing in teaching filmmaking to those interested in documenting the
cultures of Third World nations, Varan soon developed a network of satellite
workshops, including one in Lapland, where Baudry taught for several
years. Although documentary filmmaking was now the major focus of his
activities, Baudry nonetheless adhered to one of the fundamental Cahiers
axioms by refusing a clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction in
the cinema and often analyzed narrative films such as Strangers on a Train
with his students.38 His predilection for the cinema’s past led to an ongoing
interest in the work of Flaherty, Vertov and Grierson, which resulted in
historical analyses of the shift in conceptions of the documentary with
the advent of direct sound in the 1960s.39 Moreover, in keeping with his
earlier interest in “low” genres, Baudry also incorporated home movies
and other forms of “private cinema” into his theoretical discussions. In an
interview on the Varan experience, Baudry insisted on its opposition to
the “televisual ideology according to which you ‘record’ things. […] When
a student understands that making a film does not mean recording, but

37 For more on this series of events, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Character Study: Sophie Calle,” Artforum
vol. 38 no. 8 (April 2000), pp. 126-131; and Marina van Zuylen, Monomania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005), pp. 188-189.
38 See the homage to Baudry’s life and work, with testimonies from several of his friends and
collaborators, published in La Revue Documentaires no. 19-20 (Summer 2005), pp. 157-169.
39 See, in particular, Pierre Baudry, “Quelques notions de base pour réflechir sur le documen-
taire,” in Pierre Baudry and Gilles Delavaud, La Mise en scène documentaire: Robert Flaherty,
L’Homme d’Aran et le documentaire (Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la francophonie, 1994),
pp. 68-84.
712  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

directing, […] you’ve won.” For Baudry, “it is the approach towards reality
that is under question, with everything that this implies in the ethical
relationship towards the people you film, and in the political relationship
towards people and their situations.”40
Baudry’s time at Varan led to collaborations with Gilles Delavaud on a book
and video project on Robert Flaherty as well as articles for La Licorne and
CinémAction. In 1993, he became the editor-in-chief of the periodical La Revue
Documentaires, a position Baudry would retain until his death. As well as giving
him the opportunity to publish the work of Gérard Leblanc, Jean-Daniel Pollet,
Noël Burch, Harun Farocki, François Niney and Christa Blümlinger, the role
allowed Baudry to further develop his views on the documentary form and the
cinema’s relationship with the real. Resisting the vogue for using the phrase
“cinema of the real” as a synonym for documentary (as in the Paris-based
festival of the same name), Baudry recalled the Lacanian notion of the Real as
“that which is unknowable and cannot be conceptualized; that which is not,
and cannot be, articulated in a system of signs. From the moment that there
is a representation, the Real is what is lacking. […] If the ‘real’ does exist in a
documentary, it is as an effect, as a place designated in a dispositif.”41 The status
of the real in the cinema evidently exercised Baudry on a long-term basis: in
a later article for La Revue Documentaires, he gave the etymology of the word
real as being “relating to the thing” (or res, in Latin), and while admitting that
it had a “combative value” in discourse on documentary cinema, recalled the
complications arising from the use of the term: “‘real’ admits of a quantity of
antonyms: fictive, fictional, imaginary, virtual, illusionary, lying… The notion
is very obscure and equivocal, but each one evokes it under the regime of
evidence, as if, between us, it went without saying.”42
In the article “Se voir,” a text in which Baudry distinguished home movies
from commercial cinema on the basis of the status of the audience for
which they were intended (whether consisting of people who were known
or unknown to the filmmaker), he gave his most compelling definition of
good documentary practice:

No matter what it seeks to show or explain, a film has every chance of

being good if I have the impression of understanding it thanks to the

40 Pierre Baudry and Michael Hoare, “Apprendre à lire en apprenant à écrire: l’expérience Varan
aujourd’hui: Interview de Leonardo di Costanzo,” La Revue Documentaires no. 13 (August 1997),
pp. 75-88, here p. 88.
41 Pierre Baudry, “Terrains et territoires,” La Licorne no. 24 (1992), pp. 5-14, here p. 8.
42 Pierre Baudry, “Images des sciences: Le concept de chien,” La Revue Documentaires no. 17
(January 2002), pp. 5-6, here p. 5.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 713

connections between one image and another, or between one sound and
another, rather than via the “divine” voice of an off-screen commentary.
Books are excellent devices for captioning images, and certain bad films
could have made for good books. 43

The 1995 article “Paroles inventives,” meanwhile, reproduced the distinctions

between different forms of speech on television programs formulated in
his 1977 Cahiers article when talking about the use made of the voice in
the privatized, segmented media landscape of the 1990s. While this decade
witnessed the “growing starif ication of the moderator” and a far more
direct expression of the corporate basis of television, it also saw a fascinat-
ing counter-model in a weekly talk show on TV5 with the symptomatic
name Référence. Here, a single guest is interviewed for 26 minutes about
their life and work, and while the choice of guests is often refreshingly
unconventional, it is the formal dispositif of the program that most fascinates
Baudry. Each episode in the series is presented in a single, uninterrupted
long take, capturing the interview in its unified totality. For Baudry, the use
made by a television show of a sequence shot in this way cannot but incite
“some memories in the cinephile,” and the program retains the effects that,
as Bazin first reasoned, such shots have in the cinema: a gauge of reality,
the production of dramatic tension, and the reinforcement of narrative
unity. Still more importantly, Baudry notes that, through the use of such a
format, “speech ceases to be a disincarnated object, and takes on a physical
dimension.”44 In particular, the everyday aleae of the TV interview, the
pauses, stumbles and digressions that are usually elided in the editing
process, are here retained, and although this occasionally has a detrimental
effect, for the most part the filming technique adopted by Référence “makes
us more intelligent and inventive” and provides the viewer with “a sort of
living encyclopedia of the invention that it records.”45
Having suffered from a debilitating heart condition for more than a
decade, Pierre Baudry passed away on February 15, 2005, at the age of 57.
His colleagues at La Revue Documentaires dedicated a dossier to his life
and work in the following issue (no. 19-20), which, by a strange yet fitting
coincidence, accompanied an obituary for Jean Rouch, who died the same

43 Pierre Baudry, “Se voir,” La Revue Documentaires no. 9 (September 1994), pp. 63-77, here
p. 66.
44 Pierre Baudry, “Paroles inventives: La parole à la télévision,” La Revue Documentaires no. 11
(December 1995), pp. 5-17, here p. 12.
45 Ibid., pp. 14-15.
714  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

year. Included in this necrological homage was a touching note by Comolli,

who had originally introduced Baudry to Cahiers and who had renewed ties
with him through their mutual involvement with the Ateliers Varan (which
supports Comolli’s filmmaking to this day). Recognizing the immense debt
he owed to his old comrade who “guided me, perhaps without knowing it,”
Comolli described Baudry as a “discreet intellect” who was “disarming in
his kindness and attentiveness.” In the “years of fury and terror,” as Comolli
tells it, Baudry was a friend who “wished us well even in spite of ourselves,
even beyond ourselves.”46

Words Cited

Barthélemy Amengual, “L’étrange comique de Monsieur Tati,” Cahiers du

cinéma no. 31 (February 1954), pp. 31-36.
Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972).
Pierre Baudry, “Trois f ilms de Sollima,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218
(March 1970), pp. 59-61.
———, “Un avatar du sens (Fellini-Satyricon),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 219
(April 1970), pp. 56-57.
———, “Sur le réalisme: I. Trafic,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 231 (August-
September 1971), pp. 35-41.
———, “L’idéologie du western italien,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (No-
vember 1971), pp. 55-56.
———, “Figuratif, matériel, excrémentiel,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 238-239
(May-June 1972), pp. 75-82.
———, “Il était une fois… la révolution,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 238-239
(May-June 1972), pp. 93-95.
———, “À propos de la démission de Pierre Baudry,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 245-246 (April-May-June 1973), pp. 88-89.
———, “Économiques sur les média: remarques sur la télévision, la radio
et le cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 274 (March 1977), pp. 48-54, and Cahiers
du cinéma no. 277 (June 1977), pp. 15-28.
———, “Production de la réalité, réalité de la production,” in Raymond Bel-
lour (ed.), Le Cinéma américain vol. II (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), pp. 261-274.
———, “Terrains et territoires,” La Licorne no. 24 (1992), pp. 5-14.

46 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Soir,” La Revue Documentaires no. 19-20 (Summer 2005), pp. 163-164,
here p. 164.
Realism and Psychoanalysis in Pierre Baudry 715

———, “Quelques notions de base pour réflechir sur le documentaire,” in

Pierre Baudry and Gilles Delavaud, La Mise en scène documentaire: Robert
Flaherty, L’Homme d’Aran et le documentaire (Paris: Ministère de la Culture
et de la francophonie, 1994), pp. 68-84.
———, “Se voir,” La Revue Documentaires no. 9 (September 1994), pp. 63-77.
———, “Paroles inventives: La parole à la télévision,” La Revue Documen-
taires no. 11 (December 1995), pp. 5-17.
———, “Images des sciences: Le concept de chien,” La Revue Documen-
taires no. 17 (January 2002), pp. 5-6.
——— and Michael Hoare, “Apprendre à lire en apprenant à écrire:
l’expérience Varan aujourd’hui: Interview de Leonardo di Costanzo,” La
Revue Documentaires no. 13 (August 1997), pp. 75-88.
Yve-Alain Bois, “Character Study: Sophie Calle,” Artforum vol. 38 no. 8
(April 2000), pp. 126-131.
Sophie Calle, The Address Book (Los Angeles: Siglio, 2012).
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Soir,” La Revue Documentaires no. 19-20 (Summer
2005), pp. 163-164.
Serge Daney, “Once Upon a Time in the West…,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 216
(October 1969), p. 64.
Jean-André Fieschi, “Le carrefour Tati,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 199
(March 1968), pp. 24-26.
Jean Narboni, “Réponse à P.B.,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 245-246 (February-
March 1973), pp. 89-92.
Sylvie Pierre, “Clio veille (C’era una volta il West),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 218 (March 1970), pp. 53-55.
Marina van Zuylen, Monomania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005).
24. Partial Vision: The Theory and
Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer

Abstract
Pascal Bonitzer’s work as a critic, theorist and, subsequently, filmmaker
lies at the heart of this chapter. A precociously young critic when joining
Cahiers, Bonitzer wrote with a literary flair and confidently deployed a
range of thinkers as references in his texts, including Jacques Derrida,
Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Jean Louis Schefer and, above all, Jacques
Lacan. In the early 1970s, he penned a series of dense texts dealing with
the impression of reality in cinema, the role of Renaissance perspective
in this illusion, and the functioning of the hors-champ (off-screen space)
in the filmic image. He continued this field of preoccupations in his later
writings, introducing concepts such as “anamorphosis” and “deframing”
into film theory, before becoming a director of feature films in the 1990s.
While his f ilms could have been dismissed as middle-class neurotic
comedies, they in fact evince a fascinating relationship with his earlier
theory in their narrative re-working of the concept of the hors-champ.

Keywords: Pascal Bonitzer, Cahiers du cinéma, hors-champ, psychoanalytic

film theory, apparatus theory, deframing

The Reality of Denotation

The last of the trio of Lacan-influenced critics treated in this section, Bonitzer
was also the one whose collaboration with Cahiers was the most enduring:
he wrote regularly for the journal until 1989, albeit in increasing isolation
from the rest of the editorial team after Daney’s departure in 1981. His work
on questions of film form, psychoanalysis and cinematic ontology was also
the most prolific, eventually leading to several book-length studies in the
late 1970s and 1980s, before he made the shift to filmmaking in the 1990s.
Writing with a literary panache that was unmatched in the journal and

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch24
718  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

that presaged his later prowess as a screenwriter and director, Bonitzer

was also something of an intellectual jackdaw, picking up strands of ideas
developed by other figures and incorporating them into his film theory
without necessarily devoting himself to the prolonged work of scholarly
research that a more rigorous preoccupation with such concepts would have
demanded. Nonetheless, in incorporating into his writings on the cinema a
web of theoretical influences—consisting principally of the pentad formed
by Lacan, Bazin, Schefer, Barthes and Bataille, to which could be periodi-
cally added the work of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Metz—Bonitzer’s
contribution to film theory is considerable, and his treatment of the major
problematics preoccupying the Cahiers tradition since the journal’s founding
is of inestimable value.
Chief among these was the role of Renaissance perspective in produc-
ing an “impression of reality” in the visual image, whether painted or
photographic. Bonitzer joined Oudart and others at Cahiers in applying
to the cinema the research carried out by Francastel and Schefer into the
ideological implications of the development of perspectiva artificialis in
fifteenth-century Italy. The monocular perspective of this visual system,
which was hegemonic in Western art until the end of the nineteenth
century, was both impregnated by and played a role in entrenching
modern bourgeois subjectivity during capitalism’s nascent period. Far
from being a scientific technique aimed at the perfection of verisimilitude,
the perspectival schema of post-Renaissance painting was charged with
cultural and ideological effects. Schefer’s work, in particular, explored
the nexus between painting and ideology, and the theorist’s ties with
Tel Quel (he published there regularly) led to the incorporation of his
ideas into film theory.1 As noted in Part I, Marcelin Pleynet, in remarks
in an interview with Cinéthique, was the f irst to argue that the cinema
“produc[es] a perspectival code directly inherited from and constructed
on the quattrocento model of scientif ic perspective,” while Jean-Louis
Baudry explored this line of thinking more deeply in “Cinéma: effets
idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base.”2 For political as well as

1 See Jean Louis Schefer, “Note sur les systèmes représentatifs,” Tel Quel no. 40 (Spring 1970),
pp. 44-71; and Jean Louis Schefer, “Saint Augustin,” Tel Quel no. 56 (Winter 1973), pp. 65-102. Schefer
was also interviewed in the first issue of the Tel Quel “satellite” Peinture, Cahiers théoriques. See
Jean Louis Schefer, “Sur la peinture,” Peinture, Cahiers théoriques no. 1 (May 1971).
2 Marcelin Pleynet and Jean Thibaudeau, interviewed by Gérard Leblanc, “Économique,
idéologique, formel…” Cinéthique no. 3, pp. 7-14, here p. 10. Translated as, “Economic – ideologi-
cal – formal,” trans. Elias Noujaim, in Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: BFI,
1980), pp. 149-164, here p. 156; and Jean-Louis Baudry, “Cinéma: effets idéologiques produits
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 719

strategic reasons, the Cahiers editors were seduced by the telquelien line
of thinking, but pieces by Comolli, Oudart and Bonitzer pushed back
against the overly totalizing nature of Pleynet and Baudry’s claims. In
Bonitzer’s case, this resulted in a series of four articles beginning with
“‘Réalité’ de la dénotation” in May 1971 and concluding with “Hors-champ
(un espace en défaut)” at the end of the same year. Running in tandem
with Comolli’s multi-part text “Technique et idéologie,” Bonitzer’s writings
pursued a similar problematic. Across these two series, the critics shared
many of the same polemical targets—Mitry, Lebel, Bazin, Baudry—and
recurrently referred to each other’s work. Far from simply reinforcing the
arguments aired by Comolli, however, Bonitzer brought to the discussion
a distinct frame of references, which would have a lasting effect on his
later writings on the cinema.
At the same time as Cahiers engaged in a sympathetic critique of Pleynet
and Baudry, the journal’s editors fostered close relations with Schefer and
published two articles by the art theorist, “Les couleurs renversées/la buée” in
July 1971 and “Sur le ‘Déluge universel’ d’Uccello” in March-April 1972.3 Later,
in 1981, Schefer’s monograph L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma was released
under Narboni’s Cahiers du cinéma imprint and had a significant impact
on the Cahiers editors, with Bonitzer recognizing that “a whole theory
and history of the catastrophes of perception is written in this book, or, to
put it more knowingly and more indiscreetly: a sanguinary failure of the
mirror-stage.”4 Schefer’s was also the starting point of Bonitzer’s argument
in “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation,” which opens with an epigraph citing him to
the effect that “the operation which restores the third dimension in the
‘camera obscura’ occurs by means of an apparatus (a mechanism) which

par l’appareil de base,” Cinéthique no. 7-8 (c. mid-late 1970), pp. 1-8. Translated as “Ideological
Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, in Philip Rosen (ed.),
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), pp. 286-298.
3 See Jean Louis Schefer, “Les couleurs renversées/la buée,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 230 (July 1971),
pp. 28-42; and Jean Louis Schefer, “Sur le ‘Déluge universel’ d’Uccello,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 236-
237 (May-June 1972), pp. 42-66. The latter of these articles, published during the height of the
journal’s Marxist-Leninist period, now seems rather incongruously placed, as it appears in
the same issue as attacks on the PCF and lengthy articles on the cinema of Maoist China. It
nonetheless went on to form the center of Schefer’s book Le Déluge, la peste, Paolo Uccello (Paris:
Galilée, 1976).
4 Pascal Bonitzer, “L’être idéal et le criminel (Jean-Louis Schefer: L’Homme ordinaire du
cinéma),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 320 (February 1981), pp. 60-61, here p. 61. For Schefer’s book, see
Jean Louis Schefer, L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1981).
720  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

(1) produces results, and (2) vanishes from its product.”5 In his own opening
remarks, Bonitzer accepts the broader idea that the “cinematic ideological
apparatus” was “contrived, scientifically and ideologically, on the basis
of the figurative system elaborated following the symbolic mutation of
the Renaissance.” But he insists that it would be erroneous to conceive,
with Jean-Louis Baudry, of filmic figuration as being a “prisoner” of the
scenographic cube of quattrocento perspective. While it is true that the film
camera, with its temporally diachronic nature and its ability to move through
a given space, can be considered “a perfection of the imaginary freedom
lavished by the screen-mirror on the ocular subject,” certain inventions in
film technique, such as the close-up, produce “a plastic discontinuity that
irreversibly fractures the imaginary cube.”6 With its capacity for fragmenting
the scenographic unity of the filmic image, the close-up is thus one of the
primary sites for Bonitzer to interrogate and contest the sweeping claims
made about the ideological nature of cinematic representation by Baudry.
In seeking out a definition of the shot as a “theoretical unit of articulation,”
however, Bonitzer insists on the decisive nature of the historical, political
and formal contexts in which it is used. A close-up in Eisenstein, or in
Godard, is not the same as a close-up in a classical Hollywood film. Like
Comolli, therefore, Bonitzer formulates a critique of Mitry’s “normative
classification” of shots as being founded on “ideological arbitraries,” an
empiricist shortcoming he also detects in the grande syntagmatique of
Metzian semiology. Metz’s distinction between denotation (what an image
shows) and connotation (how it shows) also comes in for critical assessment
by Bonitzer. In being based on the “analogical lure” of the cinematographic
image, a “cinema of denotation” would, in the Cahiers critic’s argument, have
the effect of “constraining film and its reading to a transcendental semantic
level which is ‘cinematic language’ articulated in its narrative function, and
of ‘condemning’ connotation to the role of ‘artistic’ supplement, expressive
redundancy.” For Bonitzer, both Metzian semiology and Bazinian ontology
are characterized by a theoretical occlusion of “the symbolic/ideological
reality of the ‘spontaneous’ recognition effect” in cinematic representation,
which is produced by both the continuous reproduction of mobile figures
and, in dominant film codes, by the “welding” of the diachronic articula-
tion of images to narrative functions. Metz has the additional defect of
attempting to bestow a degree of “scientificity” onto what is, in the end, a

5 Jean Louis Schefer, “L’image: le sens ‘investi,’ Communications no. 15 (1970), pp. 210-221, here
p. 210. Cited in Pascal Bonitzer, “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation,” p. 39 [p. 248].
6 Ibid.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 721

purely ideological effect. Bonitzer thus turns to Schefer’s critique of “rigid

Saussureanism,” which refuses “an absolute reduction of the status of the
image as a text” and argues that “denotation cannot be conceived as a
simple designation, for […] it necessarily implicates a systematic process
of definition.” The passage from designation to definition—from simply
stating “here is a cat” to determining the meaning of the énoncé “cat”—is
by definition a process of transformation, which redefines the signifying
field of that which is designated. The meaning of the cinematic signifier is
thus, for Bonitzer, transversal to the “designation effect.”7
“Le Gros Orteil,” explicitly following on from the earlier article, focuses
more specifically on the status of the close-up in Mitry’s formal system,
arguing that his “historicist” discourse on the technique has the effect of
resorbing the “fragmentation irreducible to all narrative totalization” and
reinvesting the close-up into the “teleological history of filmic narrativity.”
Bonitzer nonetheless picks up on an off-hand comment from Mitry that the
close-up is a “supplement” to the general narrative movement of a film, in
order to relate the technique to Derrida’s notion of supplementarity, a step
that allows the Cahiers critic to surmise that “the close-up is the supplement
of the filmic scene […] and, in this sense, substitutes the mechanical eye of
the camera for the ‘living’ eye of the theater spectator.”8 Moreover, Bonitzer
relates this notion to Jean Epstein’s description, in Bonjour cinéma, of a near-
shot of a telephone as “a monster, a tower and a character,” phrasing that for
Bonitzer had echoes of Bataille’s description of the big toe—“always more or
less defective and humiliating”—in the avant-garde journal Documents.9 As
Epstein’s reverie suggests, the close-up destroys the scale of shots and undoes
the hierarchical formal systems based thereupon. It is for this reason that its
transgressive potential must, in the formal practice of classical cinema, be
minimized and, as much as possible, negated. The ideology subtending this
occlusion of the close-up is, in Bonitzer’s view, most coherently formulated
by Bazin’s film theory, and more specifically his insistence on a realist
vocation of the cinema that finds its apogee in the depth-of-field technique
of Welles and Renoir.

7 The quotes in this paragraph are from ibid, pp. 40-41 [pp. 250-251].
8 Pascal Bonitzer, “Le Gros Orteil (‘Réalité’ de la dénotation, 2),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 232
(October 1971), pp. 15-22, here p. 16.
9 Ibid., p. 19. See also Georges Bataille, “Le gros orteil,” Documents no. 6 (November 1929),
pp. 297-302; and Jean Epstein, Bonjour cinéma (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921). Epstein had
earlier been discussed by Cahiers in a 1968 dossier on the “old avant-garde.” See André S. Labarthe,
“Epstein à l’état naissant,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 202 (June-July 1968), pp. 51-52.
722  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

The third installment of Bonitzer’s series, “Fétichisme de la technique:

la notion de plan,” mainly consists of a rebarbative denunciation of the
technicism and ahistoricism of Lebel’s Cinéma et idéologie. Beyond this
diatribe, his discussion of the “fetishism” at the basis of the notion of the
shot prefigures the later, more detailed symptomatic reading of Bazin’s
theory in “L’écran du fantasme.” Here Bonitzer understands the fetishism
of the shot, in its psychoanalytic sense, as a Verleugnung (disavowal) of the
castration produced by the scenographic limitations of the frame, which
produces in the spectator the “I know very well… but all the same…” attitude
described by Mannoni. Bonitzer finds this state of denial admirably intuited
in Bazin’s expression, from “Montage interdit,” that: “What is needed […]
is for us to believe that the events are real even while we know them to be
tricks.”10 In Bonitzer’s analysis, it is the incorporation within a single frame
of two or more heterogeneous elements (Chaplin and the lion, in Bazin’s
paradigmatic example) that produces a “pseudos of reality whose illusory
character is known to us, but to which our desire adheres.” The cinema of
classical scenography, since it prizes temporal continuity and spatial unity,
is thus “obsessed with, or hallucinated by, castration, by all the possible
figures of ‘physical violence’ […] and death.”11 In doing so, it serves to mask
the real violence—whether economic, political, ideological or sexual—of
contemporary capitalist society.

The Hors-champ

In retrospect, the three articles discussed above can perhaps best be seen
as preludes to the major theoretical advance achieved by Bonitzer during
this period: namely, his notion of the hors-champ, as first elaborated in the
December 1971-February 1972 article “Hors-champ (un espace en défaut).”
While the term itself (“off-screen space” in English) is borrowed from Burch’s
Theory of Film Practice, Bonitzer’s use of the concept is far more theoretically
fecund and has had enduring resonances for his Cahiers colleagues, for
whom it became one of the cornerstones of their reflection on the cinema.12
Bonitzer himself now looks back on this text more favorably than many of
his other articles. Whereas he admits that he “would not like to re-read”

10 Bazin, “Montage interdit,” p. 124 [p. 80]. Cited in Pascal Bonitzer, “Fétichisme de la technique:
la notion de plan,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233 (November 1971), pp. 4-10, here p. 9.
11 Ibid., p. 10.
12 The more general utilization Bonitzer and his colleagues have made of this term, deploying
it to refer to any repressed, masked or invisible aspect of thought or visual representation, thus
legitimates here retaining the original French term (which literally means “outside-the-field”).
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 723

the initial installments in the “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation” series, he finds

“Hors-champ” to be “a more important text, because I tried to theorize
(for myself, in a sense) the specificity of the cinematic mise en scène that
motivated me and fascinated me.”13
Covering a wide range of film theory in the roughly 6000 words of his
piece, Bonitzer’s “Hors-champ” is divided into four sections: “True, false,”
“Screen-space, off-screen space [hors-champ],” “Instrument, work” and
“The Divided Scene.” The first section recaps much of the argument made
in Bonitzer’s preceding articles on the production of an “impression of
reality” in the cinema, which he finds to be more imperative than in any
other visual signifying practice. Channeling Schefer, Bonitzer asserts that
“the automatic ideological gesture which inaugurates our viewing of a film,
our experience of the projection, is to invest the surface of the screen with
a fictive depth. This depth denotes the reality within the fiction, the reality
of the fiction.”14 From the very beginning, then, the spectator is caught in an
antinomic relationship with the cinematographic image, divided between
the reality of its flatness and the illusory depth it presents. A cleavage of
the subject is produced: when watching a film, we oscillate between being
taken in by the “impression of reality” and, at any given moment, operating
a critical “pulling-back” that allows us to “question the ‘authenticity’ of
a costume, criticize the actor ‘behind’ the character, wonder whether a
background is or is not a back-projection, ask ourselves about the cost of a
production, and so on.”15 For Bonitzer, however, this is principally a defense
mechanism against the formidable “power of assertion” produced by the
cinema. Even when faced with a cinematographic representation, however,
our demand for the real can never, by definition, be truly satisfied, and so,
paradoxically, such moments of “distancing,” of contesting the authenticity
of what we see, are necessary to maintain our credence in the film—both
on the level of narrative verisimilitude and on the level of the “realism” of
the figures presented on the screen. Thus, in Bonitzer’s words, “we never
succumb absolutely, hypnotically, to the ‘reality’ of cinema. The ‘impression
of reality’ is from the start affected by a lack,” and this lack is produced by
the “material structure of the cinematic fiction.”16 The cinematographic
image, of course, cannot show us everything. It is characterized—and
even “haunted”—by the absence of what it conceals from our view, and it

13 Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014.

14 Pascal Bonitzer, “Hors-champ (un espace en défaut),” p. 15 [p. 291].
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 16 [p. 293].
724  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

is by working with this absence that the impression of reality is produced.

Following Barthes in “Le troisième sens,” Bonitzer thus determines two levels
of absence or lack in the filmic scene: a diachronic or temporal order (the
between-two-shots, or entre-deux-plans) and a synchronic or spatial order
(the out-of-frame, or hors-cadre).17
It is here that Burch’s notion of the hors-champ enters Bonitzer’s discus-
sion. Bonitzer commends Burch for treating filmic space as a “divided” or
“lacking” space while at the same time lamenting the confinement of his
analysis to an empiricist and formally reductive approach.18 The Cahiers
critic’s key move is to relate the Burchian notion of a dialectical relationship
between screen space (the champ) and off-screen space (the hors-champ)
to the theory of bourgeois representation founded on the “centered space”
of the scenographic cube, as developed by Schefer and Francastel. In con-
stituting the “extension and imaginary support” of the cinematic field, the
hors-champ, in Bonitzer’s analysis, displaces the scene’s center of gravity, a
displacement that itself represents a major resource in the classical system
of shot construction. While other visual forms such as the theater and
painting also have an “off” space, cinema is distinguished by the fact that
this space is constantly subject to shifts and inversions due to the possibility
of camera movement, and, even more strikingly, the editing together of shots
taken from disparate camera angles. Thus the hors-champ of the cinema,
even in its classical guise, “can be thought of as a dimension of time and
movement; off-screen space [le hors-champ] (a particular off-screen space)
becomes screen space, screen space is transformed into off-screen space.”19
The “real” space of the cinematic field and its “virtual” counterpart thus
become interchangeable in a recurrent process of dialectical reversal. This
process, moreover, has a clear ideological effect: to “confirm the ‘reality’
(the concreteness) of a scene from one ‘field’ to another via what is absent
from it,” or, in Bazin’s terminology, to produce a “gain” in the “reality” of
the cinematic scene.20 Bonitzer, indeed, credits Bazin’s notion of the film
screen as a cache (mask) that “unveils only a part of reality” rather than a
cadre (frame) that contains it “in its entirety,” for prefiguring the notion of
the hors-champ, even if Bazin remains ostensibly beholden to an “idealist”
conception of the cinema’s relationship with reality.21 The impression of

17 Ibid., p. 18 [p. 293].

18 Ibid. [pp. 293-294].
19 Ibid., p. 20 [p. 295].
20 Ibid. [p. 296].
21 See Bazin, “Théâtre et cinéma,” p. 100 [p. 193].
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 725

reality produced by an alternation between a field and its hors-champ in

classical filmic representation, however, relies on an adherence to two
formal principles. The first is a foreclosing (or “suturing”) of the “gap” (bé-
ance) opened up between the shots through the establishment of a set of
formal rules of editing that are governed by the principles of “continuity,
intelligibility and homogeneity.”22 Secondly, the scenic dispositif of classical
cinema must foreclose the existence of the true “other scene” of the filmic
field, namely the technical instruments required to produce the image
(the camera, lights, microphones, etc.) which are “literally within arm’s
reach” on the set but which, on the pain of an unwelcome disruption to
the spectator’s investment in the “reality” of the scene, must not be visible
in the film image itself.
At this point, therefore, Bonitzer appears close to Jean-Louis Baudry’s
position concerning the ideological nature of cinematic representation. The
third section of “Hors-champ,” however, is dedicated to an extensive rebuttal
of Baudry’s text. For Bonitzer, Baudry offers a “naïve” and “mechanistic”
understanding of the cinema that ends up resembling the technicist dis-
course of Lebel. Not only does he conflate “ideology” and “idealism” (leaping
from a discussion of the ideological effects of the cinematic apparatus to
an assertion of its fundamentally idealist nature), but the abstract nature
of his discussion has the result of autonomizing the sphere of ideology and
foreclosing the historically situated nature of filmic representation. For
Bonitzer, therefore, the Tel Quel writer’s analysis is “standing on its head,”
since:

by giving this field, the instrumental base, the main role, and refusing to
analyze the actions of foreclosure, or of the “intervention” of the instru-
ment as signifier in the fictional scene, as actions that are historically
determined, Baudry inevitably falls into the formalism and hypostasis
of an ideological effect; which is in the final analysis the hypostasis of
the ideological ‘sphere’ conceived of as a closed system not worked on
by history.23

Bonitzer—widely and not unjustly seen as a major representative of “appa-

ratus theory”—thus anticipates many of the arguments subsequently made
against this theoretical current by forces hostile to it: namely, its ahistorical
conception of the cinema, its confusion of ideology and idealist metaphysics,

22 Bonitzer, “Hors-champ,” p. 21 [p. 297].

23 Ibid. [p. 301]
726  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

and its hypostasis of the ideological sphere as a closed system. Despite the
availability of “Hors-champ” in English translation, these flaws have often,
ironically, been ascribed to the Cahiers writers themselves, undeserved
victims of later acts of conflation and confusion. Indeed, the major source
of Bonitzer’s frustration with Baudry lies in the latter’s contention that
it would “suffice” to “reveal the mechanism”—that is, to introduce the
“elements of production” (such as the camera) into the cinematic scene—in
order for bourgeois representation, and the spectatorial misrecognition at
its heart, to “collapse.”24 For Bonitzer, by contrast, it is far from certain that
such a collapse would be assured by the “magic, providential, miraculous”
apparition of the signifier of the camera in the scriptural work of the film.25
Rather, the ideological investment of the cinematic image can only be
deconstructed through an “inscription of the work” in the scene that would
be the result of the patient labor of theoretically conscious experimentation
with film form.
In all four of the texts in the “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation” series, Bonitzer
does not limit himself to a purely descriptive account of “bourgeois” cin-
ematic representation but offers an alternative model of “materialist” film
practice, grounded mainly in the work carried out initially by the Soviet
montage tradition of the 1920s (Eisenstein and Vertov) and, more recently,
figures such as Straub/Huillet, Duras and the Godard of the “Groupe Dziga
Vertov” era.26 In “Fétichisme de la technique,” for instance, he declared that
“only a cinema practicing a dialectical materialist approach to form […] can
claim to hold, with full knowledge of the facts, a political discourse (which,
with full knowledge of the facts, can only be Marxist-Leninist, proletarian).”27
In “Hors-champ,” Bonitzer is more specific about this approach. Whereas
in bourgeois cinema the “principle of the material division of the scene” is
obfuscated, a materialist scene should first of all define itself as “divided,
marked by a signifying bar implying a productive broken, contradictory
scenography, irreducible to the flat ‘realism’ of the specular scene.” Such a
pluralized, heterogeneous scene can be found in films such as Othon and
Duras’ Jaune le soleil, but it is only in the Groupe Dziga Vertov’s Vent d’est
and Luttes en Italie that this formal work is accompanied by an explicit
analysis of the “scenographic apparatus” as an “ideological apparatus.”

24 See Baudry, “Cinéma: Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” p. 8 [p. 296].
25 Bonitzer, “Hors-champ,” p. 22 [p. 301].
26 Indeed, it is partly due to Bonitzer’s insistent advocacy of the Groupe Dziga Vertov that a
reconciliation between Godard and Cahiers was brought about at this time, after a period of
frosty relations in the years 1969-1971. See Chapter 10 for more on this link.
27 Bonitzer, “Fétichisme de la technique,” p. 10.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 727

Moreover, it is only in these films that the true “other scene” of bourgeois
representation is exposed: to wit, the class struggle between the capitalist
class and the proletariat. In the absence of this political hors-champ, Bonitzer
argues, “any questioning of the ‘place’ of the spectator, or the scenographic
apparatus, would be meaningless, lacking a stake, or would have only the
minor meaning of a game without risks or consequences.”28

The Gaze and the Voice

In the wake of the demoralizing experience of the “Front culturel” project,

the militant conf idence that imbued the conclusion of “Hors-champ”
largely disappeared from Bonitzer’s writings, but throughout the 1970s
and into the 1980s he maintained an ongoing interest in questions of filmic
representation, which was manifested across a wide range of the critical
articles he wrote for Cahiers during this period. In 1976, Bonitzer was the
first of his generation of Cahiers critics to publish a collection of his writings
in book form, as part of the 10/18 series overseen by the publisher Christian
Bourgois. This anthology was tellingly titled Le Regard et la Voix, and it is the
interaction of these two elements—the gaze and the voice—that informs
much of his criticism in the post-gauchiste years. Le Regard et la Voix opens
with a re-worked version of Bonitzer’s article on the “Hors-champ”—now
stripped of the more stridently Marxist-Leninist statements of the original
piece and given the pluralist title “Des hors-champs”—which forms the
theoretical foundation stone upon which many of the other articles included
in Le Regard et la voix build. Central to his revamped problematic was an
interrogation of the militant documentary, a format that had never received
an overly favorable reception by Cahiers. Indeed, Bonitzer and his colleagues
were particularly dubitative about the political and epistemological value
of these films, which in their worst examples combined a theoretically
naïve usage of the image with a hectoring voice-over delivering the political
message the filmmakers wished to convey. While Godard’s Ici et ailleurs
critically demolished many of the presuppositions operative in this mode of
filmmaking, Bonitzer also finds counterexamples to the sterilities of much
contemporary militant cinema in the work of other, less heralded figures.
Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin, for instance, was appreciated for inject-
ing La tierra prometida with grotesque, carnivalesque elements (descending
from the literary tradition of Cervantes, Rabelais and Dostoyevsky, as

28 Bonitzer, “Hors-champ,” p. 26. [pp. 302-303].

728  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

analyzed by Bakhtin) which allowed him to achieve a “deeper realism” that

has “no fear of encompassing fantastic forms, the multiple representations
from which ‘the rich and vivid language of the masses’ is woven, and which
subverts, by crudely parodying them, the language and representations of
the dominant classes, their codes.”29 Similarly, Bénie Deswarte and Yann
Le Masson’s Kashima Paradise, with its focus on the far-left movement in
Japan, was hailed for leading the spectator into “a work of the eye and of
thought,” most notably by virtue of possessing a voice-over commentary
that “proclaims the side it takes, that thus avows the selection and editing
of the images of the film.”30 Although this approach presents the risk of
falling into partisan dogmatism, a trap Kashima Paradise does not always
avoid (such as when the image of a Japanese farmer is accompanied by an
extract of the Communist Manifesto on the vacillating political position
of the peasantry), for the most part the filmmakers use the voice-over to
destroy the “false immediacy” of cinematic representation by “naming what
is shown and by enunciating the knowledge that disposes of it (Marxism)
and the reading that is made of it (political economy).”31
The considerations formulated in these responses to individual films
were synthesized in Bonitzer’s contribution to a 1975 Cahiers dossier on
militant cinema. “Les silences de la voix” was Bonitzer’s most in-depth
article of this period and, thanks to its republication in English in Rosen’s
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, probably his most widely read piece. In-
cited by the release of the compilation film Mai 68 by Gudie Lawaetz, the
article expands in scope to cover a broad overview of documentary film
practice—encompassing Antonioni’s Chung-kuo China, Marker’s Lettre
de Sibérie and Buñuel’s Las Hurdes. As with the earlier text on Kashima
Paradise, the question of the point of view of the filmmaker is a crucial one
for Bonitzer. A common understanding of documentary film is that, unlike
its fictional counterpart, it is inherently averse to signifying ambiguity and
aims instead “to shed light on the real with which it deals” and “disengage
from that real a readability and hence a point of view.”32 Ordinarily, the most
preponderant manner in which a documentary filmmaker communicates

29 Pascal Bonitzer, “La voix veille (La Terre promise),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 253 (October-
November 1974), pp. 37-38, here p. 37. Repr. in idem., Le Regard et la Voix (Paris: Union générale
des éditions, 1976), pp. 132-134.
30 Pascal Bonitzer, “Kashima Paradise,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 254-255 (December 1974-Janu-
ary 1975), pp. 44-45, here p. 45. Repr. in idem., Le Regard et la Voix, pp. 145-147.
31 Ibid.
32 Pascal Bonitzer, “Les silences de la voix,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 256 (February-March 1975),
pp. 22-33, here p. 23. Repr in idem., Le Regard et la Voix, pp. 25-49. Translated as “The Silences of
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 729

their message to the spectator is through the voice-over, laid over the top
of the images in order to instill them with meaning and articulate them
with the intended discourse of the film. But what happens, Bonitzer asks,
when a film such as Mai 68 presents a broad spectrum of viewpoints on
a still-contentious historical event and does away with an authoritative
voice-over guiding the spectator towards a specific political viewpoint? Is
it simply a “free confrontation” of views that, as Lawaetz, quoting Sartre,
suggests, lets the events “speak for themselves”? The Cahiers critic answers
in the negative: a discourse still speaks in the film, but it does so in a silent
fashion, through the voice’s absence. This discourse is therefore that of a
“subject-supposed-to-know,” a term drawn from Lacanian theory to refer
to the position of absolute mastery and knowledge that the analysand
necessarily bestows upon the analyst (placed in the position of the “Big
Other”) as a precondition of undergoing treatment. The formal system
of Mai 68 is therefore in apparent opposition to that which governs most
militant cinema. Whereas the latter openly, if often dogmatically, avows its
point of view in the form of an authoritative commentary directly addressed
to the spectator, Lawaetz’s film conceals its own production of discourse
and instead creates an “impression of knowledge” that elicits a form of
spectatorial jouissance. While the means for conveying its point of view may
be subtler and less obtrusive than those of the militant film’s voice-over,
taking the form of editing structures, camera angles and the discourse of
on-screen “talking heads,” the end result is the same. Both the militant film
and the “no commentary” approach of Mai ’68 share with television news
a discursive structure in which an anonymous, de-subjected voice speaks.
In all these audiovisual forms, therefore, the “burning voice of revolt” gives
way to the “cold voice of order, normality and power.”33 In a deft piece of
wordplay, Bonitzer argues that commentary thus becomes comment-taire
(how to be silent): it ensures a repression of those aspects of the subject
matter that the filmmaker does not wish to enter into their discourse.34
Bonitzer thereupon seeks out the possibility of a more productive utiliza-
tion of voice-over in documentary films. The famous sequence from Lettre de
Sibérie in which the same footage of roadwork in the Siberian city of Yakutsk
is repeated with three different commentaries, each offering a different

the Voice,” trans. Philip Rosen, in Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, pp. 319-334, here
p. 320.
33 Ibid., p. 27 [p. 325].
34 The English version of the text avoids Bonitzer’s untranslatable wordplay, which appears
twice in the original text, thus markedly impoverishing the original’s rhetorical force.
730  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

political perspective (Stalinist, virulently anti-communist and a third,

supposedly more nuanced and balanced position), is mentioned but is looked
upon rather adversely as adhering to the practice of “minimal commentary”
and, by extension, Bazin’s celebration of the ontological ambiguity of the
film image.35 Las Hurdes is found to be more promising for consciously
working on and parodying an aspect of the voice-over technique found
in old travelogues, pre-war newsreels and the worst examples of militant
cinema. In these films, a comic effect is unintentionally produced by a
certain shrillness, bombast or insufferable optimism that can be discerned
in what Barthes would call the “grain” of the voice. The grain of the voice
is an accent deriving not from a geographical region but from a “region of
meaning” (an era, a class or a political regime). For Bonitzer, the detection
of such an accent betrays to the spectator not only the heterogeneity of
the voice to the images it accompanies but also the existence of the body
bearing the voice of the commentary, and this undermines its potential
for relaying an authoritative discourse that bestows meaning on the image
track. An embodied voice is incapable of being the voice of the master, of
the subject-supposed-to-know. The discursive strategy of “no commentary”
is thus the response of contemporary cinema to the increasing ability of
the spectator to perceive and therefore ridicule the embodied nature of the
traditional off-screen commentary; the voice of the master, here, is retained
by means of the silence of the voice-over.
As with his earlier theoretical texts from Cahiers’ Marxist period, Bonitzer
posits the work of Straub/Huillet, Duras and Godard as a productive site for
“limit experiments” that would strive for “a tearing in the effect of the real
of the image and in the effect of mastery of the voice.” But he also detects
positive signs in certain militant documentaries that refuse an orthodox
usage of voice-over. For instance, Oser lutter (a film made about striking
workers in the town of Flins in May-June 1968) is noted for combining a
“confused mixture of voices, over black leader, from which emerges in bits
and pieces the ‘truth’ of the struggle” with intertitles that present “the clarity
of revolutionary knowledge.” In a French Maoist film about the cultural
revolution, Shanghai au jour le jour, an even more inventive technique
is found: “there are two voices-off of women in dialogue, but they do not
directly comment on the real which the image reflects; […] rather they
comment on the image track and clearly are speaking in an editing room.”36
The act of presenting two women speaking to one another about the images

35 Ibid. [p. 326].

36 Ibid.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 731

they see before them is thus an effective means of blocking the “terrorist
indetermination of the voice-off” and re-investing the documentary form
with a speaking subject that avows its own status as such. For Bonitzer, it
points the way forward to a militant cinema that, rather than merely being
“classical documentary plus rage and great, fine-sounding words,” has the
potential to be “something else completely, something which organizes
otherwise the relation to the real, the look, and the voice.”37

The Blind Field

An interrogation of the relations between the cinema and the real is central
to Bonitzer’s following book-length publication, 1982’s Le Champ aveugle:
Essais sur le réalisme. The filmmakers that come under focus in this study
consist largely of the key figures in the traditional Cahiers canon. As Bonitzer
puts it in his introduction: “Some names punctuate this interrogation:
Lumière, Griffith, Eisenstein, Bazin, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Godard. They
represent the intense moments in the cinema’s play with reality, either in
the form of a pitiless fragmentation—the avatars of montage and cinematic
shots—or in the form of an equivocal respect. Much as Le Regard et la Voix
assembled Bonitzer’s articles from the years 1971-1976, Le Champ aveugle
drew on texts written in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Of particular rel-
evance here was a two-part article from 1977, “La notion de plan et le sujet
du cinéma,” and the text of Bonitzer’s January 1977 address to Barthes’
seminar at the Collège de France, “La vision partielle.” For the most part,
however, Le Champ aveugle is much more loosely based on pre-existing work
than Le Regard et la Voix and should be seen as an independent text in its
own right. By 1982, too, the attitude Bonitzer takes towards Bazin is more
overtly positive than in his earlier texts, which were vexed by the legacy of
Cahiers’ founder. The presiding argument of Le Champ aveugle is that the
cinema presents “at the level of reality, a kind of split [schize] that it must
conjure from a disavowal: this is the root of fetishism.” This schize of reality,
this persistent, vacillating process of belief and doubt in the ontological
realism of the cinematographic image, is fundamentally intuited in many
of Bazin’s texts, while Bonitzer also finds it metaphorically expressed in
Roald Dahl’s short story The Wish, in which a child playfully imagines that

37 The passage from which these citations are drawn does not appear in the original version
of “Les silences de la voix” but was added for its republication in Le Regard et la Voix (p. 46) and
included in Rosen’s English translation (p. 331).
732  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the intricate motifs of a carpet represent real dangers—burning f ires,

snakes, etc.—only for the fantasy to become menacingly real. Or, as Bonitzer
describes it: “The ‘impression of reality’ reclaimed in order to assure the
serious nature of the game became mortal. The motifs dissociated from
the carpet were stripped of their reassuring form in order to become wild,
intense forces.” There is, he suggests, “something like this that takes place,
‘primitively,’ in the cinema.” The “primary phenomenon” of the cinema is,
it follows, “this movement that leaps out at the spectators, when the blank
surface disappears, when the lights go out, far from the sun, in order to
give way to the mobile play of light and shadow.”38 As in his articles from
a decade earlier, it is the functioning of phenomena such as the close-up,
the deep-focus shot and the hors-champ that forms the center of Bonitzer’s
reflections in Le Champ aveugle.
The first section of his book, therefore, focuses on the notion of the shot
in the cinema. Bonitzer gives a condensed history of the development of
the shot, from its existence in potentia in the Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train
en gare de La Ciotat to the development of montage under Griffith and,
subsequently, the Soviet filmmakers such as Vertov and Eisenstein, who
sought to take montage further in the direction of violence, terror and
absolute sensation on the one hand (the montage of attractions) and abstrac-
tion, conceptual thought and political consciousness-raising on the other
(intellectual montage), thereby liberating the cinema from its “realist debt”
and “narrative fatality.” The rise of sound cinema in both Hollywood and
the USSR, however, with its “systematic reduction, in accord with narrative
metonymy, of the powers of the close-up and montage,” snuffed out this
pathway and ensured the “reign of découpage.” For Bonitzer, Bazin best
expressed this formal system when he described it as “doorknob mise en
scène”: in a sequence where the fears of the protagonist are fixated on a
character on the other side of a door, on the cusp of entering the room, the
director is compelled to include a close-up of the doorknob being turned.
Writing nearly 25 years after Bazin’s death, Bonitzer professes that “with a
few exceptions, we are still there today.” The dominant system in film and
television, analytic découpage is marked above all by formal closure: “the
space is closed, the spectator thinks he knows where he is, at the center of
the scenographic cube.” But Bazin’s evocation of the doorknob is revealing:
the door is a limit point beyond which lies the realm of the unknown, the
source of terror in the archetypal scene he describes. Behind the door,

38 The quotes in this paragraph are from Pascal Bonitzer, Le Champ aveugle: essais sur le
réalisme (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1982), p. 7.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 733

therefore, there is the hors-champ. The close-up of the doorknob has the
function of indicating the menace produced by the hors-champ and thereby
generates a sense of suspense in the viewer. Hitchcock, renowned as “the
master of suspense,” is also the Hollywood director to have most productively
worked on the close-up to the point of creating its morbid, terrifying other:
the mummified skull of Mrs. Bates in Psycho or the dead body with its eyes
torn out in The Birds. Through the deployment of such intolerable images,
Hitchcock’s “optical narrative vision” reaches the point where the cinema
“collides with its real.”39
The close-up has another quality, however. Even when used in classical
systems of filmic representation, it tends to minimize the depth-of-field
characteristic of the cinematic image and thereby annuls “perspectival
realism.” Instead, it can be read by the viewer as a “pure surface” and bears
a resemblance to the modernist experimentation in radically flattened or
perspectivally distorted images found in Godard, Syberberg and Duras, as
well as, less propitiously, the video aesthetic characterizing the contemporary
wave of science-fiction films and other blockbuster movies. Writing in
what was still a nascent period for video production, Bonitzer sees the new
technology as an “involution” rather than an evolution of film language.
Bereft of grain, shadow, depth or perspective, susceptible to incrustation
or decomposition, the videographic image is, by its nature, non-figurative,
a pure surface. Mise en scène is replaced by mise en pages. The video image
immediately saturates the attention of the spectator and is antithetical
to cinematic narrative. At its best, it can be used to create short visual
haikus such as Ed Emshwiller’s Sunstone, but Bonitzer is globally negative
towards the technology. Celluloid may well have been, as George Lucas
provocatively stated, a “stupid material typical of the nineteenth century,”
and video could turn out to be the “sophisticated, reliable format worthy of
the twentieth century,” but this only elicits a terse lament from the critic:
“Poor twentieth century.”40
Bonitzer thus returns, in the second half of Le Champ aveugle, to the
cinematic dispositif and in particular to the “partial vision” that this visual
form produces. The visual field of the cinema is doubled by what Bonitzer
calls the “blind field,” a theoretical cognate of Oudart’s l’Absent. Again,
it is an insight by Bazin that forms the point of departure for Bonitzer’s
thinking on the issue: “When a character walks out of the camera’s field

39 Ibid., pp. 23-26. For the notion of “doorknob mise en scène,” see André Bazin, “Le réalisme
cinématographique et l’école italienne de la Libération,” p. 23 [p. 242].
40 Ibid., p. 32.
734  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

of vision,” he writes in “Théâtre et cinéma,” “we know that he has left the
visual field, but he continues to exist in an identical state somewhere else in
a hidden part of the setting.”41 Bonitzer contests the idea that this is specific
to the cinema: in fact, we can see the same phenomenon when a theatrical
character leaves the scene. In Corneille’s Horace, for instance, the titular
hero who kills Camille in the wings remains identical to the personage we
see on the stage. What truly differentiates the cinema is that “what takes
place in the contiguity of the hors-champ has just as much importance, from
a dramatic point of view—and even, sometimes, more importance—as
what takes place within the frame.”42 Moreover, the interplay of match
cuts and camera movements provides a kind of “fictive proof” of the exist-
ence of the hors-champ: with each change of shot, a section of the blind
field becomes the new visual field, albeit at the expense of consigning
the previous visual field to the status of its absent other. In order for this
system to work, however, a system of prohibitions must be established,
forbidding the presence on the screen of the filmmaking instruments, the
look-towards-the-camera, anachronistic details in a period film, or even
the voices of the crew on the soundtrack. The artifice, in Bazin’s words,
must be “materially perfect.” Bonitzer, however, in a return to the terrain
of his “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation” series, is skeptical about the avant-garde
films of the 1960s and 1970s which, seeing these constraints as “an effect of
the dominant ideology,” sought to introduce images of the technological
apparatus of the cinema into the film itself as a means of undoing this
ideological stranglehold. In and of itself, he insists, such an approach did
not serve to make filmic space more “materialist”; in fact, transforming
the camera into a character by bestowing it with an on-screen existence
was, if anything, even more “metaphysical” and “fantastic” than what the
conventions of classical cinema allowed. What does find itself threatened
by this technique—whether in Vertov or Godard, Keaton or Bergman—is
the “cumbersome naturalism of technical realism.”43
Indeed, it is in their common refusal of naturalism that Bonitzer finds a
point of commonality between Bazin and Eisenstein. Because both figures, in
spite of their undeniable differences, reject the “illusion of reality,” we would
be wrong, the author of Le Champ aveugle insists, to “mechanically oppose
Bazin’s theory of prohibited montage and depth-of-field to Eisenstein’s theory

41 Bazin, “Théâtre et cinéma,” p. 100 [p. 193].

42 Bonitzer, Le Champ aveugle, p. 69.
43 Ibid., p. 75.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 735

of pathos and intellectual montage.”44 In the final analysis, there is little

separating Eisenstein’s notion of “montage within the frame” in Ivan the
Terrible from Bazin’s analysis of the multiple plans (shots or planes) present in
the deep-focus image in Welles. What counts is not “laying bare the device”
through unveiling the machinery used to make a film but experimenting
with the assemblage of shots and the effects this can have on the status
of the film as “an organic ensemble that organically captures pieces of
reality.” And yet the effects of such efforts by Godard, Syberberg or Ruiz are,
Bonitzer concedes, ambivalent. While modernist film, by disjoining shots
and inventing new relations between them, has cast off F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
notorious malediction on the cinema—cursed to be “an art incapable of
expressing anything other than the most common sentiments”—it has
done so only at the expense of a rarefaction of its potential audience. “It has
defeated,” Bonitzer writes, “organic emotions in order to work on subtler
levels,” but in doing so, modernism in film has “opened the cinema onto
both bigger and smaller dimensions.”45

Anamorphoses and Deframings

Although Bonitzer began the 1980s with the publication of Le Champ aveugle,
which can now be seen as the summa of his thinking on the cinema, the
decade was an uncertain one for the critic. From 1977 onwards, his ener-
gies came to be divided between criticism and screenwriting, but he was
yet to make the leap to direction that would come in 1996. At Cahiers, he
continued to write reviews and festival reports on a semi-regular basis, but
after Toubiana became sole editor-in-chief in 1981, Bonitzer was no longer
centrally involved in the editorial direction of the journal. Indeed, while
he recognized the necessity of the orientation advocated by Toubiana,
he is critical of the fact that “the re-positioning of Cahiers du cinéma as a
film magazine also coincided with an abandonment of film theory,” and
he describes this direction as representing the “banalization” of Cahiers. 46
At the same time, Bonitzer’s own reputation as a theorist was growing,
and he came to be something of an ambassador for Lacanian film theory.
Already in 1978, he had contributed an overview of the relationship between
psychoanalysis and cinema to Ça cinéma. In this text, Bonitzer is critical of

44 Ibid., p. 86.
45 The above quotes are from ibid., pp. 101-102.
46 Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014.
736  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the tendency, particularly prevalent in academic discourse on film, to reduce

the Freudian understanding of the cinema to a symptomatic analysis either
of the filmmaker or the audience. Such approaches bear the risk of “freezing
the multiple potential of the works, the films, as a symptom,” a risk that
was even, Bonitzer concedes, the weakness of apparatus theory’s junction
of Marxism and psychoanalysis, with its use of the “equivocal notion” of
ideology to diagnosticize a given film or even the cinema as a whole. 47 His
growing reputation would lead to Bonitzer taking on a regular assignment as
the film columnist for L’Âne: Le magazine freudien, a psychoanalytic cultural
journal published by the École de la cause freudienne. Between 1981 and
1987, he reviewed the work of filmmakers such as Godard, Oliveira, Ruiz,
Skolimowski, Lewis and Rohmer for this publication. While few of these
texts had the theoretical density of his writing for Cahiers,48 the position did
afford Bonitzer the opportunity to write for a non-cinephilic readership and
helped him forge deeper ties with the psychoanalytic community, including
Slavoj Žižek, who also wrote for L’Âne during this period. The encounter
would prove to be a fertile one, as Žižek would end up re-printing two
of Bonitzer’s texts on Hitchcock in his groundbreaking edited collection
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to
Ask Hitchcock), both of which referred to the concept of anamorphosis to
discuss the director of Psycho.
Under the influence of the art historian Jurgis Baltrusaïtis, anamorphosis
was introduced to psychoanalytic theory by Lacan in his Séminaire XI, in a
lecture dedicated to the use of the technique in Holbein’s The Ambassadors.
This painting initially appears to be a traditional portrait of two prosper-
ous members of the early bourgeoisie. In the foreground, however, the
representation is traversed by a “strange, suspended, oblique object,” which
at first glance appears to be an inscrutable stain. When the viewer moves
across the room, the stain is suddenly transformed into a skull, painted
in a distorting, slanted perspective. For Lacan, the use of the anamorphic
technique in Holbein’s painting, stretching the image of the skull to oblique
excess, is more than a mere trick effect or memento mori. Rather, it reveals
to us the nature of the gaze itself in its “pulsatile, dazzling and spread out
function”: “This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In

47 Pascal Bonitzer, “La psychanalyse avec le cinéma,” Ça cinéma no. 15 (c. 1978), pp. 2-7, here
p. 4. It is clear here, however, that Bonitzer’s most explicit reference to this junction of Freud
and Marx was less of a self-criticism and centered more on a critical stance towards Pleynet/
Thibaudeau’s remarks in their interview with Cinéthique.
48 Bonitzer admits that, unlike Cahiers, writing for outlets such as this was “not inspiring,
they did not motivate me.” Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 737

any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you
will see it disappear.”49 The presence of similar effects in Hitchcock’s films
is discerned by Bonitzer in his articles for Žižek’s anthology. In “The Skin
and the Straw,” the critic analyzes the “wholly specular” nature of the 1955
version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, whose continuous play of masks
and mirrors, presenting ordinary people as disturbing (and vice versa),
reveals the inherent structural reversibility of Hitchcock’s films, akin to
the fingers of a glove that can be turned inside and out. For Bonitzer, “it is
because Hitchcock’s films embrace this structure, which is that of the screen
itself, so closely that they seem so often to epitomize the cinema, much as
Holbein’s The Ambassadors and Velázquez’s Las Meninas seem to epitomize
painting.”50 In a more far-reaching text on “Hitchcockian Suspense,” derived
from a chapter in Le Champ aveugle, Bonitzer traces the role of the gaze and
anxiety in the suspense techniques developed by Hitchcock, as opposed
to the idyllic innocence of early cinema’s use of similar editing structures:
“The cinema, which had been innocent, joyful and dirty, was to become
obsessional, fetishistic and frozen. The dirtiness did not disappear but was
interiorized and moralized, and passed over into the gaze—that is, into the
register of desire.”51 In Hitchcock, this manifests itself in the stain associated
with the crime at the center of the film—the glass of milk in Suspicion, the
red tip of the cigarette in Rear Window—which “precipitates a gaze and so
brings about a fiction.” The technique of suspense itself, with its capacity
for stretching and distorting the duration of the film sequence, represents,
in Bonitzer’s view, an “anamorphosis of cinematic time, which shifts the
audience towards that point of the picture where, in the oblong form of
which the characters are unaware, it will recognize the death’s-head.”52
Whereas Griffithian suspense functions on the model of an accelerated
cross-cutting between parallel actions, Hitchcock’s variant “employs an

49 Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 83 [ p. 89].

50 Pascal Bonitzer, “La peau et la paille: Au-delà des apparences: Alfred Hitchock I,” L’Âne:
Le magazine freudien no. 17 (Winter 1986), pp. 16-17. Translated as “The Skin and the Straw,” in
Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask
Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 178-184, here p. 184. This issue can in fact be seen as the
starting point for the book project as a whole, as Bonitzer’s piece was accompanied by a text on
Hitchcock by Žižek, the first time the philosopher had published on the filmmaker. See Slavoj
Žižek, “Double trilogie: Surmoi et idéal: Alfred Hitchcock II,” L’Âne: Le magazine freudien no. 17
(Winter 1986), pp. 18-19.
51 Pascal Bonitzer, “Le suspense hitchcockien,” in Le Champ aveugle, pp. 35-52, here p. 38.
Translated as “Hitchcockian Suspense,” in Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know
about Lacan, pp. 15-30, here p. 17.
52 Ibid., p. 41 [p. 20].
738  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

editing of convergent actions in a homogeneous space, which presupposes

slow motion and is sustained by the gaze, itself evoked by a third element,
a perverse object or a stain.”53
The nexus between the cinema, painting and psychoanalysis, a concern
of Bonitzer’s throughout his time as a film critic, also came to the fore in the
1987 book Décadrages. Although it is now closely associated with him, the
term décadrage (which can be literally rendered as “deframing”) was not an
invention of Bonitzer’s and in fact can already be found in Bazin’s writings.
Bonitzer himself first uses the word in “Le Gros Orteil” when referring to the
“trenchant deframing in the chain of close-ups” in the razor-blade sequence
of Un Chien andalou,54 but it emerges as a fleshed-out theoretical concept
in his 1978 Cahiers article “Décadrages,” which, borrowing from Bazin and
Foucault, speaks of the centrifugal effects operative in paintings such as
Las Meninas, where the principal figures (the royal couple) are situated
outside of the frame of the painting and only evoked by a mirror located at
the vanishing point of the composition. Our gaze is thus guided outside of
the frame of the painting, leading us to perceive the limits of the image and
to interrogate the nature of visual representation itself. What takes place in
painting only in exceptional works such as Velázquez’s masterpiece is, by
contrast, a far more everyday occurrence in the cinema. While conventional
filmmakers seek to downplay and minimize the extent to which these effects
are felt by the spectator, others—such as Hitchcock, Eisenstein, Bresson
and Eustache—work with the potential for a deframing effect in order to
create a “space without a master” and an “upsetting [basculement] of the
point of view of the situations which belong specifically to the cinema.”
Used in this manner, deframing is not “divisive and fragmentary” but “a
multiplier, a generator of assemblages.”55
The 1987 book of the same title offers a more expansive discussion of
the differences and points of conjunction between painting and cinema.
In his introduction, Bonitzer specifies that his goal is not to interrogate the
“direct confrontation” between the two art forms, as found in films such as
Minnelli’s Van Gogh biopic Lust for Life, Resnais’ film on the same painter,
or Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso. Rather, he seeks out a “less evident, more
labile and more secretive relationship between cinema and painting” that

53 Ibid., p. 28.
54 Bonitzer, “Le Gros Orteil,” p. 20.
55 Pascal Bonitzer, “Décadrages,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 284 (January 1978), pp. 7-15, here
p. 15. Translated as “Deframings,” trans. Chris Darke, in Wilson (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. IV,
pp. 197-202, here p. 201.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 739

would consist of their respective treatment of the same artistic problems.56

The presence or absence of movement in the image is not necessarily a
dividing point between the two. Rather, the double hypothesis informing
Bonitzer’s study, itself the fruit of two decades of work on these questions,
is that, firstly, “the cinema would be, technically speaking, the inheritor of
the scientification of representation established in the quattrocento by the
theories of perspectiva artificialis” and that, secondly, “film, being first of all
an image, inescapably encounters the problems of painting, and, reciprocally,
the cinema’s solution to these problems cannot be without the influence of
twentieth-century painting.”57 More specifically, the figures of anamorphosis
and its reverse side, the trompe l’œil, represent privileged points of contact
between the cinema and painting, and they will be a recurrent point of
reference for Bonitzer throughout Décadrages. For the most part, it is in
the work of auteur f ilmmakers—including Rohmer, Godard, Ruiz and
Antonioni—that these techniques are most fruitfully exploited. In Dreyer’s
Gertrud, for instance, a lateral tracking shot in the film’s central scene (a
banquet honoring the titular character’s former lover) that moves from the
reception’s toastmaster, past a migraine-addled Gertrud and finally into
an adjoining room away from the supposed “action” of the scene, produces
a cinematic re-working of the disconcerting scenic dispositif adopted by
Holbein for The Ambassadors.58
Perhaps the most important chapter of Décadrages, however, concerns
what Bonitzer, following Bazin, terms the “grain of the real” in films. Here he
returns to the debates surrounding the cinema’s “base apparatus” that pitted
Pleynet and Baudry, for whom it was “impossible for the camera to entertain
any objective relationship with the real,” against Lebel and Mitry, who argued
that “the camera objectively conveys the real that it aims for.”59 It should be
recalled, of course, that Bonitzer and his colleagues did not unequivocally
side with either position, but in Décadrages the Cahiers critic argues that,
while the two theses can appear “caricatural” and “the terms of the debate
have aged,” the contretemps nonetheless touches on “a problem that the
cinema does not cease to pose again and again, that of the production of
images in their relationship to the real.”60 The most profitable way forward,
he argues, is not to take partisan sides in this dispute but to recognize that it

56 Pascal Bonitzer, Décadrages (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1987), p. 7.

57 Ibid., p. 8.
58 See ibid., pp. 94-95.
59 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
60 Ibid., p. 13.
740  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

is the contradictory nature of the cinema itself that can justifiably give rise to
both positions. Quattrocento perspective does not create a “scientific” mode
of vision, as ocular perception itself is structured around illusion; and yet,
while it is certainly possible to consider the images in a film such as North
by Northwest from a strictly plastic point of view, this does not negate the
fact that “the real adheres to this image, and that it really is Cary Grant and
Eva Marie-Saint kissing in the train.” The cinematographic image has both
an “illusionistic function” (its “Méliès side”) and a “documentary function”
(its “Lumière side”), and the two find themselves in constant interplay with
one another. There is, Bonitzer concludes, “always a ‘grain of the real’ […]
in the photograph and in the cinema, which exceeds all figuration.”61 In
this book, therefore, the Cahiers axiom as described by Daney—that “the
cinema has a fundamental rapport with the real, and the real is not what
is represented”—finds one of its most eloquent elucidations.

Narrativizing the Hors-Champ: Bonitzer as Filmmaker

Bonitzer did not entirely give up writing on film after Décadrages: still to
come were his monograph on Rohmer and, in the early 1990s, a handful of
pieces for Trafic.62 For Cahiers, one of his last articles, “Les images, le cinéma,
l’audiovisuel” from 1988, gave a resoundingly pessimistic vision of the state
of cinema, with a focus on the effects that technological mutation has had
on the status of the image, producing contradictory effects of disparity and
homogeneity, multiplicity and indifference.63 2016 did see the publication
of a collection of his articles by Capricci under the title La Vision partielle,
but apart from Bonitzer’s foreword this was purely a collection of older texts
for Cahiers, providing an accessible overview of his critical practice in the
1970s and 1980s. Since the early 1990s, Bonitzer has largely abstained from
criticism, with the making of films monopolizing his activity from this point
on. In 1996, at the age of 50, Bonitzer made the leap into direction, taking
the helm for the first time on a full-length work with Encore, which won the
prestigious Prix Jean Vigo. In the two decades following this debut, Bonitzer
has built up a corpus of eight feature films, leading up to the 2019 release Les

61 Ibid., p. 23.
62 See Pascal Bonitzer, “L’amour admirable,” Trafic no. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 19-26; Pascal Bonitzer,
“Dieu, Godard, le zapping,” Trafic no. 8 (Autumn 1993), pp. 5-12; and Pascal Bonitzer, “De la
distraction,” Trafic no. 13 (Winter 1994).
63 Pascal Bonitzer, “Les images, le cinéma, l’audiovisuel,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 404 (Febru-
ary 1988), pp. 16-21, here p. 20.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 741

Envoûtés. Of all the Cahiers critics of his generation, Bonitzer is the only one
to have become a critically recognized auteur, following in the vein of the
nouvelle vague pioneers.64 As the advanced age at which he made his first
feature suggests, however, this transition was far from a straightforward one,
as a two-decade-long apprenticeship in criticism, theory and screenwriting
was felt to be necessary before Bonitzer had the confidence to step behind
the camera. After his early involvement in Moi, Pierre Rivière (discussed
in Chapter 11), Bonitzer co-wrote a screenplay with Benoît Jacquot on the
Algerian war for the France 3 network (which was refused for political
reasons65) and penned the script for André Téchiné’s 1977 film Les Sœurs
Brontë. But it was his work with Rivette from the early 1980s onwards, which
continued until the latter’s final film, 2009’s 36 vues sur le Pic Saint-Loup,
that confirmed him in the role of screenwriter. Beyond this collaboration,
Bonitzer has become one of the most sought-after scénaristes in France,
working on scripts for Barbet Schroeder, Raúl Ruiz, Chantal Akerman
and Raoul Peck, as well as on more routine productions for television and
mainstream cinema. In 1990, Bonitzer even wrote a screenwriting manual
with Jean-Claude Carrière, L’Exercice du scénario. As could be expected,
this text departs significantly from traditional screenplay how-to guides.
Rather than issuing concrete rules of the craft, the duo offer more enigmatic
guidelines for would-be writers, insisting for instance that the conclusion
to a film may be “good or bad, ‘happy’ or ‘dark,’ open or shut,” but that it
must above all be “irrefutable.”66
Bonitzer describes his turn to directing as the product of chance. After
making the short film Les Sirènes, he was solicited by producer Claude
Kunetz, the uncle of his then partner Sophie Fillières, to write a 10-page
synopsis for a project titled Encore, which ended up drawing financing
from the avance sur recettes fund. The storyline centers on a middle-aged
male intellectual, Abel Vichac (Jackie Berroyer), who is temperamentally
cantankerous and misanthropic, on the verge of an emotional crisis, and

64 André Téchiné and Jean-Claude Biette, of a similar age to Bonitzer, also successfully negoti-
ated the transition from writing criticism for Cahiers to fiction filmmaking in the auteurist
model, but neither were involved with the journal during its Marxist period. Comolli, as we
have seen, eventually switched focus from fiction films to documentary, while Kané’s work as
a filmmaker has, perhaps unjustly, generally lacked the sufficient critical recognition necessary
for the status of an auteur.
65 See Pascal Bonitzer, interviewed by Stephen Sarrazin, “Pascal Bonitzer et le courage/timide,”
Mondes du cinéma no. 8 (January 2016), pp. 9-23, here pp. 13-14.
66 Pascal Bonitzer and Jean-Claude Carrière, L’Exercice du scénario (Paris: La Fémis, 1990),
p. 134.
742  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

romantically caught between his wife and a series of mistresses. The pro-
tagonist, as he would be in almost all of Bonitzer’s films, was essentially a
cipher for the director himself, although some details of Encore’s plot were
lifted from Althusser’s autobiography. With its generous dose of neurotic
comedy, the film set a template for Bonitzer’s later work. In stylistic terms,
Bonitzer’s films since Encore appear on the surface to generally conform to
the same conventions of narrative realism that he and his Cahiers colleagues
had so extensively condemned in the post-1968 period, but there are features
of his filmmaking that subtly depart from dominant filmmaking practice:
surrealist touches, uncanny moments and a generally dreamlike quality to
the intricate twists and turns of his storylines.
The widespread critical support and modest commercial success of Encore
ensured that Bonitzer could quickly follow the film with a sophomore outing.
February 1999, two-and-a-half years after his feature debut, saw the release of
Rien sur Robert, a work that is still Bonitzer’s best-known film, having screened
widely both in France and internationally. Fabrice Luchini plays the role of
Didier Temple, a film critic who reviews a Bosnian film without having seen
it, thereby committing a “deontological fault” for which he is punished with
a thundering tirade from the abrasive literary titan Ariel Chatwick-West
while attending a nightmarish dinner party.67 The soirée, however, is also
the occasion for Didier to make the acquaintance of Aurélie, an enigmatic
woman to whom he is magnetically drawn, despite his existing relationship
with Juliette. The couple become estranged from each other as Juliette herself
takes up with the television director Jerôme Sauveur, but although she leaves
in a car with Jerôme in the final scene, she reassures the hapless Didier “I’m
with you. Him, I hate!” Despite its status as a comedy, Bonitzer nonetheless
describes Rien sur Robert as taking place in a “dark world” in which “people
turn around in an implacable circle and come up against invisible barriers.”68
The themes and settings of his first two films were continued with Petites
coupures (2003), Je pense à vous (2006) and Le Grand Alibi (2008). While the
post-1968 Cahiers was unfavorable towards the concept of the politique des
auteurs for fostering a “demiurgic” understanding of the artistic creator,
today Bonitzer is comfortable with the auteur label this corpus has solicited,
unabashedly stating: “I absolutely believe in the concept of the auteur as
produced by the nouvelle vague. That is to say, the idea that the director is
the true author of a film.”69 Moreover, he does not shy away from accepting

67 Didier Péron, “Rien sur Robert, ce que le quadra génère,” Libération, February 24, 1999.
68 Pascal Bonitzer, Rien sur Robert (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1999), p. 5.
69 Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014.
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 743

an autobiographical reading of his films that has significantly contributed

to the auteurist aura they have acquired and speaks of his protagonists as
constituting an “altered self-portrait” of himself.70 If Bonitzer seeks models
in his filmmaking, these come from a surprisingly wide range of sources: he
admits both to the obvious points of reference, such as Rohmer, Rivette and
Ruiz, but also to more unexpected influences, including Lubitsch, Hawks,
the later work of Woody Allen, and even Tarantino.71 Taken together, these
qualities represent something of a “Bonitzer touch,” which has increasingly
become recognized in the critical reception of his films. Alongside the auto-
biographical color of Bonitzer’s œuvre, the most striking common element
to his films is the social milieu in which their stories take place. Without
exception, the universe of Bonitzer’s films is that of the Parisian middle
class, and, more particularly, its intellectual fringe. The characters of his
films are professors, film critics, theater directors, journalists and publishers.
Inhabiting chic apartments in the inner arrondissements of the capital, they
are highly educated, liberal, cosmopolitan and financially well-off, and are
inescapably divorced from the social existence of the country’s working class.
In a word, they exemplify a sociological figure that twenty-first-century
France has come to know as the bobo, the bourgeois-bohemian.
While Bonitzer insists that he resists consciously incorporating his
longheld interest in psychoanalytic film theory into his films, he does not
refuse the possibility that his background in film theory affects his directing
on a deeper, more unconscious level. Notably, there is a recurrent role of the
hors-champ in Bonitzer’s films, whether this be in the spatial construction
of his mise en scène or, on a narrative level, in the passage of characters
from spaces of familiarity and comfort to an external zone of disquiet and
paranoia. While Bonitzer’s films tend to feature elaborate narratives with an
intricate lattice of relations between the characters, there is also a sense in
which the storylines have a nebulous quality to them, only loosely tethered
to a realist narrative logic, with the improbable nature of so many of the
encounters and turns in the plot requiring a considerable suspension of
disbelief in the spectator. The dreamlike quality of Bonitzer’s approach to
narrative, with sudden shifts in their tonality and unexpected diversions in
the trajectory followed by the main characters, is reflected in the multiplicity
of genres present in his films, which end up coming across as hybrid works
that are uneasily slotted into any particular category.

70 Bonitzer, “Pascal Bonitzer et le courage/timide,” p. 19.

71 Stephen Sarrazin, “Pascal Bonitzer,” Mondes du cinéma no. 4 (October 2013), pp. 11-20, here
p.17.
744  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Politics, finally, is an ever-present feature of Bonitzer’s cinema, even if

his films are undeniably remote from the radical cinema that he defended
as a critic at Cahiers and even if the political content of Bonitzer’s films is
distinctly secondary in prominence to his depiction of the romantic imbroglios
of bourgeois intellectuals. Bonitzer’s protagonists are, for the most part, not
visibly involved in political activism—at best, they express wistful nostalgia
about their youthful radicalism. His 2005 film Petites coupures is notable
for the major characters being former communist militants, although this
narrative element mainly forms the pretext for running jokes rather than a
profound engagement with the legacy of the PCF. The reality of institutional
power in contemporary France is more directly tackled in Bonitzer’s later
films. Cherchez Hortense (2011) prominently features the Conseil d’état, situ-
ated within the Palais Royal in the first arrondissement of Paris. One of the
most powerful yet secretive legal bodies in the republic, the Conseil is tasked
with providing legal advice to the executive branch of the government. One
of the most fascinating aspects of the film is the fact that Bonitzer was able
to film in the labyrinthine premises of the Conseil itself, giving the viewer
access to one of France’s really existing corridors of power. In Tout de suite
maintenant (2016), which represented a point of departure by placing the
narrative focus on a young woman, hedge fund employee Nora Sator (played by
Agathe Bonitzer, the director’s daughter), Bonitzer provides a satirical vision
of the world of finance capital, with its amoral drive for profit and expansion
but also its fundamental absurdity, manifested in the unnerving eccentric-
ity of the firm’s upper management, as well as in the alienating, Tatiesque
glass-and-steel contemporary architecture of its corporate headquarters. And
yet the distance between his present views and his political stances while
at Cahiers, where he was one of the most uncompromising upholders of the
journal’s Maoist orientation, are glaringly apparent. Bonitzer is ambivalent
about his political past: while not coming out against Marxism per se, he is
critical of what he saw as the gauchissement of Marxist theory during the
late 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, Bonitzer stresses the contrasts between
contemporary politics and the militant engagement of the late 1960s: “In
May 1968 the student movement started out from the idea that we needed
to blow up bourgeois society. […] Today, nobody, absolutely nobody, wants to
blow up the Republic, except for the far-right and even they deny wanting to
do so. On the contrary, it is in a republican spirit that people are mobilizing
today.”72 In terms of his own political views, Bonitzer declares: “I am a citizen.
I am more or less interested in politics. […] Certainly, this infuses the films

72 Bonitzer, “Nos années non-légendaires,” p. 154.

Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 745

I make. But, to paraphrase Rose Sélavy, I tend to be more interested, by

temperament, in the trances of confusion than the contusions of France.”73

Works Cited

Georges Bataille, “Le gros orteil,” Documents no. 6 (November 1929), pp. 297-302.
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Cinéma: effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,”
Cinéthique no. 7-8 (c. mid-late 1970), pp. 1-8. Translated as “Ideological Effects of
the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, in Philip Rosen
(ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), pp. 286-298.
André Bazin, “Théâtre et cinéma,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. II: Le Cinéma et
les autres arts (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1959), pp. 69-118. Translated as “Theatre
and Film,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal:
Caboose, 2011), pp. 161-214.
———, “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la Libération,” in
idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. IV: Une esthétique de la réalité: le néo-réalisme
(Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), pp. 9-37. Translated as “Cinematic Realism and
the Italian School of the Liberation,” in idem., What is Cinema?, trans. and ed.
Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2011), pp. 215-249.
Pascal Bonitzer, “‘Réalité’ de la dénotation,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 229 (May 1971),
pp. 39-41. Translated as “‘Reality’ of Denotation,” trans. Lindley Hanlon, in Nick
Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation
(London: BFI, 1990), pp. 248-253. Hereafter CDC III.
———, “Le Gros Orteil (‘Réalité’ de la dénotation, 2),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 232
(October 1971), pp. 15-22.
———, “Fétichisme de la technique: la notion de plan,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 233
(November 1971), pp. 4-10.
———, “Hors-champ (un espace en défaut),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 234-235 (De-
cember 1971-January-February 1972), pp. 15-26. Translated as “Off-screen Space,”
trans. Lindley Hanlon, in CDC III, pp. 291-305.
———, “La voix veille (La Terre promise),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 253 (October-
November 1974), pp. 37-38. Repr. in idem., Le Regard et la Voix (Paris: Union
générale des éditions, 1976), pp. 132-134.
———, “Kashima Paradise,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 254-255 (December 1974-Janu-
ary 1975), pp. 44-45. Repr. in idem., Le Regard et la Voix (Paris: Union générale
des éditions, 1976), pp. 145-147.

73 Ibid., p. 153.
746  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

———, “Les silences de la voix,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 256 (February-March 1975),
pp. 22-33. Repr in idem., Le Regard et la Voix (Paris: Union générale des éditions,
1976), pp. 25-49. Translated as “The Silences of the Voice,” trans. Philip Rosen,
in idem. (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 319-334.
———, Le Regard et la Voix (Paris: Union générale des éditions, 1976).
———, “Voici (La notion de plan et le sujet du cinéma),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 273
(January-February 1977), pp. 5-18.
———, “La psychanalyse avec le cinéma,” Ça cinéma no. 15 (c. 1978), pp. 2-7.
———, “Décadrages,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 284 (January 1978), pp. 7-15. Translated
as “Deframings,” trans. Chris Darke, in David Wilson (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma
vol. IV: 1973-1978 History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle (London: Routledge, 2000),
pp. 197-202.
———, “La vision partielle,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 301 (June 1979), pp. 34-41.
———, “L’être idéal et le criminel (Jean-Louis Schefer: L’Homme ordinaire du
cinéma),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 320 (February 1981), pp. 60-61.
———, Le Champ aveugle: essais sur le réalisme (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1982).
———, “Le suspense hitchcockien,” in Le Champ aveugle: essais sur le réalisme (Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, 1982), pp. 35-52. Translated as “Hitchcockian Suspense,” in
Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 15-30.
———, “La peau et la paille: Au-delà des apparences: Alfred Hitchock I,” L’Âne: Le
magazine freudien no. 17 (Winter 1986), pp. 16-17. Translated as “The Skin and
the Straw,” in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about
Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 178-184.
———, Décadrages (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1987).
———, “Les images, le cinéma, l’audiovisuel,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 404 (Febru-
ary 1988), pp. 16-21.
———, “L’amour admirable,” Trafic no. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 19-26.
———, “Dieu, Godard, le zapping,” Trafic no. 8 (Autumn 1993), pp. 5-12.
———, “De la distraction,” Trafic no. 13 (Winter 1994).
———, interviewed by Stephen Sarrazin, “Pascal Bonitzer et le courage/timide,”
Mondes du cinéma no. 8 (January 2016), pp. 9-23.
——— and Jean-Claude Carrière, L’Exercice du scénario (Paris: La Fémis, 1990).
André S. Labarthe, “Epstein à l’état naissant,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 202 (June-
July 1968), pp. 51-52.
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fonda-
mentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 58. Translated as The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book
XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).
Partial Vision: The Theory and Filmmaking of Pascal Bonitzer 747

Didier Péron, “Rien sur Robert, ce que le quadra génère,” Libération, February 24, 1999.
Marcelin Pleynet and Jean Thibaudeau, interviewed by Gérard Leblanc, “Économ-
ique, idéologique, formel…” Cinéthique no. 3, pp. 7-14. Translated as, “Economic
– ideological – formal,” trans. Elias Noujaim, in Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture
(London: BFI, 1980), pp. 149-164.
Stephen Sarrazin, “Pascal Bonitzer,” Mondes du cinéma no. 4 (October 2013), pp. 11-20.
Jean Louis Schefer, “L’image: le sens ‘investi,’ Communications no. 15 (1970),
pp. 210-221.
———, “Note sur les systèmes représentatifs,” Tel Quel no. 40 (Spring 1970), pp. 44-71.
———, “Sur la peinture,” Peinture, Cahiers théoriques no. 1 (May 1971).
———, “Les couleurs renversées/la buée,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 230 (July 1971),
pp. 28-42.
———, “Sur le ‘Déluge universel’ d’Uccello,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 236-237 (May-
June 1972), pp. 42-66.
———, “Saint Augustin,” Tel Quel no. 56 (Winter 1973), pp. 65-102.
———, L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1981).
Slavoj Žižek, “Double trilogie: Surmoi et idéal: Alfred Hitchcock II,” L’Âne: Le
magazine freudien no. 17 (Winter 1986), pp. 18-19.
25. The Brain is the Screen: Cahiers du
cinéma and Gilles Deleuze

Abstract
This chapter follows the enduring relationship between the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the post-1968 critics at Cahiers du cinéma.
While references to Deleuze were largely avoided during the journal’s
Marxist-Leninist phase, the period of openness after 1973 saw a fascinat-
ing pseudo-interview published with the philosopher in 1976, centering
on a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard’s television work. At the time, Jean
Narboni taught alongside Deleuze at Paris-VIII, and their conversations
helped shape Deleuze’s magisterial diptych Cinéma, published in the
early 1980s. Both volumes of this text are suffused with the influence
of numerous Cahiers critics, but it is with Serge Daney that the most
fruitful dialogue took place, as exemplified in Deleuze’s preface to Daney’s
book Ciné journal, “Optimisme, pessimisme et voyage,” where the state
of contemporary cinema in the age of the electronic image is addressed.

Keywords: Gilles Deleuze, Cahiers du cinéma, Jean Narboni, Serge Daney,

movement-image, time-image

A Community of Tastes

The next element in our exploration of the relationship between cinema

and ontology in the thinking of the Cahiers critics swerves away from the
theoretical optic that has dominated this section until now, which, stressing
the cinema’s status as an encounter with the real, has drawn on a combustive
combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Bazinian film theory. From
the mid-1970s onwards, a new interlocutor came to play an increasingly
important role for the Cahiers critics: namely, the post-structuralist phi-
losopher Gilles Deleuze. The relationship between Deleuze and the film
journal was far from a straightforward one. After all, L’Anti-Œdipe, his 1972

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch25
750  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

collaboration with Félix Guattari, had launched a lacerating assault on three

of the central pillars of the Cahiers project in the 1968-1973 period: Marx,
Freud and Saussure. Aside from some scattered early references to the
philosopher, it was not until after the journal withdrew from its engagement
in Maoist politics and began looking for alternative sources of guidance that
Deleuze came to assume importance for Cahiers. In the same period that
dialogues were opened up with contemporary thinkers such as Foucault,
Rancière and Schefer, a collaboration with Deleuze was initiated with the
publication of a supposed interview with the philosopher, “Trois questions
sur Six fois deux,” in November 1976.
The dialogue that the Cahiers critics pursued with Deleuze, aided by the
institutional links between the philosopher and Narboni at Paris-VIII, bore
notable fruit upon the publication of Deleuze’s two Cinéma books in the
mid-1980s, which evinces a considerable debt to the critical ideas of both
Narboni himself and his colleagues at the journal. But Deleuze’s work on the
cinema also significantly recasts the question of film ontology away from
its Bazinian roots, which centered on the relation between the cinematic
image and its referent, and towards other aspects of being such as movement,
time, thought and perception—towards, that is, questions that had been
treated by Henri Bergson, through whom Deleuze ventriloquizes much of
his discussion of cinema. Bergson was never an important philosophical
figure for Cahiers under Comolli/Narboni, whose references to his work
are exceedingly rare.1 And yet there are multiple points of intersection
between Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema and the core ideas of the film
journal. Above all, these affinities come in the shape of a community of
tastes, a shared predilection for the work of certain filmmakers—derived
chiefly from the cinephilic canon established in the post-war period by
Langlois and Bazin and updated by later generations of Cahiers critics—as
well as an imperious disdain for what Deleuze called “the vast proportion
of rubbish in film production.”2 But of greater importance than Deleuze’s
reproduction of the Cahiers pantheon is his adoption of a large number
of the critical categories developed by the journal in order to speak of the
filmmakers they fêted. Here, the philosopher was influenced above all by
Daney’s expatiation of the historical metamorphoses undergone by the

1 Earlier generations of Cahiers writers were more susceptible to Bergson’s influence. Bazin,
for instance, had ventured some possible relations between Bergson and the cinema in his article
“Un film bergsonien: Le Mystère Picasso,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. II, pp. 133-142.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’Image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983), p. 8. Translated as Cinema
1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv.
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 751

cinema, with a particular emphasis on the profound effect that the rupture
of World War II had on the functioning of the cinematic image and the
concomitant changes that were also taking place as the twentieth century
drew to a close. This viewpoint was also shared by Godard, working on his
mammoth Histoire(s) du cinéma project at the same time as Daney and
Deleuze were writing on the cinema, a situation Bergala discerned as a
“moment of impeccable synchronism” between the three figures:

It is very rare in the history of art that there should be, with strict simulta-
neity, an artist who invents forms, a philosopher in the midst of formulat-
ing the concepts for these forms at the moment of their emergence, and
a great critic in the midst of watching and analyzing these exchanges,
which, like communicating vases, instantaneously focus on what is taking
place on the historical level, right before the end of the century.3

In the voluminous secondary literature that Deleuze’s Cinéma books have

inspired, however, precious few of his exegetes have paid attention to the
influence that the post-1968 Cahiers critics had on the philosopher. 4 This
is despite the fact that his reliance on their ideas at certain key moments
is patently obvious, as even a cursory examination of the footnotes to
his diptych reveals, with a multitude of citations of the work of Daney,
Bonitzer and company. The rest of this chapter, therefore, will chart the
extended theoretical exchange between Cahiers and Deleuze, which has
had a profound impact on contemporary film theory.
Deleuze’s work was known to Cahiers long before he was first asked to
participate in an interview with the journal: already in the early 1960s,
Narboni recalls, “Barbet Schroeder entered our office and announced: ‘I’m
currently reading an extraordinary book!’ It was Marcel Proust et les signes,
which had just come out. Barbet spoke to me about it and I was excited by
it. I bought the book, read it in one sitting, and found it magnificent, new
and stimulating.”5 From this point on, however, Cahiers’ encounters with

3 Alain Bergala, “Stratégie critique, tactique pédagogique,” in François Dosse and Jean-Michel
Frodon (eds.), Gilles Deleuze et les images (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2008), pp. 37-41, here p. 37.
4 As a symptomatic example, Rodowick explicitly signals in the preface to his monograph Gilles
Deleuze’s Time Machine that Deleuze’s concepts seem “less anomalous” if his text is compared
with the writings of figures such as Bonitzer and Daney—but studiously avoids making any
further reference to them in the rest of his study. See D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time
Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. xii.
5 Jean Narboni, “…une aile de papillon,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 497 (December 1995), pp. 22-25,
here p. 22. Later, Narboni’s text “Visages d’Hitchcock” was an overt attempt to transpose the
752  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Deleuze’s ideas were intermittent at best, particularly when measured

against the preponderant influence of Derrida, Barthes and Kristeva in
the years 1968-1971, not to mention Althusser and Lacan. In 1970, Bonitzer
used Deleuze’s notion of the language-body in the chapter of his 1969
book Logique du sens on Pierre Klossowski to discuss Oshima’s Death
by Hanging,6 while Daney referred to the same work in his response to
Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage.7 As the journal’s Marxism-Leninism became
more rigidly dogmatic, however, its receptivity towards Deleuze correspond-
ingly dwindled, and the Cahiers critics were singularly unresponsive to
the release of L’Anti-Œdipe in 1972, despite the explosive effect the book
had on the intellectual left in France, which was tiring from the period
of furious militancy after May ’68. Narboni is adamant that Deleuze and
Guattari’s text “did not exercise, at the moment of its release, any influence,
at any level whatsoever, on the members of a journal then marked by
Marxism (re-read by Louis Althusser), the work of Roland Barthes and the
thinking of Lacan,” even if he admits that “after the fact, among our circles
of well-wishers, and even within the Cahiers editorial team of the time,
certain people, carried away by a belatedly self-critical spirit of expiation,
have deplored that at this point, ignorant and blind as we were, we chose
not to prefer the liberty promised by L’Anti-Œdipe to the confinement of
pro-Chinese dogmatism.”8
The incendiary effect of this text, jubilantly demolishing the sacred cows
of early 1970s gauchisme, evidently had a divisive effect on the Cahiers
editors, torn between denouncing Deleuze/Guattari’s ideas and embracing
them. In a 1973 article treating L’An 01 and Themroc, for instance, Kané relates
the “anti-repressive discourse” found in these films to their cognate in
L’Anti-Œdipe, but while he argues that “it is certainly correct, psychoanalyti-
cally and politically, to play, as [Deleuze/Guattari] do, the ‘deterritorialized
fluxes of desire’ against the superego, the schize against the signifier, and
to send Œdipus to the devil,” the Cahiers critic insists that “this will never
replace a political discourse (a Marxist discourse, for example), or the

methodology of Deleuze’s Proust book to the cinema of Hitchcock. See Jean Narboni, “Visages
d’Hitchcock,” Cahiers du cinéma hors série “Spécial Hitchcock” (1980), pp. 30-37.
6 Bonitzer, “Oshima et les corps-langage.” See Chapter 18 for more on this text. Bonitzer later
noted that “I was very marked by the reading of Logique du sens upon its publication in 1969
[…] but when the Maoist turn came, we had nothing more to do with Deleuze.” Bonitzer, “Nos
années non-légendaires,” p. 151.
7 See Daney, “Amphisbetesis.”
8 Jean Narboni, “Du côté des noms,” in Dosse/Frodon (eds.), Gilles Deleuze et les images,
pp. 21-30, here p. 24.
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 753

concrete practices of struggle in society.”9 Bonitzer even recalls writing a

review of Rivette’s Céline et Julie vont en bateau that interpreted the film
through a schema inspired by L’Anti-Œdipe, but his article was refused by
the editorial committee, the only time this happened during his period at
Cahiers.10 Soon afterwards, however, Deleuze began to find a more positive
response to his ideas on the pages of Cahiers, and articles by Bonitzer from
1975-1976 on Portiere di notte, Histoire de Paul, Professione Reporter and
Two-Lane Blacktop all made approbatory references to the philosopher.11
Retrospectively, Bonitzer has argued that Deleuze “helped us to exit” from
the difficulties posed by the journal’s Marxist-Leninist alignment:

Deleuze’s philosophy rests entirely on affirmations, on active rather than

reactive conceptions. His theory of machines […] is entirely active: it is an
affirmation. Faced with the stage or the screen he does not only have a
radical critical analysis. The cinema is a movement-image, a time-image.
There are planes of immanence, assemblages, concepts that were a breath
of fresh air because it was a way of making this whole negative problematic
of the deconstruction of representation terribly old-fashioned.12

As the Cahiers critics sought to re-establish a positive orientation towards

the cinema, therefore, the affirmative spirit of Deleuze’s philosophy served
as a touchstone for the journal. Toubiana recalls that Deleuze was both
a “fellow traveler” of Cahiers and, conversely, that Cahiers was a fellow
traveler of Deleuze, while also underscoring that the journal’s relation-
ship with Deleuze was nourished by the philosopher’s status as “truly a
cinephile.”13 Deleuze’s cinephilic roots went deep: in an interview with

9 Pascal Kané, “Et c’est pas triste? (L’An 01, Themroc),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 247 (July-
August 1973), pp. 36-39, here p. 38.
10 Bonitzer, “Nos années non-légendaires,” p. 152. Bonitzer conf irmed this incident when
interviewed, but the chronology gives us some reason to be skeptical about this claim: Céline et
Julie premiered at Cannes in May 1974, by which time the editorial committee had passed into
the hands of Daney and Toubiana and had moved beyond the hardline Maoism that marked
the 1972-1973 period. It seems strange, therefore, that they would have been so an intolerant of
such an article written at that time.
11 See Pascal Bonitzer, “Le secret derrière la porte (Portier de nuit),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 251-
252 (July-August 1974), pp. 30-36; Pascal Bonitzer, “La bouche rit (Histoire de Paul),” Cahiers du
cinéma no. 262-263 (January 1976), pp. 66-68; Pascal Bonitzer, “Désir désert (Profession reporter),”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 262-263 (January 1976), pp. 96-98; and Pascal Bonitzer, “Lignes et voies
(Macadam à deux voies),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 266-267 (May 1976), pp. 68-71.
12 Bonitzer,“Nos années non-légendaires,” pp. 150-151.
13 Serge Toubiana, “Le cinéma est deleuzien,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 497 (December 1995),
pp. 20-21, here p. 20.
754  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Cahiers to accompany the publication of L’Image-temps, he recalls two

primary periods of intense cinephilia: before World War II when, still a child,
he went to the cinema frequently with his family, and in the post-war era,
when he assiduously watched films in the Quartier Latin while studying
philosophy.14 Later, in the 1970s, Deleuze was known to attend screenings
organized as part of the “Semaine des Cahiers” at the Action-République
cinema, a presence that instilled a “sentiment of pride” in Toubiana and
his fellow critics.15 Narboni has insisted that the decision to invite Deleuze
to contribute to Cahiers was motivated not simply by the fact that he was
a philosopher “but above all because he was a philosopher who admired
Godard.”16 Above all, then, the Cahiers critics were attracted by Deleuze’s
ability to integrate his cinephilia into his philosophy or, as Toubiana put
it, his concern for “thinking about the world with the cinema, and the
cinema with the world.”17

Narboni and Deleuze: Intersecting Lives

François Dosse’s biography of Deleuze and Guattari fittingly speaks of their

“intersecting lives,”18 but when it comes to the philosopher’s engagement
with the cinema, the chief biographical intersection is with Jean Narboni. It
was Narboni’s position lecturing at Paris-VIII, where Deleuze was a professor
of philosophy, that proved to be the institutional bridgehead for Cahiers to
forge contact with him. As he later related, Narboni had been struck by the
frequency with which nods to the cinema appeared in Deleuze’s writings.19

14 Gilles Deleuze, interviewed by Alain Bergala, Pascal Bonitzer, Marc Chevrie, Jean Narboni,
Charles Tesson and Serge Toubiana, “Le cerveau, c’est l’écran: Entretien avec Gilles Deleuze,”
Cahiers du cinéma no. 380 (February 1986), pp. 24-32, here p. 24.
15 Toubiana, “Le cinéma est deleuzien,” p. 20.
16 Narboni, “Du côté des noms,” p. 28. In this sense, Deleuze notably distinguished himself
from Foucault, whose thinking piqued the interest of Cahiers in the 1970s but who vocally
detested Godard’s f ilms and preferred the work of Herzog or Tavernier. See Narboni, “…une
aille de papillon,” p. 24.
17 Toubiana, “Le cinéma est deleuzien,” p. 20.,
18 See François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah
Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). The original French title refers to a
“biographie croisée.”
19 Narboni noted, for instance, that in March 1968 the philosopher spoke at length about
Godard in an interview with Les Lettres françaises Here Deleuze stated, in a passage that hints
at the central argument of his future Cinéma diptych: “Godard has transformed the cinema, he
has introduced thought into it. He does not think about the cinema, he does not put (good or
bad) thinking into the cinema, he makes the cinema think—for the first time, I believe.” Gilles
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 755

When Godard’s experimental television program Six fois deux: sur et sous
la communication was broadcast in August 1976, Narboni thus thought of
proposing an interview with Deleuze on Godard, having learnt through
intermediaries at Vincennes that Deleuze was indeed fascinated with the
series. Although at this point Narboni had only crossed paths a couple of
times with Deleuze in the campus corridors, he telephoned his academic
colleague to suggest an interview. Deleuze politely declined the proposal but
instead offered to compose his own article on Six fois deux.20 The resulting
text, published in issue no. 271 of Cahiers, nonetheless took the form of a
simulated interview, in which the questions, despite actually being penned
by Deleuze, were presented as coming from Cahiers. As Narboni recalls,
Deleuze took delight in “humorously miming the rhetorical back-and-forth
style that prevails in such circumstances” by peppering the mock dialogue
with the verbal tics of the interview format, along the lines of: “Cahiers du
cinéma has asked you for an interview, because you’re a ‘philosopher’ and
we wanted to do something philosophical…,” “You haven’t answered our
question. Say you had to give a ‘course’ on these programs…,” and “Oh, come
on, you know better than anyone it’s not like that…”21 The ruse deceived
the bulk of Deleuze’s readers, who have predominantly treated the text as
a genuine discussion with the Cahiers critics. As if to deepen the confusion,
the title of Deleuze’s article is perversely misleading on another level: “Trois
questions sur Six fois deux” in fact contains four questions posed to Deleuze
by the concocted interviewer.
There is more to Deleuze’s subterfuge than a mere prank on unwitting
readers, however. His text is concerned, precisely, with the question of
cinematic multiplicity and seeks to move away from what the philosopher
sees as the theoretically sterile arithmetic in dialectical schemas of cinematic
montage, which has been challenged by Godard in his post-Groupe Dziga
Vertov output, whose anti-dialectical, non-synthesizable binaries are evinced
in the very titles of his works during this period (Ici et ailleurs, Numéro
deux, Six fois deux). Deleuze’s “interrogator” specifically asks “why does
everything in Godard come in twos? You need two to get to three. Fine, but
what are these twos and threes all about?” The answer is that “Godard’s not
a dialectician. What counts with him isn’t two or three or however many,

Deleuze, L’Île déserte et autres textes (1953-1974), ed. David Lapouajde (Paris: Minuit, 2002), p. 187.
Cited in Narboni, “Du côté des noms,” p. 23.
20 This information is given in Narboni, “…une aile de papillon,” p. 24; and Narboni, “Du côté
des noms,” pp. 21-22.
21 Ibid., p. 22.
756  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

it’s AND, the conjunction AND.”22 In Deleuze’s conception, the “and” in

Godardian montage runs counter to the “is” of syllogistic models upon which
earlier editing practices had been based, and in place of the attempts to
fashion a film language through the articulation of shots instead produces
a form of “creative stammering.”
The “interview” with Deleuze, which appeared shortly after the pub-
lication of Deleuze/Guattari’s Kafka: vers une littérature mineure, also
transplants many of the Kafka book’s concepts onto Godard’s filmmaking.
The director is described here as a “foreigner in [his] own language” who
follows “his own line, a line of active flight, a repeatedly broken zigzagging
beneath the surface;” his cinema is one that is concerned with “a whole
micropolitics of borders, countering the macropolitics of large groups.”23
As Narboni has recognized, Deleuze’s text has served to open “lines of
thought on Godard which, since then, have often been reiterated, cited,
repeated and pillaged.” On a broader level, however, Narboni has expressed
skepticism about the sudden take-up of Deleuzian concepts by those who
had only shortly before been under the sway of quite different theoretical
and political tendencies: “I confess to having often been exasperated
by sudden terminological changes of course, which, under the effect of
Capitalisme et schizophrénie, could be seen just about everywhere, and
which substituted overnight ‘desiring machines’ for ‘montage as pul-
sion,’ and the movement of flux for the insistence on the signif ier.” If
Cahiers struggled with its own doctrinaire history, this at least prevented
it from “participating in opportunistic and buffoonish u-turns.” Instead,
in Narboni’s view, the journal’s critics were impelled to “take seriously
the radical change of theoretical and political problematic operated by
L’Anti-Œdipe, instead of acting as if it were enough to designate the same
concepts with new terms.”24
Deleuze’s intervention into Cahiers, therefore, contributed to a broader
process of re-orientation for the journal, which was far from being the
straightforward ideological volte-face that could be found in other ex-militant
circles at the time. But his text also offered an initial exposition of the

22 Gilles Deleuze, “Trois questions sur Six fois deux,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (November 1976),
pp. 5-12, here p. 11. Translated as “Three Questions on Six Times Two,” in idem., Negotations:
1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 37-45, here
p. 44.
23 Ibid., p. 6 [p. 38]. See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature
mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975). Translated as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan
(Mineeapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
24 The above quotes are from Narboni, “…une aile de papillon,” p. 24.
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 757

conceptual apparatus that would be deployed in the Cinéma books. Rejecting

the suggestion by the imagined questioner that the themes of labor and
information in Six fois deux could correspond to the functioning of images
and sounds in Godard’s work, Deleuze instead argues that: “There are im-
ages, things are themselves images, because images aren’t in our head, in
our brain. The brain’s just one image among others. Images are constantly
acting and reacting on each other, producing and consuming. There’s no
difference at all between images, things and motion.” Moreover, for the first
time, Deleuze relates Bergsonian philosophy to the cinema, noting that
“the first chapter of Matière et Mémoire develops an amazing conception
of the relations between photography and cinematic motion, and things.”
While Deleuze yields that it would be inaccurate to characterize Godard
as a Bergsonian, he contends that “it’s more the other way around; Godard’s
not even reviving Bergson, but finding bits of Bergson along his way as he
revivifies television.”25
In the wake of this “interview,” the personal rapport between Deleuze and
Narboni was further deepened. The film studies department at Vincennes
in which Narboni taught was popular with students, but the professional
inexperience of the faculty there (the department had only been set up in
1969) meant that it was unable to oversee the work of doctoral students,
who were instead supervised by the philosophy faculty, including Deleuze.
On a more individual level, timetable synchronies saw the two teachers
giving courses at the same time on Tuesday mornings, which afforded
them the opportunity to speak before the beginning of their lectures.26 A
mutual friendship with Carmelo Bene further solidified their ties, and in
the early 1980s, after the Vincennes campus had been displaced to Saint-
Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris, the trio formed a kind of bande à
trois together. At the same time, Deleuze began a series of seminars on
cinema, which he pursued in the three academic years leading up to the
publication of L’Image-Mouvement. Narboni later revealed that in the course
of Deleuze’s research for the Cinéma books, the philosopher often turned to
his friend for guidance on the selection of films and that in many cases the
philosophical concepts were devised before films were found to instantiate
them. “You even have the sentiment, sometimes,” Narboni stated, “that the
movement and the logic of his thought made him produce the place, or the

25 The quotes in this paragraph are from Deleuze, “Trois questions sur Six fois deux,” pp. 9-10
[pp. 42-43].
26 See Dosse, Intersecting Lives, p. 398.
758  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

slot, before the object that would come to occupy it.” When Narboni relayed
this thought to Deleuze himself, the philosopher’s response was to laugh
in acknowledgement.27
Narboni’s behind-the-scenes role in the construction of Deleuze’s film
philosophy was exemplary of the function he has performed in French film
culture since the Sturm-und-Drang years of Cahiers’ Marxist period. For
33 years, until his retirement in 2003, he taught at Paris-VIII, but unlike
Aumont he did not progress to the rank of professor and never completed a
doctorate. Less concerned with the rigors of academic publishing, Narboni’s
written output during this period has also been far less prolific than that
of his former Cahiers colleague. Instead, from the late 1970s onwards, he
divided his time between university lecturing and managing the publish-
ing arm of Cahiers du cinéma. Realizing a long-cherished goal to publish
works of f ilm theory, he shepherded into existence key texts written
by Barthes, Schefer, Oshima and Leutrat, as well as personally editing
collections of writings by Bazin, Rohmer, Langlois and Fuller. As a result,
Narboni became a specialist in preface writing as he penned the forewords
of many of the Éditions des Cahiers du Cinéma publications he put out.
It was only after his retirement from academia that Narboni turned to
longer-form writing, composing monographs on Mikio Naruse (2006),
Bergman’s In the Presence of a Clown (2007), Chaplin’s The Great Dictator
(2010) and Samuel Fuller (2017), as well as a rumination on Barthes’ La
Chambre claire in La nuit sera noire et blanche (2015).28 The 2000s have thus
seen something of a renaissance in Narboni’s critical practice, after years of
relative taciturnity. When interviewed, however, he admits that his “major
work” of f ilm theory is still to be written and would, if it materializes,
center on “the idea of musicality” in the cinema, in a project that would
seek to bring to light the “deeper, albeit less visible, resemblances” between
the two art forms.29

27 Narboni, “…une aile de papillon,” p. 25.

28 See Jean Narboni, Mikio Naruse: Les temps incertains (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006); Jean
Narboni, En présence d’un clown de Ingmar Bergman (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2007); Jean Narboni,
Pourquoi les coiffeurs?: Notes actuelles sur Le Dictateur (Paris: Capricci, 2010); Jean Narboni, Samuel
Fuller: Un homme à fables (Paris: Capricci, 2017); and Narboni, La Nuit sera noire et blanche. The
Barthes book is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 14.
29 Interview with Jean Narboni, April 2, 2014. A taste of the contents of this putative project
can be found in Narboni’s discussion on music and cinema with the pianist Philippe Cassard.
See Jean Narboni, Philippe Cassard and Marc Chévrie, Deux temps, trois mouvements: Un pianiste
au cinéma (Paris: Capricci, 2012).
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 759

The Movement-Image and the Hors-champ

The two volumes of Deleze’s Cinéma constituted a major point of rupture for
reflection on the medium around the world. In French academia, Deleuze’s
film philosophy initially caused consternation. His assault on the semiologi-
cal approach to cinema met with resistance from Metz’s followers, such
as Michel Marie, Marc Vernet and François Jost, although Metz himself
responded in a more sanguine manner.30 Aumont, too, was at first skeptical
towards the books: “I was terribly resistant. […] I thought that [Deleuze] was
saying the obvious: to tell us after three hundred very complicated pages
that the image is moving, thanks we knew that.”31 Aumont later became
more receptive to Deleuze’s ideas but even today he admits that he has
trouble with the philosopher’s “vitalist” approach, and asserts that “I prefer
either his books of pure philosophy, or his books on the great philosophical
systems, like his book on Spinoza.”32 The reception of Deleuze’s books by
Cahiers, by contrast, was unreservedly and immediately positive. The journal
celebrated the appearance of each tome by publishing an interview with the
philosopher, in which he was able to summarize the account of the cinema
presented at greater length in the two books. This collaboration continued
even after the publication of L’Image-mouvement: in 1986, Bergala arranged
for Deleuze to write the preface to Daney’s collection of Libération articles
in Ciné-journal,33 while in 1987, Cahiers ran a text by the philosopher on
Rivette, and Narboni invited him to speak at the La Fémis film school, with
the resulting lecture on the work of Straub/Huillet published as “Avoir une
idée en cinéma.”34 Of greater importance for us, however, is the influence that
the film theory developed by the Cahiers critics of the post-1968 generation
had on the conceptualization of the cinema developed by Deleuze in his
two Cinéma books.
Deleuze’s taxonomical breakdown of film forms has become so widely
known within the field as to require only the most succinct of summaries
here. The cinema, in his conception, is divided into two overarching cat-
egories: the movement-image and the time-image. Although the division

30 See Dosse, Intersecting Lives, p. 413.

31 Jacques Aumont, cited in ibid., p. 412.
32 Interview with Jacques Aumont, May 8, 2015.
33 See Bergala, “Stratégie critique, tactique pédagogique,” p. 38.
34 See Gilles Deleuze, “Les trois cercles de Rivette,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 416 (February 1989),
pp. 20-21; and Gilles Deleuze, “Avoir une idée en cinéma: À propos du cinéma des Straub-Huillet,”
in Dominique Païni (ed.), Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Hölderlin, Cézanne. (Paris: Éditions
Antigone, 1990), pp. 63-77.
760  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

between the two can be broadly mapped onto a historical turning point (the
social rupture of World War II), the philosopher insists that his presentation
is not a “history of the cinema” but rather an attempted “classification of
images and signs,” which uses Bergson’s ontology and Peirce’s semiotics to
create a cognate of Linnaeus’ categorization of animal and plant species or
Mendeleev’s periodic table in chemistry.35 Deleuze turns to the cinema in
order to undertake this task because it “imposes new points of view on this
problematic.”36 The movement-image, which encompasses both classical
Hollywood and the European cinema of the f irst half of the twentieth
century, is structured around a cause-and-effect schema that passes in
linear fashion from a given situation—by means of an action—to a new,
changed situation. It is cinematically represented by montage-assemblages
of long shots (dubbed perception-images), mid-shots (action-images) and
close-ups (affection-images). After World War II, this “sensori-motor schema”
disintegrates, and the modernist works of movements such as Italian neo-
realism and the French nouvelle vague are instead marked by the existence
of “pure optical and sonic situations,” which give rise to a “crystalline”
articulation of shots capable of giving us a “direct image of time.”
While presented in a radically new lexicon, Deleuze’s account of cinematic
form bears a distinct—and avowed—debt to the synopsis of film history
given by Bazin in texts such as “L’Évolution du langage cinématographique,”
with his emphasis on the fundamental break represented by the work of
Welles, Renoir and Rossellini, a standpoint that was subsequently treated
as axiomatic by successive waves of critics at Cahiers. The link with Bazin
has long been recognized by Deleuze’s followers in the field of film studies,
but they have generally been slower to acknowledge the philosopher’s reli-
ance on the post-1968 generation of Cahiers writers for a sizable proportion
of his critical concepts. In fact, the two Cinéma books are replete with
references to these critics.37 At one stage in L’Image-temps, Deleuze even
discusses Comolli’s cinema, describing him as a “true political filmmaker”
and pointing to resonances between films of his such as L’Ombre rouge
and the literature of Kafka, for focusing on “a double impossibility, that
of forming a group and that of not forming a group, ‘the impossibility of

35 Deleuze, Cinéma 1, p. 7 [p. xiv].

36 Ibid. This sentence is mysteriously absent from the English translation.
37 The format of the English translation of Cinéma, displacing the footnotes that appeared at
the bottom of the page in the original version to the end of each volume, may well have served
to mask the influence that the Cahiers critics had on Deleuze’s ideas, as the avowal of the
provenance of his concepts is usually presented there rather than in the body of the text.
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 761

escaping from the group and the impossibility of being satisfied with it.’”38
But there are three key moments in Deleuze’s diptych where the influence
of Cahiers becomes overwhelming. Two of these effectively bookend the
work: early on in L’Image-mouvement, a chapter titled “Cadre et plan, cadrage
et découpage” is dominated by the notion of the hors-champ as developed
by Bonitzer; in the concluding chapter of L’Image-temps, Deleuze’s discus-
sion of Straub/Huillet, Duras and Syberberg evinces a major debt to the
critical writings of Bonitzer, Daney and Narboni on these filmmakers in
the 1970s. In between, the dividing point cleaving Cinéma into two—the
“breakdown in the sensori-motor schema” brought about by World War
II—shows clear parallels with ideas developed by Daney in the years leading
up to the publication of Deleuze’s books. This influence remained mostly
unacknowledged in the relevant chapters of the Cinéma books but was
affirmed by Deleuze in later texts.
Deleuze’s chapter on the role of framing in the filmic image is one of the
fundamental building blocks in his philosophical account of the cinema, an
aspect that makes the philosopher’s debt to Bonitzer’s discussion of framing,
“deframing” and the hors-champ all the more crucial to his overall project.
From the start of this chapter, Deleuze offers a provisional definition of
the frame, described as “the determination of a closed system, a relatively
closed system which includes everything which is present in the image—sets,
characters and props.” While acknowledging that a frame can thus be a set
(ensemble) containing within it a multiplicity of components or sub-sets,
Deleuze immediately rejects a semiological approach to cinematic framing,
arguing that “if the frame has an analogue, it is to be found in an information
system rather than a linguistic one.”39 This standpoint, indeed, reflects the
more general position adopted in Cinéma 1, since Deleuze stridently insists
that “it’s catastrophic to apply linguistics to the cinema”40 and that “we
must understand the cinema not as a language [langage], but as signaletic
matter.”41 In this optic, the elements within a frame are understood to be data

38 Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985), p. 286. Translated as Cinema
2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 219. The quoted passage comes from Comolli in Bergala/Philippon,
“Entretien avec Jean-Louis Comolli,” p. 23.
39 Deleuze, Cinéma 1, p. 23 [p. 12].
40 Gilles Deleuze, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni, “La photographie est déjà
tirée dans les choses: Entretien avec Gilles Deleuze,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 352 (October 1983),
pp. 35-40, p. 38. Translated as “On The Movement-Image,” in Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans.
and ed. Martin Joughlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 46-56, here p. 52.
41 Deleuze, “Le cerveau, c’est l’écran,” p. 26.
762  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

(données) and can be subject to both saturation (in the deep-focus aesthetic
of Wyler and Altman) or rarefaction (in Ozu’s empty frames). The image
itself, Deleuze argues, is a site for the recording of visual information and
hence “legible” as much as it is “visible.” Drawing implicitly at this stage on
Daney’s text “Le thérrorisé (pédagogie godardienne),” Deleuze thus argues
that “there is a pedagogy of the image, especially with Godard, when this
function is made explicit, when the frame serves as an opaque surface of
information, sometimes blurred by saturation, sometimes reduced to the
empty set, to the white or black screen.”42
The inherently mobile, dynamic nature of the cinematic frame draws
Deleuze towards Bonitzer’s notion of deframing (décadrage). While Bonitzer
was yet to publish Décadrages as a book, he had already developed the notion
in his 1978 article for Cahiers, and the broader concept informs much of his
film theory in the 1970s and early 1980s.43 For Deleuze, deframing is a “very
interesting concept” that allows us to “designate these abnormal points
of view which […] refer to another dimension of the image.”44 Examples
of this phenomenon can be found in the close-ups of fragmented faces in
Dreyer’s Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the “dead zones” in Ozu or the “disconnected
spaces” in Bresson, the last of which tend to “confirm that the visual image
has a legible function beyond its visual function.”45 This discussion leads
directly to Deleuze’s more fundamental use of the notion of the hors-champ,
as initially developed by Burch and Bonitzer. While resting on the ideas
of these two film theorists (particularly Bonitzer), Deleuze nonetheless
gives a fresh conceptualization of the functioning of the hors-champ in the
cinema. For the philosopher, the hors-champ is “not a negation” and should
not be defined as “the non-coincidence between two frames, one visual and
the other sound”; rather, it refers to “what is neither seen nor heard, but is
nevertheless perfectly present.”46
Reproducing Bazin’s distinction between the frame and the cache (mask),
itself frequently reiterated by Bonitzer, Deleuze ascribes a different variant
of the hors-champ to each of these two types of framing. Every frame, he
insists, implies an hors-champ—even the most closed, self-contained system
can eliminate it in appearance only. Hence, “there are not two types of
frame only one of which would refer to the hors-champ; there are rather

42 Deleuze, Cinéma 1, p. 24 [p. 13]. Daney’s text is later explicitly cited in Deleuze, Cinéma 2,
p. 322 [p. 247].
43 See Chapter 25.
44 Deleuze, Cinéma 1, pp. 27-28 [ p. 15].
45 Ibid., p. 28 [p. 15].
46 Ibid. [p. 16].
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 763

two very different aspects of the hors-champ, each of which refers to a mode
of framing.”47 The hors-champ implies that any set presented for our view
is actually only one component of a larger set, which has the potential to
scale up to the entire universe. What begins, therefore, as a notion in film
poetics is transformed in Deleuze’s hands into an ontological concept. In
Bonitzer’s polemic with the “empiricism” of Burch’s original exposition
of the hors-champ, with its more pragmatic sense of “off-screen space,”
the Cahiers writer objected to the idea that there was a “becoming-field”
(devenir-champ) of the hors-champ; instead, something always remains
radically outside of the frame of the filmic image—the camera.48 Deleuze
notes that he finds these remarks to be “solidly based”; at the same time,
however, he argues that there is an “internal duality” within the hors-champ
that does not merely relate to the filming apparatus but to the existence of
two qualitatively different forms of the hors-champ: a “relative aspect” that
relates to a space that is momentarily excluded from the frame but that can
be absorbed into the image through a change in camera position (by means
of a cut or a camera movement), and an “absolute aspect” by means of which
“the closed system opens onto a duration which is immanent to the whole
universe.”49 In this latter case, which arises when deframing effects are
used in a way that has no “pragmatic” justification, the hors-champ refers
to “a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time” and
introduces a “trans-spatial” or “spiritual” element into a system that can
never be perfectly closed off.50
From this specific discussion of the hors-champ, Deleuze moves to a
broader treatment of the shot, intervening into debates around the status
of the sequence shot, camera movement and the classification of shots in
the work of Bazin, Mitry and Metz. Pushing against Mitry’s refusal of the
category of the sequence shot, Deleuze argues that the unity of a shot is
based, precisely, on movement, and that it therefore “embraces a correla-
tive multiplicity which does not contradict it.”51 But this claim also leads
him to distance himself from Bonitzer, who is nonetheless recognized as
the contemporary critic “most interested in the notion of the shot and its

47 Ibid., p. 29 [p. 15].

48 In addition to the argument made in Bonitzer’s original Cahiers article, “Hors-champ,” this
argument is made more clearly in its revised version, as published in Bonitzer, Le Regard et la
Voix (see, especially, p. 17).
49 Deleuze, Cinéma 1, p. 30 [p. 17].
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., p. 43 [p. 27].
764  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

evolution.”52 While Bonitzer’s analyses of the different types of shot in Le

Champ aveugle are “very rigorous,” Deleuze argues that they should have
“brought him to a new conception of the shot as a consistent unity” and
expresses disappointment that he instead “draws from it doubts about the
consistency of the notion of the shot whose ‘composite, ambiguous and
fundamentally fake character’ he condemns.” Of a figure who is one of the
most frequently cited names in the Cinéma books, therefore, Deleuze writes
that “it is only on this point that we cannot follow him.”53

Components of the Time-Image

Whereas the references to the Cahiers critics in Cinéma 1 were mostly

confined to the use of Bonitzer’s ideas in the “Cadre et plan, cadrage et
découpage” chapter, in Cinéma 2 the influence of the journal on Deleuze’s
thinking is spread across the text as a whole. To a large degree, this can
be ascribed to the fact that, as opposed to the focus in the first volume on
directors from pre-war cinema, the second volume deals with filmmakers
whose work was contemporaneous with the critical practice of Cahiers. As
such, it is perhaps no surprise that this cross-pollination of ideas should
reach a crescendo in the closing chapter of Cinéma 2, “Les composantes de
l’image,” given that it deals primarily with the cinema of the 1970s and focuses
on the work of three filmmakers whose work was obsessively discussed by
Cahiers during this time: Straub/Huillet, Duras and Syberberg.
“Les composantes de l’image” is a curious culmination of Deleuze’s
700-page study of the cinema: while discussing what was, at the time of
writing, the latest works of modernist cinema, the chapter also operates a
return to the very origins of the medium and, on the basis of the shifting
relations of sound and vision, replays the historical schema of the cinema
provided by the two volumes of Cinéma. Here, however, the binary divi-
sion between the movement-image and the time-image is replaced with a
tripartite organization, classifying the cinema into the silent period, the
“first phase” of sound cinema and a third period in which the relationship
between sound and image takes on a new guise. Whereas, with its use of
intertitles to convey spoken information, the silent era operated a strict
distinction between the “seen image” (image vue) and the “read image”
(image lue), the f irst, classical era of sound cinema merged the visual

52 Ibid., p. 44 [pp. 221-222].

53 Ibid. [p. 222].
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 765

image with the spoken word by synchronizing the voices of on-screen

figures with images of their bodies in the act of speaking. Subsequently,
in the modernist “second phase” of sound cinema, the speech act comes
to “extricate itself from its dependencies in relation to the visual image,
and assume[s] a value for itself.”54 Here, a thinker who was notoriously
hostile to Hegelian logic adopts an uncannily dialectical approach to the
evolution of the spoken word in the cinema. The opposition between the
indirect use of speech in the silent era (whereby a title card has to report
on the speech that goes unheard by the spectator) and the direct speech
of the classical sound era (with its emphasis on the unity of image and
sound) is superseded by a new form of speech in modern cinema, which
Deleuze—following Pasolini and Rohmer—dubs “free indirect speech.”
Furthermore, the modern cinema of Straub/Huillet and Godard harks
back to the silent cinema through its re-introduction of written words
into the visual image: in the form, this time, not only of intertitles but also
on-screen notebooks, letters, street signs, plaques and so on.55 Deleuze
nonetheless cautions against understanding modern cinema as a return to
the silent cinema: whereas the latter was characterized by the coexistence
of two types of images (the seen and the read), in modern sound cinema,
it is “the visual image in its entirety that must be read,” as both intertitles
and “scriptural injections” are now merely the “stipplings” (pointillés) of a
stratigraphically layered image.56
Early signs of a modern approach to the interplay between sound and
image in the cinema can be seen in Bresson, and in examining the use of
sound in Bresson’s films, Deleuze turns to Daney’s discussion of Le Diable
probablement in his August-September 1977 article “L’orgue et l’aspirateur
(La voix off et quelques autres).” Invoking a scene in a church basement
where the voices of young people attending a political meeting have to
contend for supremacy on the soundtrack not only with the sacral music
of an organ but also with the mundane hum of a vacuum cleaner running
over a red carpet, Daney argues that this filmic fragment is held together
by an “aleatory, heterogeneous sonic dispositif ” bearing witness to Bresson’s
characteristic formal “heterology,” which contains the three terms of “the
high (the organ), the low (the discussion), and that which ruins the simple

54 Deleuze, Cinéma 2, p. 314 [p. 242].

55 Deleuze credits both Narboni and Bonitzer for pointing out the presence of these “scriptural
elements” in Straub/Huillet’s work. See Jean Narboni, “Là,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 275 (April 1977),
pp. 6-14, here p. 9; and Bonitzer, Le Regard et la Voix, p. 67.
56 Deleuze, Cinéma 2, p. 320 [p. 246].
766  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

high/low opposition: the trivial (the vacuum cleaner).”57 Following the lead of
Bonitzer’s discussion of voice-over in “Les silences de la voix,” Daney proposes
a fourfold classification of speech in the cinema: the standard voix-off,
which remains permanently or provisionally off-screen, is accompanied
by a voix-in (which speaks from the hors-champ to an on-screen figure) as
well as a voix-out (a filmed body directs its speech towards the hors-champ),
and finally a voix-through, which is “emitted in the image but outside of
the spectacle of the mouth,” for instance by showing a character speaking
while their backs are filmed from behind.58 As Daney explains, “of course,
these backs are not ‘true,’ even though in Bresson (and Straub), the whole
problem consists in displacing the direct-effect on a smooth and obtuse
part of the body. Modernity (since Bresson, precisely) is translated through
a large number of bodies filmed from behind. Direct and non-direct, here
and elsewhere.”59
Deleuze, for his part, argues that in Bresson’s films “it is not indirect
discourse that is treated as direct, it was the opposite; it was the direct, the
dialogue, which was treated as if it were reported by someone else: hence the
famous Bressonian voice, the voice of the ‘model’ […] where the character
speaks as if he were listening to his own words reported by someone else.”60
The bulk of his discussion in this chapter, however, is concerned with the
work of Straub/Huillet and is derived to a large extent from the decades-long
critical appreciation of the duo’s work by the Cahiers critics. Citing Narboni’s
discussion of the role of speech in Othon, Deleuze contends that the foremost
aspect of Straub/Huillet’s work is “the isolating of the pure speech act, the
properly cinematic utterance [énoncé] or the sound image” and that this
tearing away of the spoken voice from its textual support “presupposes a
certain resistance of the text, and all the more respect for the text.” In the
case of Straub/Huillet’s Corneille adaptation, Deleuze insists that “what they
tear from the representation is a cinematic act, what they tear from the text
is a rhythm or a tempo; what they tear from language is an ‘aphasia.’” The
same treatment of the speech act can be found across a wide range of Straub/
Huillet’s films, from Nicht versöhnt to Klassenverhältnisse, but Deleuze seems
to locate its purest instantantiation in the one-word cry “Hinaus!” (Leave!)
in the Bach film, which presages the use of Sprechgesang in Moses und Aron.

57 Serge Daney, “L’orgue et l’aspirateur (La voix off et quelques autres),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 279-280 (August-September 1977), pp. 19-27, here p. 20.
58 Ibid., p. 26. Daney uses the English preposition for all four of the terms used in his text.
59 Ibid.
60 Deleuze, Cinéma 2, p. 315 [p. 242].
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 767

On the basis of these examples, then, Deleuze declares that the speech act
is “a struggle: it must be economical and sparse, infinitely patient, in order
to impose itself on what resists it, but extremely violent in order to be itself
a resistance, an act of resistance. Irresistibly, it rises.”61
Straub/Huillet’s use of the speech-act as a gesture of resistance is, in
Deleuze’s analysis, mirrored in the treatment of landscapes in their films.
Leaning on Narboni and Daney’s critical responses to works such as Othon,
Fortini/Cani and Dalla nube alla resistenza, the philosopher defines the
visual image in these films as presenting “empty and lacunary stratigraphic
landscapes” where “the earth stands for what is buried in it”: the cache
of partisan weapons in the grotto of Othon or the cornf ields fertilized
by the blood of sacrificial victims in Dalla nube alla resistenza.62 At the
same time, he maintains that “empty” and “disconnected” are not the best
words to describe these spaces. Instead, as Daney first recognized in “Le
plan straubien,” their stratigraphic nature, which entails an “impossible
coalescence of the perceived and the known, the content of a perception
and the perception of a knowledge,” requires the visual image itself to be
subject to reading.63 We must, Deleuze notes, “read the visual as well as
hear the speech-act in a new way.”64 It is this new mode of reading and of
listening that is at the root of the pedagogical nature of modern cinema,
which manifests itself above all, as both Daney and Deleuze accept, in the
work of the two filmmakers most fetishized by Cahiers: Godard and Straub/
Huillet.65 As Deleuze argues, a “new regime of the image” is constructed on
this pedagogical basis, one that “consists of this: images and sequences are
no longer linked by rational cuts, which end the first or begin the second,
but are relinked on top of irrational cuts, which no longer belong to either
of the two and are valid for themselves (interstices). Irrational cuts thus
have a disjunctive, and no longer a conjunctive value.”66 As Deleuze grants,
the pedagogical aspect of modern filmmaking brings the cinema close to
its rival medium, television—a bridge that actually is crossed by Godard
in his 1970s television works. In the Deleuzian schema, then, the work of
Godard and Straub/Huillet (and a fortiori that of Syberberg), represents

61 Ibid., pp. 330-331 [pp. 253-254].

62 Ibid., p. 318 [p. 244].
63 Daney, “Le plan straubien,” p. 6.
64 Ibid., p. 322 [p. 247].
65 For more on the role of pedagogy in the thinking of Deleuze and Daney, see Garin Dowd,
“Pedagogies of the Image between Daney and Deleuze,” New Review of Film and Television Studies
vol. 8 no. 1 (2010), pp. 41-56.
66 Ibid., p. 324 [p. 248].
768  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

the end point of the evolution of the cinema and the moment at which it is
superseded by television. But this is far from being a decisive step forward;
instead, there is an oscillation between the two media in the “electronic
age” of the image. As Deleuze circumspectly writes, the second, modernist
stage of the sound cinema

would never have arisen without television; it is television which made

it possible; but, because television abandoned most of its own creative
possibilities, and did not even understand them, it needed cinema to give
it a pedagogical lesson; it needed great cinema authors to show what it
could do and what it would be able to do; if it is true that television kills
cinema, cinema on the other hand is continually revitalizing television,
not only because it feeds it with films, but because the great cinema
authors invent the audio-visual image, which they are quite ready to ‘give
back’ to television if it gives them the opportunity.67

Optimism, Pessimism and Travel: Deleuze avec Daney

The elaborate classification system of images adopted by Deleuze is thus

marked by not one but two major ruptures. The first, openly avowed and
at the center of his study, is the transition from the movement-image to the
time-image, correlative with the breakdown of the sensori-motor schema
precipitated by the social collapse of World War II. The second, which
remains in tacit form in the Cinéma books, only visible in select moments
of the text and often overlooked by readers of Deleuze, is the transition
from the cinematic image to a televisual or electronic image—that is, the
putative supersession of the cinema itself, which was taking place in strict
contemporaneity with the act of writing Cinéma and on which Deleuze,
therefore, was unable to make anything more than the most tentative
pronouncements. The idea of a second rupture does, however, assume
a more central position in a subsequent text by Deleuze: “Optimisme,
pessimisme et voyage,” the preface to Daney’s Ciné journal. Here, Deleuze
avows that it was the critical intuitions of Daney that allowed both ruptures
to be pinpointed and elaborated. In this sense, therefore, a case can be
made that it is in fact Daney—more than Bergson, Peirce or Bazin—who
is the true tutelary thinker for Deleuze’s philosophical exposition of the
cinema.

67 Ibid., p. 328 [pp. 251-252].

THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 769

The text of Daney’s that best summarized his views in this regard, and
which was manifestly influential for Deleuze, was the conclusion to his 1982
collection of critical writings, La Rampe. In “La rampe (bis),” Daney claims
that the classical cinema, which existed in the three decades leading up to
the cataclysm of World War II, was marked by its scenographic depth, a trait
that was founded on a pact with the spectator based on the idea that “there
is indeed something ‘behind the door.’” This pact is fundamentally broken
by the modern cinema, which “‘took on’ this non-depth of the image, which
laid claim to it, and which thought to make of it—with humor or fury—a
war machine against the illusionism of classical cinema.” Daney offers a
precise historical point of departure for this process: the modern, anti-
illusionist cinema of radical non-depth was born—and “not by chance”—in
“the destroyed and traumatized Europe of the post-war period, on the
ruins of an annihilated, discredited cinema, on the basis of a fundamental
refusal of simulation, of mise en scène.” Concomitantly, the machinery of
audiovisual propaganda had led to a disaster “in the real”: “Behind this
belligerent theater, as its reverse side and its shameful truth, there was
another scene that has ceaselessly haunted our imaginations: that of the
camps.” Thus, for Daney, the great innovators of modern cinema—Rossel-
lini, Godard, Bergman and others—radically disassociated their art from
classical cinema’s “theatrical-propagandistic model,” and, furthermore, they
shared the intuition that “they are no longer dealing with the same body as
before—before the camps, before Hiroshima. And that this is irreversible.”
Modern cinema’s “scenography of obscenity” is based not on the question
“What is there to see behind?” but “Can my gaze withstand what, in any
case, I see before me?”68
Having traced out a historical mutation in the nature of the film image,
the result of a geopolitical catastrophe, Daney turns his attention to the
second mutation, unfolding in real time before the critic’s eyes as the 1970s
turned into the 1980s. If the modern cinema was born with the torture scene
from Roma città aperta, it expires with the “eternal disavowal-question
of Godard’s latest films: why does the cinema always show the faces of
victims and the backs of executioners?” Already, Daney contends, “it is
possible today to venture this: the ‘modern’ cinema, its flat image and its
scenography of the gaze, is receding into the distance.” The reason? It has
become generalized and automated by another medium, the “surveillance
tool” of television. Television completes modern cinema but also betrays it:
“The horror at indifference that confers on Godard’s films the pathos of the

68 The quotes in this paragraph are from Daney, La Rampe, pp. 208-210.
770  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

moral recoil has become, on television, the pure and simple indifference
towards horror.” Thus, the 1980s witnesses the rise of a third type of scenic
construction, neither classical or modern but akin to a guided visit through
the museum of scenography itself, and which can be found in the mannerist
aesthetic of Ruiz, Syberberg and the “young cinephile-tycoons” of the New
Hollywood cinema. In Syberberg’s Méliès-like aesthetic, for instance, the
film image only ever reveals another film image: “from now on, the backdrop
of the cinema is the cinema.”69
The line of reasoning developed by Daney in this short but fundamental
text finds a distinct echo in Deleuze’s Cinéma books. Already in Cinéma
1, which was published but months after La Rampe, Deleuze delivers a
remarkably similar chronology to that expressed by Daney, in which “the
great crisis of the image action” unfurled in Europe, beginning in Italy, where,
“in the situation at the end of the war, Rossellini discovered a dispersive
and lacunary reality.”70 At the same time, the “American Dream” and the
action-image it powered collapsed, and although the great genres of classical
Hollywood continued to churn out films, the social rationale for them had
dissipated. In the preface to the English edition of Cinéma 2, Deleuze is
more specific about the political context surrounding the demise of the
movement-image:

Why is the Second World War taken as a break? The fact is that, in Europe,
the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no
longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how
to describe. These were “any spaces whatever,” deserted but inhabited,
disused warehouses, waste ground cities in the course of demolition or
reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters
was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers.71

In the body of Cinéma 2, Deleuze invokes La Rampe when stating that “what
has brought the whole cinema of the movement-image into question are ‘the
great political mises-en-scène, state propaganda turned tableaux vivants, the
first mass deportations of human beings’ and their backdrop, the camps. This
was the death knell for the ambitions of ‘the old cinema.’”72 The philosopher
also praises Daney’s book for being “one of the few to take up the question

69 Ibid., pp. 211-212.

70 Deleuze, Cinéma 1, p. 285 [p. 212].
71 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. xi.
72 Deleuze, Cinéma 2, p. 214 [p. 164].
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 771

of cinema-thought relations, which were so common at the beginning of

reflection on cinema, but later abandoned because of disenchantment.
Daney restores the full weight to it, in relation to contemporary cinema.”73
In his conclusion to the volume, Deleuze also follows Daney in speaking of a
“new regime of the image” succeeding that of the time-image. The “electronic
image, that is, the tele and video image, the digital image coming into being,
either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death.”74 Deleuze
cautions that the dawning era of the televisual image will not form part of
his study but comments that the “new images no longer have any exteriority
(hors-champ), any more than they are internalized in a whole; rather, […]
they are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can
arise from any point whatever of the preceding image.”75 Like Daney, Deleuze
sees the work of Syberberg—and more specifically what Oudart called the
“media-effect” at work in his films, in which the “division of the visual and
the sound” is “specifically entrusted with experiencing this complexity of
informational space”76 —as occupying the threshold between cinematic
modernism and its own supersession by the electronic image.
It is in “Optimisme, pessimisme et voyage,” however, that the philosopher
most expansively discusses the ideas of Daney, doing so in the form of
an epistolary message directly addressing the critic in the second person
singular. Here Deleuze places Daney squarely in the critical tradition of
Bazin by dint of the fact that he still seeks “a fundamental link between
cinema and thought” and still regards film criticism as a “poetic and aesthetic
activity.” Daney’s thinking is marked by a deep irony, however: while his
critical outlook has retained “the grand idea of cinema’s first period: cinema
as a new Art and a new Thought,” his day-to-day practice as a critic involved
charting the emergence of a “third period, a third function of the image, a
third set of relations.”77 The new era is marked by the confrontation between
cinema and television, but instead of producing refreshing attempts to
develop the aesthetic specificities of the two mediums, this encounter has
principally opened up new ways of operating political power and social
control. The third state of the image thus leads, as Daney had noted, to the
dominance of mannerism in the cinema, which Deleuze defines as a state

73 Ibid., p. 230 [p. 312].

74 Ibid., p. 346 [p. 265].
75 Ibid., pp. 346-347 [p. 265].
76 Ibid., p. 352 [p. 269]. See also Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Notes de mémoire sur Hitler, de Syberberg.”
77 Gilles Deleuze, “Optimisme, pessimisme et voyage,” in Serge Daney, Ciné journal vol. I,
pp. 9-25, here p. 13. Translated as “Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel,” in
Gilles Deleuze., Negotiations, pp. 68-79, here pp. 70-71.
772  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

where “there is nothing to see behind [the image], not much to see in it or
on the surface, but just an image constantly slipping across pre-existing,
presupposed images.” Reverting to his own inimitable lexical style, Deleuze
argues that “the couple Nature-Body, or Landscape-Man, has given way to the
couple City-Brain: the screen is no longer a window-door (behind which…)
nor a frame-shot (in which), but a digital monitor [table d’information] on
which images glide like ‘data’ points.”78
Thus, for Deleuze, Daney’s thinking is striated by a deep contradiction
between optimism and pessimism, between despair for the present and hope
for the future. Television may well be a powerful means for formal and social
consensus, but the path still lies open for the cinema to “invent the new
resistance and combat the televisual function of surveillance and control.”
The task of the critic, the filmmaker, and even the philosopher, therefore, is
to “prevent television subverting or short-circuiting the extension of cinema
into the new types of image” (whether magnetic, electronic or digital).79
As Samuel Fuller declared in Pierrot le fou, “the cinema is a battleground.”
From the mid-1980s onwards, Daney would increasingly play the role of
frontline reporter in the ongoing skirmishes between the cinema and other
audiovisual media, which he came to call “the visual.” In the final chapter,
therefore, my discussion will center on the responses to this confrontation
between the cinema and the visual in the contemporary era.

Works Cited

André Bazin, “Un f ilm bergsonien: Le Mystère Picasso,” in idem., Qu’est-ce que
le cinéma? vol. II: Le Cinéma et les autres arts (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1959),
pp. 133-142.
Alain Bergala, “Stratégie critique, tactique pédagogique,” in François Dosse and
Jean-Michel Frodon, Gilles Deleuze et les images (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma,
2008), pp. 37-41.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Oshima et les corps-langages,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 218
(March 1970), pp. 31-34.
———, “Le secret derrière la porte (Portier de nuit),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 251-252
(July-August 1974), pp. 30-36.
———, Le Regard et la Voix (Paris: Union générale des éditions, 1976).

78 Ibid., pp. 19-20 [pp. 75-76].

79 Ibid.
THE BR AIN IS THE SCREEN: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA AND GILLES DELEUZE 773

———, “La bouche rit (Histoire de Paul),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 262-263 (Janu-
ary 1976), pp. 66-68.
———, “Désir désert (Profession reporter),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 262-263 (Janu-
ary 1976), pp. 96-98.
———, “Lignes et voies (Macadam à deux voies),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 266-267
(May 1976), pp. 68-71.
———, interviewed by Stéphane Bouquet, Emmanuel Burdeau and François
Ramone, “Nos années non-légendaires: Entretien avec Pascal Bonitzer,” in
Emmanuel Burdeau (ed.), Cinéma 68 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2008 [1998]),
pp. 143-156.
Serge Daney, “Amphisbetesis,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 31-32.
———, “L’orgue et l’aspirateur (La voix off et quelques autres),” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 279-280 (August-September 1977), pp. 19-27.
———, La Rampe (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983).
Gilles Deleuze, “Trois questions sur Six fois deux,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 271
(November 1976), pp. 5-12. Translated as “Three Questions on Six Times Two,”
in idem., Negotations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), pp. 37-45.
———, Cinéma 1: L’Image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983). Translated as Cinema
1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
———, interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni, “La photographie est
déjà tirée dans les choses: Entretien avec Gilles Deleuze,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 352 (October 1983), pp. 35-40.
———, Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985). Translated as Cinema 2: The
Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989).
———, interviewed by Alain Bergala, Pascal Bonitzer, Marc Chevrie, Jean Narboni,
Charles Tesson and Serge Toubiana, “Le cerveau, c’est l’écran: Entretien avec
Gilles Deleuze,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 380 (February 1986), pp. 24-32.
———, “Optimisme, pessimisme et voyage,” in Serge Daney, Ciné journal vol. I: 1981-1982
(Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 [1986]), pp. 9-25. Translated as “Letter to Serge
Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel,” in Gilles Deleuze, Negotations: 1972-1990,
trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 68-79.
———, L’Île déserte et autres textes (1953-1974), ed. David Lapouajde (Paris: Minuit,
2002).
François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah
Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Garin Dowd, “Pedagogies of the Image between Daney and Deleuze,” New Review
of Film and Television Studies vol. 8, no. 1 (2010), pp. 41-56.
774  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Pascal Kané, “Et c’est pas triste? (L’An 01, Themroc),” Cahiers du cinéma no. 247
(July-August 1973), pp. 36-39.
Jean Narboni, “Là,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 275 (April 1977), pp. 6-14.
———, “Visages d’Hitchcock,” Cahiers du cinéma hors série “Spécial Hitchcock”
(1980), pp. 30-37.
———, “…une aile de papillon,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 497 (December 1995),
pp. 22-25.
———, Mikio Naruse: Les temps incertains (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006).
———, En présence d’un clown de Ingmar Bergman (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2007).
———, “Du côté des noms,” in François Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon, Gilles
Deleuze et les images (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2008), pp. 21-30.
———, Pourquoi les coiffeurs?: Notes actuelles sur Le Dictateur (Paris: Capricci, 2010).
———, La nuit sera noire et blanche: Barthes, La Chambre claire, le cinéma (Paris:
Capricci, 2015).
———, Samuel Fuller: Un homme à fables (Paris: Capricci, 2017).
———, Philippe Cassard and Marc Chévrie, Deux temps, trois mouvements: Un
pianiste au cinéma (Paris: Capricci, 2012).
Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Notes de mémoire sur Hitler, de Syberberg,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 294 (November 1978), pp. 5-16.
D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press,
1997).
Serge Toubiana, “Le cinéma est deleuzien,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 497 (Decem-
ber 1995), pp. 20-21.
26. Film Ontology in the Age of “New”
Media

Abstract
In this, the final chapter of my study, I turn my attention to the response
that Cahiers du cinéma critics have had to various forms of “new” media
(television, advertising, digital imagery, etc.). Whether it was the collective
analysis of the talk show “À armes égales” as a product of the “televisual
state apparatus” by Cahiers in 1972, Serge Daney’s notion of “the visual”
in his writings for Libération in the 1980s, Jacques Aumont’s wry polem-
ics around the state of contemporary media culture in the twenty-first
century, or Jean-Louis Comolli’s incendiary counterposition of “cinema”
and “spectacle” in his recent texts, these critics have attempted to grapple
with a situation in which the cinema has an increasingly marginalized
position within the broader realm of visual imagery. But they do so by
drawing on the same fundamental set of ideas that guided their f ilm
criticism: a distinctive blend of apparatus theory and Bazinian realism.

Keywords: Cahiers du cinéma, new media, ideological state apparatus,

Serge Daney, Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli

Cahiers du cinéma and the “televisual state apparatus”

Writing for Libération on October 8, 1987, Serge Daney turned his critical
eye to the question of photojournalism, in particular the coverage of war
zones and natural disasters. The critic was prompted to do so by a television
program two nights earlier, Dossiers de l’écran, which presented a debate
on the topic, and he used this pretext to explore the underlying morality
of image production. Rejecting the self-exonerating argument of profes-
sional photographers that their work can save lives or popularize a worthy
cause, Daney affirmed that in the case of such images of devastation and
suffering, “nothing is less evident than [their] social utility.” Probing more

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_ch26
776  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

deeply, Daney’s focus turned to one of the most acclaimed photographs of

the decade: an image of Omayra Sánchez Garzón, a 13-year-old girl from
the village of Armero in Colombia, caught in a mudslide after a volcanic
explosion in November 1985. Shortly before she died of hypothermia, French
photographer Frank Fournier captured a snapshot of the girl, her hands
already a chalky-white due to the chill, her eyes glazed as she slipped into
deathly hallucinations. The resulting picture was emblazoned on the cover of
newspapers and magazines and beamed around the world by television news
broadcasts. The photo, it was hoped, would call attention to the lackluster
response to the disaster by the Colombian authorities. Daney, however, was
rather more dubious: “It would be abusive to claim that the shot of the little
girl from Armerio [sic] helped to raise awareness of anything at all. And if the
live broadcast of a little girl’s death was needed for decent-minded people to
look up Colombia in an atlas, this is a rather high price to pay for pedagogy.”
Asking himself why contemporary societies have such an intense need for
this “spectacle of human impotence,” Daney argued that it is because they
“screen off the real, […] and because they are also the screen on which the
reminder of something unforgettable is inscribed.” He went on to note the
exceptional role played by images of children in the media:

This is why our era is crisscrossed by images of children. Useless images

of children uselessly killed. Images, even, of massacres. The Jewish child
from the Warsaw ghetto with arms raised. The little naked girl on a
Vietnamese highway. The girl from Armerio. These images, because they
are without any possible reverse-shot, doubtless function as the only pious
images left to us, and it is without any shame that we keep ahold of them
in our memories.1

Reading Daney’s words today, it is hard not to think of the photograph of

Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose lifeless body was found
washed up on the Turkish coastline in September 2015. As if by miracle, the
distressing image seemingly changed Europe’s attitudes to refugees from
Syria overnight. As Daney would have said, however, Aylan’s death was a
high price to pay for this shift in public opinion.
The resonances between an article written in 1987 and an event from
2015 do not, of course, make Daney a visionary oracle of the present-day
media-political landscape. Rather, this parallel is made to highlight the
fact that, beyond his profound critical analysis of the cinema, Daney was

1 The above quotes are from Serge Daney, Le Salaire du zappeur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), pp. 62-63.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 777

also a perspicacious observer of other modes of audiovisual media produc-

tion—television, video, print journalism, advertising—to which he gave the
overarching term “the visual.”2 In this, he is joined by other Cahiers alumni:
in particular, Aumont and Comolli, who have also turned their attention to
the thoroughgoing changes to the ways images function in the contemporary
era and the effects these changes have had on the traditional “apparatus”
of the cinema. This chapter will thus focus on the recent writings of these
three figures concerning the ontological status of the image in the age of
“new” media and link it to their earlier output at Cahiers, particularly those
moments—such as the articles “Notes sur le nouveau spectateur” by Comolli,
“Sur Salador” by Daney and the collective analysis of the political television
program À armes égales—when the journal shifted its optic away from the
cinema and toward other media forms such as television. Finally, my focus
will turn to the journal Trafic, which, having been established by Daney
three decades ago, has become a site of resistance against the dominance
of the “visual” in contemporary culture and a place where former Cahiers
critics and others have embarked on the ongoing project to develop a pluralist
critical theory of the cinema.
It is true that the theoretical activity of Cahiers in the post-1968 era
is—justifiably—not known for its preoccupation with “new” media. For the
most part, the journal focused on providing an ideological analysis of the
cinema as a relatively self-contained, unified cultural field. Sporadically,
however, articles written by the Cahiers critics did show an interest in the
aesthetics and politics of phenomena such as advertising and television
broadcasting. Although the preoccupation is far from being as theoretically
fleshed out as the intense concern for the cinema, these texts are fascinating
precursors to the later writings of the Cahiers critics and point to the possible
application of the journal’s variant of “apparatus theory” to media domains
outside of the cinema.
An early text in this vein was Comolli’s “Notes sur le nouveau spectateur”
from April 1966, a belated riposte to the humanist, phenomenological vision
of the cinema in his 1963 article “Vivre le film.”3 In his 1966 text, the focus
lies much more on the viewing conditions of what would soon afterwards
be called the “cinematic apparatus.” In particular, Comolli points to the
social and psychological function of the darkened movie theater and its
innate kinship with the “cinema of consumption,” a set-up that induces a

2 Daney’s death in 1992, of course, prevented the critic from having insights into the world
of online media, as the Internet only existed in very nascent form at the time.
3 For more on “Vivre le film,” see Chapter 2.
778  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

hypnotized, somnolent spectator prone to the “machinery of dreams.” By

contrast, even a modest auteur film requires a “genuine effort to resist” from
the spectator, precisely because it “does not conform to the vague norms
fixed by the tradition of dark cinemas.”4 This antimony leads Comolli to
call for “lighted theaters” (salles claires) which, by dint of not absorbing the
brightness radiating from the screen, place the character and the spectator
in a relationship of equality with each other. Admitting that this proposal
amounts to little more than a pipe dream, Comolli finds a curious equivalent
to his “lighted theaters” in the television set:

The major use television makes of cinéma-vérité is no accident: the small

screen is often the only one that opens onto a lighted “theater.” Indeed,
re-seeing the great works of cinema on television confirms this: if you
are not obsessed with dark cinemas [and] if you re-view these films in a
half-light that helps concentration, you see them differently and better
than in the cinema.5

This positive appraisal of television viewing was, however, to remain an

isolated case in Cahiers. For the most part, the newer medium was over-
looked or discussed in desultory fashion. The next prominent article to
focus specifically on television did not appear until 1972, by which time
Cahiers was in the throes of its Maoist period. The 25-page article, “‘À armes
égales’: Analyse d’une émission télévisée,” penned by the “Groupe Lou Sin
d’intervention idéologique,” sought to analyze television from the standpoint
of Althusser’s newly devised concept of the Ideological State Apparatus
(ISA). In the landmark 1970 article “Idéologie et Appareils idéologiques
d’état,” the philosopher built on his earlier texts concerning the functioning
of ideology by discussing the role played by a pluralized set of public and
private institutions (including the church, the education system, the family,
the media) in ideologically cementing a given state formation’s hegemony
over its populace, which was deployed in tandem with the predominantly
violent functioning of the Repressive State Apparatus (the police, the army,
the prison system).6

4 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Notes sur le nouveau spectateur,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 177 (April 1966),
pp. 66-67. Translated as “Notes on the New Spectator,” trans. Diana Matias, in Hillier (ed.), Cahiers
du Cinéma vol. II, pp. 210-215, here p. 213.
5 Ibid., p. 67 [p. 214].
6 See Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et Appareils idéologiques d’état (Notes pour une recherche),”
La Pensée no. 151 (June 1970), pp. 3-38. Translated as “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses:
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 779

Following Althusser, the Groupe Lou Sin’s introductory remarks align

television and the cinema as twin “information ISAs” that “support and
maintain each other, reproducing the ideological conditions of each other’s
functioning, renewing the systems of ideological recognition that program
them and that they, in turn, confirm.”7 In addition to their common material
basis (mechanically reproduced images and sounds), the cinematic and
televisual apparatuses have a privileged relationship: television “institu-
tionalizes and perpetuates the spectacular and distractive functions of the
cinema such as they were defined by Hollywood.”8 Moreover, with a national
viewership of 30 million people a night in France, the “televisual apparatus”
is, in fact, “more massive and more legible” than its cinematic counterpart,
and the cinema has concomitantly been relegated to a “secondary front”
in the contemporary struggle within the information ISA, a recognition
of a changed media landscape that would increasingly come to agonize
Cahiers later in the 1970s. By focusing their analysis on À armes égales, the
Groupe Lou Sin specifically chose to highlight an alternative relationship:
that between television and the political apparatus. À armes égales (the
title means “on equal terms”) was a political program that broadcast 33
two-hour episodes on a monthly basis on state broadcaster ORTF’s main
channel between February 1970 and March 1973.9 The novelty of the show
was twofold: firstly, its format combined political debate with short films
made under the auspices of the participants, and secondly, it specifically
aimed to be the site for a confrontation between two contrasting views on
the topic under focus. This was a strikingly new phenomenon for the ORTF,
which, prior to 1968, was a monolithic mouthpiece for the Gaullist state.
À armes égales was perhaps most notable for the frequent opportunities
the program provided for prominent Communist Party figures to appear
on the show—despite representing up to 30% of the electorate, they had
previously been almost totally excluded from the airwaves. In the episode
analyzed by Cahiers (broadcast on January 25, 1972), PCF representative

Notes towards an Investigation,” in idem., Lenin and Philosophy and Other Texts, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 85-132.
7 Groupe Lou Sin d’intervention idéologique, “À armes égales: Analyse d’une émission télévisée,”
Cahiers du cinéma 236-237 (March-April 1972), pp. 4-29, here p. 4. An abridged version of this
text was translated as “On Equal Terms – Analysis of a Television Programme,” in John Caughie
(ed.), Television: Ideology and Exchange (London: BFI, 1978).
8 Ibid.
9 A number of these episodes—although not the one studied by Cahiers—are now available
for viewing at the Institut national de l’audiovisuel’s mediatheque, located in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris.
780  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Roland Leroy faced off against Gaullist politician Michel Habib-Deloncle

on the topic “Ideology and Culture in French Society.”
Given that the journal at the time considered the “revisionist” PCF to be
entirely absorbed into the structures of bourgeois parliamentarism, this
gesture to political ecumenism was far from convincing proof, for Cahiers, of
the program’s much-vaunted “impartial” status.10 Rather, constructing a criti-
cal analysis of the ideological structures underpinning the format of À armes
égales would reveal, in the Groupe Lou Sin’s view, the specific, “material”
manner in which the show “marks the encounter […] of two apparatuses: the
political apparatus (the political debate) and the broadcasting-information
apparatus (television).”11 These two mutually reinforcing apparatuses have
the same function: in both cases, they mask the real primary contradiction
governing capitalist societies (the class struggle between bourgeoisie and
proletariat) through diversionary debates over “fictive stakes.” Moreover,
the impression of neutrality in the two apparatuses, of giving equal time
and consideration to each side of the debate, has a fundamentally repressive
function, serving to obfuscate the real ideological fault lines in a given
society. In the Leroy/Habib-Deloncle episode, for instance, both of the
speakers, while vigorously disputing secondary differences, gave expression
to a bourgeois-humanist concept of art and culture that was never contested
or open to question within the parameters of the debate, thus excluding any
globalizing alternatives to this ideological standpoint from being presented.
At this point, the Groupe Lou Sin’s analysis of À armes égales was a rather
stock-standard Althusserian account of a cultural product. What sets their
article apart, however, is the subsequent discussion of the scenic structure
of the programme’s “basic dispositif.” In particular, by condensing political
struggle into the staged representation of a duel between two sparring
individuals, the show’s format is overdetermined by the “universal norms”
of Hollywood cinema—and in particular, “the most universal of its genres,
the Western.”12 Not only does television re-broadcast American films ad
inifinitum, but Hollywood aesthetics impregnates even those programming
categories that would at first glance appear remote from the cinema (news,
sports, talk shows, etc.). Hence television, rather than being engaged in

10 The ideological limits of the program were ably demonstrated in its 16 May 1972 episode,
soon after the Cahiers article was published. Dedicated to the theme of “gauchisme,” neither
of the two participants on the show politically identified with the movement discussed, and
they differed merely in whether to aggressively attack the far left or treat it with paternalistic
condescension.
11 Ibid., p. 5
12 Ibid., p. 20.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 781

a “struggle to the death” with cinema, can more usefully be seen as the
“triumph, the apogee of Hollywood: the transparency of the world in one’s
home, the representation that abolishes class divisions, the ‘universal family
spectacle’ par excellence.”13 And yet, it would be no more correct to strictly
classify television in the cultural ISA alongside cinema than it would be
to unambiguously include it, as Althusser did, as part of the Information
ISA. Instead, as the Groupe Lou Sin concludes their article, it lies in a space
between these two fields. By dint of primarily serving to “re-ideologize
ideological texts produced in the various ISAs,” television thus acts as the
“cement” unifying the different domains of the ISA. As such, the “televisual
state apparatus” plays an analogous function to ideology itself and becomes
the privileged means in contemporary societies for the continued hegemony
of the dominant ideology.14

Daney: The Triumph of the Visual

Dating from July 1970, Serge Daney’s short text “Sur Salador” (a section of
the article “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” co-authored by Jean-Pierre Oudart),
took a more specific look at the role of advertising within what he called “the
ideology of visibility.” While noting that much of the ideological analysis of
the cinema had focused on the status of the camera, Daney argues for the
need to go even further in this direction and interrogate the hegemonic
position of the eye in Western metaphysics, a phenomenon that he dubs “the
blind trust in the visible.”15 Taking inspiration from Derrida, Daney finds
one of the most striking manifestations of this ideology of the visible in an
unexpected source: TV commercials. In this branch of the film industry,
“every truth is immediately verifiable,” since “one clearly sees the irruption
of the white tornado, the softness of Krema caramel, or the most obstinate
stain yielding to K2R.”16 While Daney argues that the vast majority of cinema,
by valorizing pre-existing material, conforms to the twin aesthetics of
advertising and propaganda, he also contends that the series of commercials
for the Salador brand of olive oil has an “undeniable beauty.” Here it should
be noted that, far from being standard representatives of French television

13 Ibid.
14 Ibid, p. 28.
15 Daney/Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” p. 39 [p. 116]. This text is also discussed in
Chapter 15.
16 Ibid., p. 40 [p. 117].
782  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

advertising at the dawn of the 1970s, the spots for K2R, Krema and Salador
that Daney refers to were rapidly edited, slapstick affairs with a veneer of
experimental cinema and a “pitch” that was so exaggerated as to be nearly
parodic. All three campaigns were the work of the duo Pierre Grimblat and
Gérard Pirès, who had long careers in television, radio and genre cinema.17
Noting that Grimblat/Pirès had taken a decisive “leap forward for advertising
cinema in the extreme care and precision of [their] work,” Daney suggested
that “capital” should not let comparable talents go to waste on “pseudo-films.”
Instead of Lelouch “pretending to shoot a dramatic scene with Montand
in the Congo,” the French director ought to sing the praises of a brand
of khaki jeans, while Melville could, Daney proposes, profitably hawk a
raincoat brand.18
It was not until the 1980s, however, that this subject would assume a central
importance for Daney’s thinking. While a drolly ironic take on audiovisual
culture had marked his writings since the “Sur Salador” text, Daney’s articles
for Libération grew progressively more downcast in the second half of the
1980s. This tendency was primarily determined by the broader changes in
the political and cultural landscape in these years. The hope incited by the
election of François Mitterand as president in 1981 had been dissipated by his
administration’s neoliberal turn soon after taking power. At the same time, the
privatization and segmentation of French television had seen the emergence
of new networks but led to an unadulterated focus on mass entertainment,
a tendency that was shared, in the cinema, with the aesthetic hegemony of
the Hollywood blockbuster and its “local” counterpart, the cinéma du look.
Finally, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe at the end of the decade
signaled the expiration of the global and national political binary that had
predominated since the end of World War II. The new, unipolar world order,
with the US enjoying an undisputed status as the world’s only remaining
superpower, was brutally confirmed by the Gulf War in 1991.
Perhaps the key change of the decade for Daney, however, was his recogni-
tion of the marginalization of the cinema in toto: from an earlier position of
cultural dominance, it had retreated to occupying a niche position within
the more amorphous, totalizing entity of “the visual.” This realization had
a couple of major consequences for the critic. Firstly, it entailed a greater

17 See Philippe Rège (ed.), Encyclopedia of French Film Directors vol. I, (Lanham: Scarecrow
Press, 2009), pp. 471, 823-824. Grimblat was friends with Boris Vian and Raymond Queneau
and directed the Serge Gainsbourg vehicle Slogan. Pirès directed Erotissimo in 1968 and later
made the first film in the Taxi franchise. A certain anarcho-surrealist heritage can be seen in
the commercials they made together, many of which can now be viewed at the Inathèque.
18 Daney/Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” p. 40 [p. 117].
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 783

acceptance of a much broader swathe of the cinema than that which Daney,
or Cahiers more generally, had earlier defended. Secondly, the cultural
dominance of television called for increased attention to the medium and
a more nuanced theoretical account than was often produced by those who,
steeped in the tradition of post-war French cinephilia, had looked derisively
at the shortcomings of the medium. As with Comolli two decades earlier,
Daney did not fetishize the dispositif of the movie theater, and his accounts
of watching films on the small screen registered both the negative and
positive mutations these works undergo in the new viewing environment.19
Resisting a Manichaean opposition between cinema and television, he
instead adopted a theory of an “incestuous” relationship between the two
mediums, exemplified by the television work of figures such as Rossellini
and Godard. By 1987, however, Daney began to suspect that this theory had
ceased to be true. To put his hypothesis to the test, for a period of three
months (September to December 1987), the critic spent most of his waking
hours in front of the television set, remote control in hand, recording his
experiences in a regular column for Libération, which was later published
in book form as Le Salaire du zappeur. The guidelines he set himself for
systematically watching French television were to “observe, describe, and
not laugh too much” as well as to write on a daily basis about “that continent,
strangely little known and even less commented on, that is television.”20
A singular area of preoccupation for Daney was the practice of zapping
(channel hopping), which had the potential to introduce acts of montage
generated by the viewers themselves. This capability, however, had in Daney’s
eyes already been lost: the twin processes of privatization and “Americaniza-
tion” had led to television programming becoming ever more homogenous
and formally staid. Instead of “obtaining the ghost of something different, a
lost real, a still possible encounter,” the zappeur only had the possibility of
flipping “from Charybdis to Scylla.”21 Moreover, the act of channel hopping
went hand in hand with the mode of programming innate to television:

It is not because the remote control has generalized zapping that it

invented it. Zapping has always been an invention of television, it is
inherent to it and, zapping like madmen, we only generalize its usage

19 For instance, Daney noted that watching Woody Allen’s Zelig on Canal+ allowed him to
find in it “a weight that it had less of in the darkened theater, faced with a public that was too
self-aware, too in on the joke.” Serge Daney, Le Salaire du zappeur, p. 58.
20 Ibid., p. 187.
21 Ibid., p. 12.
784  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

and realize its concept. Now that the ball is in the TV viewer’s court, he
takes revenge for his ex-passivity by exaggerating the normal functioning
of television.22

Looking back at his experiment after bringing it to a close, Daney nonetheless

avowed that he was reasonably optimistic about its results, and his conclud-
ing remarks were upbeat: whereas television may have become the “prose”
of the modern world, cinema now had an unprecedented opportunity to be
its poetry. After having become “industrially outmoded,” film could embark
on a second life as a minoritarian, artisanal practice such as could be found
in the work of Straub/Huillet, Raúl Ruiz or Robert Kramer. If television
had taken over the role of “transmitting culture,” then the cinema could
exclusively concern itself with “imparting experiences.”23
By the time Daney left Libération in 1991, however, he had become steadily
disabused of this budding optimism, a shift that can be traced in the growing
despondency of the texts he wrote in the period 1988-1991.24 Here, Daney’s
discussion of television and other audiovisual media increasingly takes on
the allure of “postmodern” thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François
Lyotard and Paolo Virilio—all of whom became explicit points of reference
for Daney. The onset of the 1990s is marked above all by the omnipotence of
what Daney calls “the visual” and its ascendance over “the image.” In this
line of thinking, the unremitting torrent of audiovisual imagery is specifi-
cally counterposed to the cinematic image, which requires a conceptual
“reverse-shot” that is invariably lacking in television. Following Godard’s
phrase “always two for an image” (in other words, a true image requires
the productive combination through montage of two distinct aesthetic
elements), Daney insists on the importance of alterity for an image to exist:
“Godard […] would say: with which other image would you show this image in
order to have the inception of an idea?”25 By contrast, “the visual” is defined
as being purely “connected to perception, the optic nerve, physiology: a
pinball machine, a video game, on-screen text, a commercial, all this is

22 Ibid., p. 22.
23 Ibid., pp. 189-190. For more on Daney’s account of the phenomenon of zapping, see James
Tweedie, “Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media,” October
no. 157 (Summer 2016), pp. 107-127.
24 A number of these texts were collected in Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à
mains, while the remainder have been included in Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde,
vol. III: Les Années Libé 1986-1991, ed. Patrice Rollet (Paris: P.O.L., 2012).
25 Serge Daney, “La guerre, le visuel, l’image,” in idem., La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. III,
pp. 323-329, here p. 328.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 785

part of the visual. […] But the visual does not relate to seeing, it relates to
all these words that are now so successful: viewing [visionnage], visioning
[visionnement], vision.”26
Two geopolitical events were decisive for the development of Daney’s ideas
in this period. The first was the overthrow of the Ceausescus in Romania, the
media coverage of which formed a prototype for the executions of latter-day
dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. The Romanian
“revolution” of 1989 was unique in its relation to television broadcasting:
not only was the inciting event of the uprising, a rally planned in support of
Ceausescu, transmitted live to the nation, but the headquarters of Romanian
state television itself became a key stake in the struggle for power—occupied
by insurgents, it was the ability to freely broadcast anti-government mes-
sages that truly heralded the end of the regime. Watching these moments
relayed by French television, Daney not only saw “traces of the footsteps
of Bazin, Rossellini and Godard” in the snowy streets of Bucharest, he also
discerned a “democratization” of cinematic grammar: “It is as if everyone
had suddenly become a ‘film critic.’ Not out of cinephilia, but because the
need so tremendously made itself felt.”27 In particular, the live broadcast
of the death by firing squad of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, shown across
the world, was the cause for “notions of the freeze-frame, slow-motion, the
hors-champ and the ellipse” to be more than just “figures of style.” Instead,
they were elevated to the status of “information to be decrypted (with the
possibilities of lying, trickery and omission).” Following on from Bazin’s
discussion of the “ontological obscenity” of newsreel footage showing the
shooting of Chinese revolutionaries in 1947,28 the “macabre feuilleton” of
the executed couple and the “eternal return” of their dead bodies to the
screen revealed for Daney the three key aspects of “truth regime” specific
to television: “1. There is no other truth on television than that of the live
broadcast [le direct]. 2. When it comes down to it, the only live broadcast
that is worthwhile is death. 3. The only proof of death is the possibility of
producing a corpse.”29

26 Ibid., p. 324.
27 Serge Daney, “Roumanie, année zéro,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 428 (February 1990), pp. 84-86,
here p. 84.
28 See Bazin, “Mort tous les après-midi.”
29 Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, p. 144. The live transmission
of these events on French television was also acerbically treated by Chris Marker in the short
film Détour Ceausescu. Television footage of the overthrow of Ceausescu was also repurposed
for Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s essay-film Videogramme einer Revolution.
786  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

The rapturous events in Romania, however, were soon followed by the

much more chastening experience of the 1991 Gulf War, the media coverage
of which brought Daney in close proximity to the Baudrillard of La guerre
du golfe n’a pas eu lieu.30 Daney dedicated a series of articles for Libération
to charting the obscene nightmare of watching a live broadcast of war as
the conflict unfurled in January 1991. He took particular aim at the rolling
CNN coverage of the combat, which transformed the reality of war into a
Schwarzenegger action-hero movie.31 After the end of fighting, Daney would
take a deeper, retrospective look at the war in the key text “Montage obligé,”
written in April 1991. Returning to his opposition between the visual and
the image, Daney noted that the “video-game”-style depiction of the war
concealed the existence of “a true missing image, that of Baghdad under
the bombs,” and it is this absent image that “obliged all of us to ‘imagine’
something, which would depend on our opinions, nightmares or memories
of war-films.” Whereas Bazin spoke of a “prohibition” of montage, Daney
insists on its necessity. But the montage he refers to is of an imaginary,
purely mental nature: “I had the sentiment, euphoric in the beginning and
onerous at the end, of having become an editor [monteur] in my head. A
history of fabricating enough imaginary to struggle against the real threat
of irrealization. Like a madman, I randomly edited what I saw with all the
missing images, all the hors-champs.” In this context, the simple feats of
seeing and showing had become “acts of resistance”; our own imagination—a
“phantom of the image”—turned out to be the site of a “bitter victory.”32

Aumont and the Twenty-First-Century Image

Serge Daney’s untimely death prevented him from continuing his work
beyond the early 1990s, but the reflection on the contemporary status of
the image, occasionally taking direct inspiration from Daney’s writings, has
been continued by two other former Cahiers writers. Unlike Daney, Aumont
and Comolli both left Cahiers on unequivocal terms in 1973, but from that
moment on, their lives would take rather different trajectories. Despite
these divergent paths, both figures have pursued a prolonged investigation
of the cinema and its relationship with “new media” that has resulted in

30 See Jean Baudrillard, La guerre du golfe n’a pas eu lieu (Paris: Galilée, 1991). Translated as The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
31 Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, p. 157.
32 The above quotes are from ibid., p. 166.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 787

a considerable arsenal of writings on the subject, which continues to the

present day.
As discussed in Chapter 19, Aumont’s scholarly output in the 1980s and
1990s mostly focused on a discussion of directors from the canon of film
history—among them Eisenstein, Epstein, Dreyer, Bergman and Godard.
Occasionally, however, he tackled audiovisual products that would seem-
ingly be far less propitious as an object of aesthetic discourse. In 1983, for
instance, Aumont offered a close analysis of the animated television program
Grendizer (known as Goldorak in France), a precursor to series such as Voltron
and Transformers that was produced by the Japanese firm Toei.33 This show,
a totally anonymous, industrial product made cheaply with the single goal
of keeping children entertained, could hardly have been more remote from
the auteurist cinema on which Aumont had otherwise concentrated his
critical energies. And yet, even though there is a degree of playful irony in
his discussion of the show, Aumont discerns a certain cinematic heritage
in its visual elements, particularly when it comes to framing and editing.
The frequent use of high-angled, low-angled and Dutch-angled shots recalls
Welles (“a style in which we see not only what we see, but also the manner
in which we see it”), while the fast-paced editing, in which “the change of
shots never, or only very remotely, follows the rules of classic match-cuts,
the passage from one shot to the next being effected according to a logic
of minimal narrative implication” harkens back to the Soviet montage
tradition.34 Certain “shots,” meanwhile, are so abstract as to approximate
tachist painting, and Aumont is also struck by the show’s stylistic Japonité,
particularly parallels with the tradition of East Asian calligraphy. But the
most unique aesthetic characteristic of the show, and the major source of
its “strangeness,” comes in its articulation of filmic rhythm and temporality:
there is such a frequent alternation of shots that the resulting saccadic
tempo leads to time in the show being read rather than perceived: “we see
here the production of something like a temporal scintillation […] whose
reference to real time becomes more and more doubtful.” Thus, of all the
arts, that to which Grendizer is aesthetically closest is, surprisingly, music:
“The film does not reproduce […] a profilmic time; it produces time. Such
an enigmatic utterance, so often used with respect to music, here assumes,

33 Aumont’s article was first published in Italian as “Un’ estetica industriale (a proposito di
Goldrake),” in Francesco Casetti (ed.), L’immagine al plurale (Venice: Marsilio, 1984), pp. 233-47.
The original French version was reprinted in Aumont’s À quoi pensent les films (Paris: Séguier,
1996), pp. 174-95.
34 Ibid., p. 180.
788  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

with absolute tranquility, a self-evident meaning, even though it is, strictly

speaking, incomprehensible.”35
Although not discussed in these terms in the above article, the dissemina-
tion of stylistic techniques from Eisenstein and Welles to a mass-produced
children’s cartoon follows the phenomenon described by German art histo-
rian Aby Warburg as the “migration” of aesthetic forms. Aumont explicitly
adopted this concept in a three-part series of articles called “Migrations”
from the late 1990s.36 Here, he focuses more particularly on the mechanisms
by which specific motifs from painting and silent cinema are transposed not
just to modernist cinema through the conscious act of citation but also to
more humble realms of audiovisual creation and through more enigmatic,
indiscernible means. A notable example is the reproduction of imagery from
Murnau’s adaptation of Faust in not only Éric Rohmer’s film La Marquise
d’O (a film that intentionally cites a number of artistic predecessors) but
also Disney’s Fantasia—with the processes by which such transferences
take place remaining an enigma that, even if the scholar may attempt to
find solutions, resists straightforward explanations.
In more recent years, Aumont has dedicated two short pamphlets to the
question of contemporary cinema and its relations with the broader culture
of image production in the twenty-first century. While more concise and
informal than his scholarly works, these books nonetheless offer a more
unmediated exposition of Aumont’s personal views, substantially freed
from the expectations of “objective” academic writing. In the first of these
works, Moderne? (Comment le cinéma est devenu le plus singulier des arts),
Aumont investigates the question of modernism in film, arguing for the
existence of two strands of cinematic modernity in the post-war era: the
Welles line (vaunting the freedom of the artist to experiment formally)
and the Rossellini line (highlighting the filmmaker’s receptivity to his
surrounding reality).37 In more recent times, however, the situation becomes
less clear. As with many of his Cahiers colleagues, Aumont pinpoints the

35 Ibid., p. 195.
36 See Jacques Aumont, “Migrations,” Cinémathèque no 7 (Spring 1995), pp. 35-47; Jacques
Aumont, “Vanités (Migrations, 2),” Cinémathèque, no. 16 (Fall 1999), pp. 7-21; and Jacques Aumont,
“Annonciations (Migrations, 3),” CINéMAS vol. 12 no. 3 (Spring 2002), pp. 53-71.
37 These two lines, of course, represent tendencies that dominated within Cahiers in the
1950s, especially in the writings of André Bazin and Jacques Rivette. The journal famously
neglected avant-garde and experimental cinema and was actively hostile to most of the New
York underground filmmakers—a prejudice for which Aumont issues a humble self-criticism.
See Jacques Aumont, Moderne? Comment le cinéma est devenu le plus singulier des arts (Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, 2007), pp. 69-70.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 789

end of cinematic modernism as taking place in the early 1980s (with the
election of Mitterand in 1981 serving as a useful demarcation point), but
this is the culmination of a process that, in his view, had already begun
by the time of the student revolts of 1968. At the same time, the aesthetic
specificity of cinema is also under threat. Whereas Daney located this threat
in the cultural dominance of television and “the visual,” Aumont highlights
the absorption of the cinema’s heritage by the contemporary art milieu—
whether through the “museification” of filmmakers brought about by the
increasing trend of galleries to dedicate exhibitions to canonized figures in
film history (Hitchcock, Cocteau, Renoir, etc.) or through the reproduction
of cinematic forms and tropes in the work of artists safely ensconced in
the gallery world (Bill Viola, Douglas Gordon, Christian Marclay), not to
mention the “migration” of filmmakers from the cinematic dispositif to
installation work, to varying degrees of success (Weerasethakul, Egoyan,
Farocki, Varda and, notoriously, Godard, whose 2006 Centre Pompidou
exhibition provoked heated debate). In the end, however, Aumont refuses
to accept the notion that the cinema has been assimilated into the broader
dispositif of contemporary art; instead, it continues to possess the eternal
quality of contemporaneity and has not ceased to invent forms that have both
“effects of novelty and effects of actuality.”38 In other words, “the cinema
has not changed; in the same evening, I can see a Ford and a Hitchcock, or
a John Woo and a Kiarostami; I will have less of a sentiment of traveling in
time than of traveling between styles.”39
These ruminations will be continued in Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, a
pamphlet published in 2012. Here, Aumont confronts the purported “crisis”
brought about by the rise of digital technology in the production and dis-
semination of audiovisual works, offering a polemical riposte to the theses
on the “death” of the cinema that have been articulated since its centenary
in 1995. In particular, Aumont spars with D.N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life
in Film, in which the American academic argued that the advent of digital
imagery represented the definitive end of the cinematic era and that “digital-
native” works such as Russian Ark can no longer be considered films in
the traditional sense of the word. 40 For Aumont, Sokurov’s undertaking is
“still a work of moving images, and this is what I call a film. In short, to my
eyes, film is defined in spectatorial, not creational terms.”41 Conversely,

38 Ibid., p. 101.
39 Ibid., p. 112.
40 See D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
41 Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma? (Paris: Vrin, 2012), p. 18.
790  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

however, he also repudiates the advocates of “expanded cinema,” from

Gene Youngblood to Philippe Dubois, who have argued that all forms of
moving image culture belong to the same broad social practice, contending
that the “segregation of milieux” separating cinema from video art is “far
from having disappeared, even if it has shifted its frontiers.”42 Aumont’s
avowedly pragmatic position is, as he concludes, that the cinema “remains,
quite simply, the cinema.”43 He nonetheless admits that there have been
major metamorphoses in recent times, of which he points to two: firstly,
that the cinema “no longer has the exclusivity of moving images,” sharing
this role with television, the internet and the gallery; and secondly, that
“mass cinema” (Hollywood and its international counterparts) has taken
the “Méliès path,” abandoning Lumièrist (or Bazinian) realism in favor of
the use of CGI imagery and spectacular special effects, which are devoid
of any grounding in a worldly referent. 44
In other writings, however, Aumont is more circumspect about professing
a continued faith in the vitality of the cinema. At one point in his recent
short text on Montage, he claims that “Ours is not a theoretical age, no more
so in the cinema than elsewhere,”45 while his conclusion to Les Théories des
cinéastes seems particularly pessimistic: not only does he confess to not being
“absolutely sure, in the end, that the cinema is an art” but, noting that few
of his chosen filmmaker-theorists are under the age of fifty, he also muses
that “perhaps theory, like art, was a matter for the twentieth century.”46 For
a writer who devoted much to developing the foundations of an aesthetic
theory of the cinema, this appears to be a particularly self-defeating verdict.

Comolli on Cinema and Spectacle

For a more militant standpoint on contemporary visual culture, we can

instead turn to the work of Comolli. Out of all the ex-members of the Cahiers
team from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Comolli is the most unrepentant

42 Ibid., p. 21.
43 Ibid., p. 116.
44 Ibid., pp. 55, 60. On a technical level, if there is one innovation from the late twentieth
century that Aumont f inds truly signif icant from an aesthetic point of view, it is, curiously
enough, neither the digital image nor the proliferation of miniature, mobile screens but rather
the “pause” button on video players, which produces “an image of a new nature,” a hybrid fusion
of the still and moving images.
45 Jacques Aumont, Montage, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Caboose, 2014), p. 46.
46 Jacques Aumont, Les Théories des cinéastes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), p. 179.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 791

when it comes to the journal’s core political project, the tenets of which
have been upheld, to a large degree, in his more recent writings. Comolli’s
critical/theoretical output has been collected in two anthologies, Voir et
pouvoir (2003) and Corps et cadre (2010). Together, they total more than 1200
pages of text, little of which has been translated into English. His major work
of this period, however, is the monograph Cinéma contre spectacle (2009),
which combines a reprint of the six parts of “Technique et idéologie” with a
new text tackling the same subject matter from the standpoint of the early
twenty-first century. Comolli in no way retreats from his earlier line of
argumentation adopted in the “Technique et idéologie” articles, with their
insistence on the “reciprocal reinforcement” of ideological and economic
demands in the invention and subsequent evolution of the cinema. Rather,
he avows that “these six articles from 1971-1972 have not ceased to shape my
work” and admits to still being “haunted” by his time with the journal.47 In
the intervening years, his field of reference had expanded from the strict
Marxist-Leninist framework of the early 1970s, taking in theorists such as
Rancière, Nancy, Deleuze, Stiegler and Adorno. It is, however, the work of
Debord that is perhaps of greatest importance for the Comolli of 2009, and
a central claim of his new text is that “The holy alliance of the spectacle and
the commodity, foreseen and analyzed by Guy Debord from 1967 onwards,
has now been realized. It governs our world. From pole to pole, across the
tropics, capital in its current guise has found the ultimate weapon for its
domination: images and sounds combined.” The global economic crisis that
had just begun at the time of his writing did nothing to significantly alter
this fact: “The show must go on! The same screens show, on loop, the same
audiovisual standards, the same commodified buttresses for the need to
see and hear, the same forms and the same formulae.” Comolli even sug-
gests that the dominance of the spectacle in contemporary society and its
inversion of the Marxist conception of the relationship between economics
and ideology (today, the spectacle does not merely serve the commodity,
it has become its “supreme form”) has “gone far beyond what Debord was
able to predict and announce.”48
In a historical irony, the cinema prepared the ground for the grip of
the spectacle on our lives, but it is also its first victim, succumbing to “the
overwhelming flux of audiovisual entertainment” and thereby losing its

47 Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinéma contre spectacle (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2009), p. 18. Translated
as Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited, trans. and ed. Daniel Fairfax
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), p. 57.
48 Ibid., p. 8 [pp. 49-50].
792  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

aesthetic specificity. Unlike Debord, however, Comolli refuses the thesis

of a totalitarian omnipotence of the spectacle that would render void any
form of resistance to the status quo, and he retains a belief in the viability
of the struggle to “salvage something of man’s human dimension.”49 Here,
Comolli references Rancière’s notion of the “emancipated spectator” but
argues instead for a “critical spectator” capable of analyzing and critiquing
the forms presented by the spectacle and welcoming the advent of new,
liberated types of images.50 Importantly, and in this area he follows directly
in the line of his Cahiers heritage, Comolli insists that such a struggle cannot
merely take place on the level of content, since contemporary media can
assimilate practically any discourse that is presented in a consensual fashion.
He even registers his dissatisfaction with the fact that those who are opposed
to global capitalism too often “speak the language of the enemy.” Rather,
“defeating or overcoming the existing order of things requires the invention
of forms that are different to those serving to repress our consciousness
and our movements.”51 On this basis, Comolli embarks on an extensive
discussion of the political and theoretical implications of film form, but
when it comes to specific modes of resistance in this domain, he perceives a
second historical irony. Whereas fragmentary techniques such as the rapid
montage of Vertov or the jump-cut of Godard’s À bout de souffle were initially
developed as a means by which film form could be emancipated from the
stifling conventions of narrative cinema, the same procedures have now
been generalized by television’s “aesthetic of abbreviation,” which mandates
a “frenetically agitated scopic drive in a kaleidoscope of visual effects.”52 The
Pyrrhic victory of the montage-aesthetic in video clips and TV commercials
means that, for Comolli, the “principle of fragmentation has switched sides
in the battle” and it is “by entirely different formal means that the cinema
today hopes to resurrect the vitality of Vertov’s utopia.”53 Comolli, indeed,
finds appropriate forms of resistance to the spectacle at the opposite end of
the aesthetic spectrum to the rapid montage of the Soviet avant-garde. It is
in the long-take aesthetic of contemporary “slow cinema,” and in particular
the distinctly neo-Bazinian work of filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami,
Jia Zhang-ke and Pedro Costa, that a true resistance to the media forms of
neoliberal capitalism can be found. In Comolli’s view, this “anti-spectacle,

49 Ibid., p. 10 [p. 51].

50 Ibid., p. 11 [p. 52]. See also Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur emancipé (Paris: La Fabrique,
2009). Translated as The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011).
51 Comolli, Cinéma contre spectacle, p. 10 [p. 51]
52 Ibid., p. 95 [p. 118].
53 Ibid., p. 106 [p. 126-127].
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 793

capable of dis-alienating us from the dominant spectacular alienation,” is

the only viable means for the cinema to persist as an autonomous medium.54
Two works by Comolli written in the years 2015-2016 have further
developed the theoretical and political standpoint outlined in Cinéma
contre spectacle. In Cinéma, mode d’emploi: De l’argentique au numérique, a
handbook on filmmaking arranged around alphabetically ordered key terms
and co-authored with the film technician Vincent Sorrel, Comolli focuses
on the recent shift from celluloid to digital video in film production and
distribution. Comolli/Sorrel use the handbook format in order to produce
a theoretical interrogation of the digital transition. But the orientation
informing this discussion is marked by a deep irony. For the most part,
the emergence of computer-based imagery is treated in a negative light.
The digital is a mere simulacrum of the film-based cinema-image, and
its present dominance represents a technological victory for the forces of
global capitalism. It is part of a broader trend towards “desolidarization,
isolation, detachment”—in a word, digital cinema is a form of dislocation.55
Whereas the world captured on film is characterized by an irrevocable
interdependence of the “elements of the plastic composition,” the digital
is “like a new catechism that proclaims the era of delinking, the era of
the irresponsibility of the components of the visible with respect to one
another, and the irresponsibility of the engineers and artists who handle
these components.”56 Key formal aspects of the cinema that have been
integral to its functioning not only as an art form but as a tool for seeing
the world—elements such as framing, découpage, the hors-champ, depth
and duration—find themselves annihilated by the digital image. Even the
dialectic between belief and doubt—the entre-deux state of the “Je sais
bien, mais quand même” effect necessary for an engaged response to the
cinematic image—is threatened with desuetude. And yet, Comolli himself,
in his own cinematic practice, has resolutely turned to digital production.
He does not call for a neo-Luddite refusal of the new tools available to
filmmakers. Instead, he urges the cinéastes of today to follow the lead of
Rouch and Godard, who both, in their own ways, combined groundbreaking
technological innovation with restless formal experimentation, and whose
artisanal, even amateur-like practice “never stopped reinventing techniques

54 Ibid., p. 117 [p. 136].

55 Jean-Louis Comolli and Vincent Sorrel, Cinéma, mode d’emploi: De l’argentique au numérique
(Lagrasse: Verdier, 2015), p. 18.
56 Ibid., p. 19.
794  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

for filming situations inaccessible to the ‘professionals.’”57 Digital cinema,

Comolli insists, is a practice that “is yet to be invented.”58
The next year, a shorter, pamphlet-style text by Comolli tackled the
contemporary usage of the digital image in one of its most horrifying guises.
In Daech, le cinéma et la mort, Comolli turns his attention to the present-day
phenomenon of the ISIS video clip, a genre of digital filmmaking in which
atrocities carried out by the Islamic fundamentalist movement—murders,
acts of torture, beheadings, drownings—are captured on smartphone
cameras and relayed around the world on video-sharing websites, reaching
a global audience within hours of these vicious deeds taking place. Given
his youth in Algeria, where he directly witnessed human rights abuses
committed by French colonial authorities, the phenomenon of the ISIS
video could not avoid arousing deep personal resonances for Comolli.
It would seem to be straightforward for Comolli to return to the binary
couple he had established in his 2009 monograph and consign these clips
to a status within the spectacle, in stark opposition to the cinema. But
the theorist takes a different, more provocative line of argument: in fact,
these audiovisual artefacts fulfil all the fundamental requirements of the
cinema. Although they may never be projected in movie theaters, they
are nonetheless produced for and shown on screens. Moreover, they are
recordings of the real, which are inscribed within a defined frame and
duration. They are acts of mise en scène, whether rudimentary or (increas-
ingly) sophisticated, and they thus come within the category of the cinema.
Comolli admits that this conclusion “shocks me, it overturns what remains
in me of my young cinephilia.” But, he resolutely declares, “this is a fact.”59
Indeed, Comolli will go further and register the close parallels between the
aesthetic strategies of ISIS’s social media teams and those of contemporary
Hollywood blockbusters: both seek to reduce the spectator to “a montage of
sensations: fear, hallucination, stupefaction, fascination, shaking, trembling,
horror… The effects and the forms used to produce them are pretty much
the same.”60 The complicity between ISIS’s video strategy and Hollywood,
as well as the major tech corporations whose products are used to film and
transmit these atrocities (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) is, for Comolli, a
mirror image of the larger symbiotic relationship between the military

57 Ibid., p. 32.
58 Ibid., p. 67. That this was not to be Comolli’s last word on digital cinema proved to be the
case when, in 2019, he published the short book Cinema numérique, survie: L’Art du temps (Lyons:
ENS, 2019).
59 Jean-Louis Comolli, Daech, le cinéma et la mort (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2016), p. 12.
60 Ibid., pp. 32-33.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 795

machine of US imperialism and the radical Islamic movements active in

Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
The ISIS video is cinema because it exercises the same ethical and
ontological stakes as films traditionally have, stakes that are made more
acute when the cinematic image is the site for an encounter with death.
The same ontological obscenity that Bazin had located in the newsreel
footage of Shanghai communists executed by the Kuomintang in 1949
is on display when the spectator is confronted with one of the clips ISIS
disseminates on sites such as YouTube. The question thus presents itself
as to whether we, as spectators, should view this grisly footage. Comolli
understands and respects the decision to refuse to do so, all the more
legitimate for resisting the “doxa of the image market […] that everything
should be showable and visible.”61 But he baldly asserts that this choice is
not his own:

On the contrary, I think that it is necessary to see with one’s own eyes
one or more of these little films, to tolerate the images of violent death
made by an executioner and thrown up onto a screen, not only in order to
observe that the ignominy of those who show such images can go beyond
abjection […] but, I will not deny it, in the hope of saving the cinema from
what sullies it, condensable in the formula of the all-visible.62

The fight against ISIS, therefore, is an intra-cinematic war: it involves cin-

ema practitioners taking up the battle against other cinema practitioners,
deploying cinematic forms against other cinematic forms. While Comolli
discusses the ISIS media center Al-Hayat in great depth, he also points
to positive counterexamples such as the Syrian collective Abounadarra,
whose members, inspired by the legacy of Godard’s militant period, are
engaged in making video works aimed at combating the politics of Islamic
fundamentalism in one of its most vicious guises. But this struggle also
raises the need for film theory, for spectators to attain a level of critical
awareness and embark on a reflection of the images they watch. If we
must watch the ISIS videos that presently swash around the backwaters
of the internet, then this should be not only to critique these image-forms
but also to transform the society in which such images could be born
and consumed. Film theory, therefore, is not a disinterested mode of

61 Ibid., p. 11
62 Ibid.
796  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

comprehending the world but a zone of resistance against the present

social order.63

A Zone of Resistance: Trafic

If, today, there is an organ where film theory can be exercised as an act
of resistance, then it is the French film quarterly Trafic. Furthermore, if
there is a site for continuing, in the present day, the Cahiers tradition of
thinking on the cinema—a critical, theoretical approach with its origins
in Bazin and which persisted through the editorships of Rohmer, Rivette,
Comolli/Narboni and Daney/Toubiana, in spite of the considerable political
vicissitudes the journal underwent—then it is also Trafic. Named after the
1972 Tati film, Trafic was founded by Daney in 1991 and continues to be
published today. In the intervening years, it has regularly showcased the
writing of his comrades from the post-1968 years, including Comolli, Narboni,
Aumont, Eisenschitz and Bonitzer, as well as former Cahiers writers from
other generations such as Jacques Bontemps, Jean-Claude Biette, Jean-André
Fieschi, Luc Moullet and Jean Douchet. Fellow travelers of Cahiers, including
Jacques Rancière, Jean Louis Schefer, Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio
Agamben, have found a place on the pages of Trafic, as have “international
correspondents” such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Bill Krohn, Tag Gallagher
and Adrian Martin. Today, Trafic is one of the rare publications to promote
writing on the cinema—writing, that is, in a truly literary register, which
escapes both the disposable consumerism of most film reviewing and the
colorless insipidity of much academic scholarship. Articles can take the form
of lengthy papers or shorter, more idiosyncratic pieces, as well as dialogues,
correspondences and even poetry. Regardless of format, however, its edi-
tors, following Daney’s lead, insist on the primacy of original, independent
thinking on the cinema.
Although the idea for a quarterly initially surfaced in conversations with
producer Paolo Branco as far back as 1986, under the influence of Schefer’s
short-lived review Café (for which Daney wrote occasional articles), Daney’s
decision to found Trafic was precipitated by his alienation from Libération
in 1991. After several years of writing predominantly on television and the

63 For a more detailed response to Comolli’s book, see Daniel Fairfax, “Cinema against cinema:
Daech, le cinéma et la mort,” Senses of Cinema no. 83 (June 2017), http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/
book-reviews/cinema-against-cinema-daech-le-cinema-et-la-mort-by-jean-louis-comolli/
attachment/fairfax-image-5-5/ (accessed January 1, 2021).
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 797

media, he felt the urge to return to the cinema. Bemoaning the fact that the
only major decisions he had made in life had been negative ones—leaving
Cahiers in 1981, and then, ten years later, departing Libération—Daney
expressed pride at discovering that he “was capable of a positive act” such
as founding a new journal, even if this decision took place both near the
end of his life and at a historical juncture where the cinema seemed to
have aesthetically exhausted itself.64 While Daney’s work at Cahiers and
Libération was perforce dominated by cinematic actuality, the format that
Trafic offered allowed for a deeper grappling with film history: “Today, it’s
about putting the cinema, and only the cinema, back into a history that
will no longer be synchronic, but rather diachronic: from which came the
idea of creating Trafic.”65 As for his views on the world of “new images” as
it constituted itself in the 1980s and 1990s, Daney came to make a striking
transformation, coming full circle, as it were, to his past at Cahiers:

I have again become a Marxist: there is something called the market, and
it has to be ready to welcome true and great new contributions, in terms
of images and sounds, which can’t be reduced to the state of appliances
and the rivalry between Sony and Phillips. That takes place at a purely
economic level; there is a corporate battle with the possibilities of new
images of which no one sees the ludic after-effects. […] We don’t see the
desire for a new Train en gare de La Ciotat anywhere.66

Trafic, of course, did not reproduce the strictly defined Marxism-Leninism

of the post-1968 period at Cahiers. Daney established the journal’s mission
statement in the following terms: “Trafic seeks to rediscover, retrace, or
invent the path that allow us to better know, today, ‘how to live with im-
ages.’ The journal is open to all those whose first passion is the image, who
have the cinema in their cultural baggage, and whose second passion is
writing.”67 As opposed to the “general line” mentality of Cahiers, Trafic has
been defined by its heterodoxy and its pluralistic openness to different
modes of thinking about the cinema. And yet it has situated itself, within
the cultural constellation of French letters, in a firmly socially critical
position, distancing itself from the conservative consensus of the 1980s

64 Daney, Persévérance, p. 68 [p. 58].

65 Ibid., p. 158 [p. 132].
66 Ibid., pp. 162-163 [p. 135].
67 Serge Daney, “Comment vivre avec les images,” in idem., La Maison cinéma et le monde vol.
IV: Le moment Trafic 1991-1992, ed. Patrice Rollet (Paris: P.O.L., 2016), p. 23.
798  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

and early 1990s and unafraid, at times, to take a militant stance on the
political issues of the day, a tendency that became all the more urgent in
the early years of the twenty-first century, where global events such as the
September 11 attacks, the Iraq War, and the global financial crisis of 2008 all
called for the development of a critical theory of the image in combination
with a renewed political militancy. In other ways, too, the profile of Trafic
uncannily resembles that of Cahiers in its “red years”: at Daney’s behest,
the journal is obstinately free of images, printed on rough paper, with an
austere, brown cardboard cover. Its readership consists of a small band
of loyalists, with a subscription base measuring in the hundreds, and it is
maintained partly through the forbearance of the publisher P.O.L., which
supports the project due largely to the prestige attached to publishing the
“revue de Daney.”
Daney set the tone for Trafic with the articles he published in the first
three issues of the journal, which took the form of diaristic accounts of his
viewing habits and the thoughts that these daily encounters inspired in the
critic. The questions that pursued him during this time were numerous:
“Is the cinema an art? Will it be preserved, in whole or in part? What will
become of what we loved about it? What will become of us, we who so unduly
loved ourselves via the cinema? And what will become of the world that
it promised us, whose citizens we were impelled to be?”68 There must be
a place, Daney insists, for writing about such questions, “in order for this
oral tradition to continue. Before the old-timers shuffle off into retirement.
There must be a journal, for example. A film journal.”69 As fate would have
it, Daney did not live to see Trafic’s first anniversary. If the journal has
survived for another three decades, then this has in large measure been the
result of the tireless efforts of the editors who have overseen it during this
time, a team that has included Raymond Bellour, Jean-Claude Biette (until
his death in 2003), Patrice Rollet, Marcos Uzal and Daney’s old colleague
at Cahiers, Sylvie Pierre.
After returning to France from Brazil in 1976, Pierre chose not to resume
film criticism in anything more than an occasional capacity, sporadically
publishing articles with Cahiers on documentary film, Brazilian cinema
and the American mini-series Holocaust in the late 1970s and 1980s but
playing no further role in its editorial activities. Instead, she was employed
full-time in the mediathèque of a government environment agency, where

68 Serge Daney, “Journal de l’an passé,” Trafic no. 1 (Winter 1991/1992), pp. 5-30, here p. 5. Repr.
in idem., La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. IV, pp. 53-82.
69 Ibid.
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 799

she worked until her retirement in 2009. Daney’s offer to become co-editor
at Trafic presented Pierre with the opportunity to resume an ongoing role
in film culture and to go back to writing criticism: she has published more
than twenty articles for Trafic since its founding, becoming one of its most
prolific contributors in the process. Pierre regards her work at Trafic as being
“completely in continuity with the most intelligent things I did at Cahiers
when I was there,” adding that “carrying out an in-depth reflection on the
cinema is not something that goes out of date.” And yet she insists that
contemporary reflection on the cinema must recognize that “the cinematic
object itself has changed enormously these days. It is not at all the same.
All the problematics have changed.”70 This dual imperative of fidelity to
the legacy of the past and adaptation to the changed conditions of the
present is eminently visible in her texts for Trafic, which cover not only the
canon of filmmakers with which she and her colleagues have enduringly
identified—Ford, Mizoguchi, Rohmer, Rivette—but also, precisely, newer
problematics: the debate around Schindler’s List, the media discourse sur-
rounding France’s World Cup final win in 1998, or the cable news coverage
of the September 11 attacks.
The persistence with which Pierre and her co-editors at Trafic have taken
this approach to the world of images was determined, perhaps more than
anything, by the final text written by Daney, published in issue no. 4 of
Trafic, the first to appear after his death and intended as the first chapter
of the “real” book that his illness did not afford him the time to write. “Le
travelling de Kapò,” which was reprinted as a prologue to his conversation
with Toubiana in Persévérance, is not only one of the most beautiful, most
moving essays in the history of film criticism, it is also an incomparable
encapsulation of the Cahiers “line,” the morality of the image that exists
as a fundamental conduit between the Bazin era and its Marxist period.
Daney begins his text with the confession that, among the films he has never
watched—a list that includes October, Le jour se lève and Bambi—there
is one that he has nonetheless repeatedly invoked: Kapò. And yet, Daney
maintains, he has seen Kapò because “someone showed it to me—with
words.”71 In Rivette’s acerbic description of a single shot from the film in
“De l’abjection,” the former Cahiers editor insisted that the decision to
dolly forward at the moment in the film when Emmanuelle Riva commits
suicide by throwing herself on the electric fence “deserves only the most

70 Interview with Sylvie Pierre, May 26, 2014.

71 Serge Daney, “Le travelling de Kapò,”, p. 15 [p. 17].
800  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

profound contempt.”72 For Daney, this “abrupt and luminous” text became
“my portable dogma, the axiom that wasn’t up for discussion, the breaking
point in any debate. I would definitely have nothing to do or share with
anyone who didn’t immediately feel the abjection of ‘the tracking shot
in Kapò.’”73 In contrast with the revulsion he felt at Pontecorvo’s f ilm,
Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard represented, in the young Daney’s eyes, a “just”
treatment of the camps, while the implacable, absolutely modern cruelty
of the panning shots of Mizoguchi’s Tales of Ugetsu are also “just moments,”
freed of the “‘artistic’ pornography” with which Pontecorvo had imbued the
movement of his camera. Daney admits that the “gravity” of his decision
to opt “so early for the panoramic shot in Ugetsu instead of the tracking
shot in Kapò” only dawned on him ten years later, “amidst the late and
radical politicization of Cahiers after 1968.”74 Pontecorvo, he admits, was
a “courageous filmmaker” who shared Daney’s own political views, while
Mizoguchi was a “political opportunist” who had managed to make films
throughout the era of Japanese fascism. But the justness of the forms the
f ilmmakers respectively use trumps the correctness of their political
convictions.
Turning to his own time, Daney sees an echo of the “tracking shot in
Kapò” in a charity music video by the group “USA for Africa” he glimpsed
on television, which insouciantly mixed images of rich singers (belting out
the refrain “We are the world, we are the children!”) with images of Third
World inhabitants on the brink of starvation. But Daney was dismayed
that this “present face of abjection” seemed not to perturb anyone at all. In
television, he concluded, alterity has disappeared, and “there are no longer
good or bad ways to manipulate images. There are no longer ‘images of
the other’ but images among others on the market of brand images.”75 It is
only in the cinema that an encounter with the other could take place. As
Daney recognized, what fundamentally distinguished him and his fellow
Cahiers critics was their dogged “belief” in film. This was the reason why
he had “adopted” cinema in the first place: “so it could adopt me in return
and teach me to ceaselessly touch—with the gaze—that distance between
myself and the place where the other begins.”76

72 Rivette, “De l’abjection,” p. 55. Cited in Daney, “Le travelling de Kapò,” p. 16 [p. 17]. For more
on Rivette’s text, see the introductory remarks to Part II.
73 Ibid., p. 16 [pp. 17-18].
74 Ibid., p. 28 [pp. 26].
75 Ibid., pp. 37-38 [pp. 33-34].
76 Ibid., p. 39 [p. 35].
Film Ontology in the Age of “New” Media 801

Works Cited

Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et les Appareils idéologiques d’état (Notes pour une
recherche),” La Pensée no. 151 (June 1970), pp. 3-38. Translated as “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” in idem., Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Texts, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), pp. 85-132.
Jacques Aumont, “Un’ estetica industriale (a proposito di Goldrake),” in Francesco
Casetti (ed.), L’immagine al plurale (Venice: Marsilio, 1984), pp. 233-47. Repr.
in French in Aumont, À quoi pensent les films (Paris: Séguier, 1996), pp. 174-95.
———, “Migrations,” Cinémathèque no 7 (Spring 1995), pp. 35-47.
———, “Vanités (Migrations, 2),” Cinémathèque, no. 16 (Fall 1999), pp. 7-21.
———, “Annonciations (Migrations, 3),” CINéMAS vol. 12 no. 3 (Spring 2002),
pp. 53-71.
———, Moderne? Comment le cinéma est devenu le plus singulier des arts (Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, 2007).
———, Que reste-t-il du cinéma? (Paris: Vrin, 2012).
Jean Baudrillard, La guerre du golfe n’a pas eu lieu (Paris: Galilée, 1991). Translated
as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995).
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Notes sur le nouveau spectateur,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 177
(April 1966), pp. 66-67. Translated as “Notes on the New Spectator,” trans. Diana
Matias, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. II: The 1960s: New Wave, New
Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 210-215.
———, Cinéma contre spectacle (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2009). Translated as Cinema
against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited, trans. and ed. Daniel Fairfax
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).
———, Cinema numérique, survie: L’Art du temps (Lyons: ENS, 2011).
———, Daech, le cinéma et la mort (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2016).
——— and Vincent Sorrel, Cinéma, mode d’emploi: De l’argentique au numérique
(Lagrasse: Verdier, 2015).
Serge Daney, “Roumanie, année zéro,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 428 (February 1990),
pp. 84-86.
———, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à mains (Lyons: Aléas, 1991).
———, “Journal de l’an passé,” Trafic no. 1 (Winter 1991/1992), pp. 5-30. Repr. in
idem., La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. IV: Le moment Trafic 1991-1992, ed. Patric
Rollet (Paris: P.O.L., 2016), pp. 53-82. Hereafter MCM IV.
———, “Le travelling de Kapò,” Trafic no. 4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 5-19. Translated
as “The Tracking Shot from Kapò,” in idem., Postcards from the Cinema, trans.
Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 17-35.
802  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

———, Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L., 1993). Translated as Postcards from the Cinema,
trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
———, Le Salaire du zappeur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993).
———, “La guerre, le visuel, l’image,” in idem., La Maison cinéma et le monde, vol.
III: Les Années Libé 1986-1991, ed. Patrice Rollet (Paris: P.O.L., 2012), pp. 323-329.
———, “Comment vivre avec les images,” in MCM IV, p. 23.
——— and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” Cahiers du cinéma
no. 222 (July 1970), pp. 39-46. Translated as, “Work, Reading Pleasure,” trans.
Diana Matias, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The
Politics of Representation (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 115-136.
Daniel Fairfax, “Cinema against cinema: Daech, le cinéma et la mort,” Senses of
Cinema no. 83 (June 2017), http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/book-reviews/
cinema-against-cinema-daech-le-cinema-et-la-mort-by-jean-louis-comolli/
attachment/fairfax-image-5-5/ (accessed January 1, 2021).
Groupe Lou Sin d’intervention idéologique, “À armes égales: Analyse d’une émission
télévisée,” Cahiers du cinéma 236-237 (March-April 1972), pp. 4-29. Translated
in abridged form as “On Equal Terms – Analysis of a Television Programme,”
in John Caughie (ed.), Television: Ideology and Exchange (London: BFI, 1978).
Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur emancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009). Translated as
The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011).
Philippe Rège (ed.), Encyclopedia of French Film Directors vol. I, (Lanham: Scarecrow
Press, 2009).
D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007).
James Tweedie, “Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of
Media,” October no. 157 (Summer 2016), pp. 107-127.
 Conclusion

Serge Daney once declared that there is one quality, above all, that defines
Cahiers du cinéma: it resembles its time.1 This quality is embodied, perhaps
more than any other generation of Cahiers critics, by Daney’s own cohort,
whose formative moments came in the years surrounding May ’68. At that
time, the journal was an avatar of the historical moment, a microcosm of the
near-revolution’s dramas, tensions and contradictions. The Cahiers critics felt,
with full force, both the highs and the lows of these years, the giddy moments
of utopian dreaming, followed by the crushing return of the political real.
Comolli undoubtedly speaks for all of his comrades when he confesses that
these années terribles still haunt him today, a half-century later.2 For all of
the Cahiers critics, this period left an indelible imprint on their lives, one that
leaves them alternating between immense pride at their achievements in
the arena of film criticism and theory and uneasy discomfort, even trauma,
at the impasses they came up against, the infighting, dogmatism and cruel
intransigence to which the journal’s Marxist orientation led them.
And yet this resemblance to their time, this fundamental contemporaneity
with the broader sweep of historical events, was not limited to the post-1968
era. After 1973, the équipe splintered, its members setting off on dispersed
biographical pathways. But they have all retained a fidelity to the emancipa-
tory kernel of the era of late 1960s-early 1970s militancy and its globally
critical mode of thinking. None of them have unequivocally disavowed their
past or beaten a path towards the political right, as so many of their peers
were to do in the conservative wave of the late 1970s and 1980s. Moreover,
they have all remained contemporary with their times and with the cinema
of these times, throughout the decisive shifts and changes that have marked
the decades since the radical years of their youth. Those Cahiers critics who
are still alive have now entered their seventies. To their immense credit,
however, they have not nostalgically wallowed in their own past or the past

1 Daney, La Rampe, p. 12.

2 Comolli, Cinéma contre spectacle, p. 18 [p. 58].

Fairfax, D., The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973). Volume II: Ideology and Politics.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021
doi 10.5117/9789463728607_concl
804  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

of the cinema. Rather, they have consistently engaged with (and made) new
works and sought to re-read the films of old through the light of the present,
its events, social phenomena and ideas. In spite of their advanced age, many
of them are now more active in film culture than they ever have been, and
none of them hesitated to articulate their views when I proposed to interview
them. At the risk of seeing this book pass steadily into obsolescence, I can
only hope that their present fecund output continues well into the future.
For this reason, restricting my study of the work that this generation of
Cahiers critics produced to the years 1968-1973 was not an option—despite
the fact that this has been the dominant approach adopted in earlier exami-
nations of this moment in film criticism. Fundamental continuities link the
later (and, in some cases, earlier) output of these writers with the texts they
yielded when they were unified as a group. They simply demand to be read
together. The result is that an intellectual universe has opened up—one that
spreads out in myriad directions while still remaining centered on a series
of core ideas relating to ideology, politics, aesthetics and ontology in the
cinema. The length of these two volumes attests not only to the immense
body of work that the figures under study have generated over the course
of more than half a century of thinking about the cinema, it also points to
the multiplicity of theoretical tendencies that exerted an influence on the
journal and the daunting number of theorists, philosophers, filmmakers,
artists and writers with whom the Cahiers critics have entered into dialogue.
As I have consistently argued, two intellectual traditions, above all, have
distinguished the post-1968 generation of critics: the film theory of Bazin,
which was further developed at Cahiers under the stewardship of Rohmer
and Rivette before the baton was passed onto Comolli and Narboni; and
the critical theory of Althusser, Lacan, Barthes and a panoply of other
contemporary thinkers (Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Rancière,
Macherey, Schefer and Metz, to name only a few). Throughout the shifting
attitudes that the Cahiers critics had towards these two lineages, their
critical project was consistently marked by attempts to synthesize them with
each other. But the constituent elements were combustible when brought
together, and the resulting theoretical fusion was highly unstable. If the
volatile history of Cahiers in the years following 1968 was a reflection of
broader historical paroxysms, it was also, we can posit, determined by the
conceptual convulsions that the journal’s mix of theoretical elements gener-
ated. And yet, while the answers the Cahiers critics came up with may have
been constantly changing, a fundamental question was persistently posed:
namely, what is behind images? What do they reveal about our ideological
formations, our political structures, our artistic movements? What do they
reveal about the real itself?
Conclusion 805

This is a question that is more pertinent than ever, even with the sweeping
transformation of our media environment in the period since the apogee of
“political modernism” in film studies. For this reason, my study is conceived
not merely as a historical overview, taking stock of a distinct period that can
be safely confined to the past. Rather it is intended as a clarion call for the
present, prompting us to follow the lead of the Cahiers critics and think about
the cinema, and society with the same radical rigor and critical insight that
they adopted in the 1960s and 1970s. In his essay on “Le traveling de Kapò,”
Daney recalls photocopying Rivette’s “De l’abjection” to disseminate among
his pupils while teaching at Paris-III in the early 1970s—a “‘red’ period when
some students were trying to glean a bit of the political radicalism of ’68 from
their professors.” Already, he could feel the pertinence of the text fading for
this younger generation of cinephiles: “the most motivated of them consented
to see ‘De l’abjection’ as an interesting historical, but slightly dated document.”
Writing in 1992, he imagines that, should he repeat the experiment with a
newer crop of students, “I wouldn’t be so concerned as to whether or not they
understood the tracking shot, but I would have my heart set on knowing
that they saw some trace of abjection.” Daney’s fear, however, was that this
would not happen, which he read as “a sign that not only are tracking shots
no longer a moral issue, but that the cinema is even too weak to entertain
such a question.”3 As students of Cahiers, of texts such as “Ontologie de
l’image photographique,” “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” “De
l’abjection,” “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” “Technique et idéologie,” “La suture,”
Le Champ aveugle, “Le travelling de Kapò,” Cinéma contre spectacle and tutti
quanti, it is imperative that we disprove Daney’s gloomy hypothesis and
that we keep this theoretical legacy alive—not simply as a museum piece
from a past era but as a living, organically evolving way of thinking about
and practicing the cinema. As spectators, critics, scholars and filmmakers,
we too must resemble our time. The survival of the cinema depends on it.

Works Cited

Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited,

trans. Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).
Serge Daney, “Le travelling de Kapò,” Trafic no. 4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 5-19. Translated
as “The Tracking Shot from Kapò,” in idem., Postcards from the Cinema, trans.
Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 17-35.
———, La Rampe (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983).

3 Daney, “Le travelling de Kapò,” pp. 30-31 [p. 28].

 Index of Names Cited
Abel, Richard, 116 Baecque, Antoine de, 18, 26, 77, 113, 227, 245,
Adorno, Theodor W., 791 272, 281, 350, 352, 354
Agamben, Giorgio, 796 Bagh, Peter von, 372
Agel, Henri, 212, 575 Balázs, Béla, 17, 582
Akerman, Chantal, 677, 678, 741 Baltrusaïtis, Jurgis, 736
Akika, Ali, 337 Balzac, Honoré de, 62, 63, 103, 577
Akin, Fatih, 374 Bancroft, Anne, 120
Alain, 119 Barbin, Pierre, 218, 219
Alaouié, Borhan, 337 Barnet, Boris, 367, 375, 376
Alberti, Leon Battista, 581 Barrès, Maurice, 226
Alburni, Robert, 242 Barthes, Roland, 16, 29, 41, 49, 68, 78, 103, 111,
Allégret, Marc, 445 116, 129, 135, 136, 144, 182, 187, 203, 209, 243,
Allen, Richard, 42, 192 271, 278, 291, 293, 354, 426, 427, 431-438, 442,
Allen, Woody, 350, 743, 783 446-448, 452-458, 463, 471, 478, 484-487, 532,
Allende, Salvador, 335 533, 559, 560, 567, 577, 579-581, 600, 661, 686,
Allio, René, 243, 312, 343, 346, 347 718, 724, 730, 731, 752, 758, 804
Althusser, Louis, 16, 20-22, 24-26, 40, 41, 46, 49, Bataille, Georges, 21, 271, 293, 485, 486, 520, 537,
53-56, 61-64, 66-68, 96, 103, 111, 116, 129, 151, 538, 564, 633, 701, 702, 710, 718, 721
156, 157, 162, 177, 182, 185, 187, 192, 238-240, Bataille, Sylvia, 247
273, 275, 277, 278, 285, 289, 291, 308, 309, 312, Baudrillard, Jean, 30, 708, 784, 786
317, 335, 336, 354, 362, 364, 447, 451, 453, 480, Baudry, Jean-Louis, 24, 25, 151-157, 241, 331, 654,
483, 484, 504, 517, 553, 573, 581, 585, 588, 629, 718-720, 725, 726, 739
661, 682, 695, 697, 742, 752, 778-781, 804 Baudry, Pierre, 14, 19, 21, 30, 112, 181, 242, 245,
Altman, Rick, 190, 572 246, 254, 278, 286, 288, 311, 343, 502, 508-510,
Altman, Robert, 511, 762 520, 533, 534, 562, 574, 575, 600, 601, 629, 633,
Amengual, Barthélemy, 73, 495, 514, 696 661, 695-714
Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de, 555 Bava, Mario, 213
Andrew, Dudley, 16, 17, 22, 105, 117, 118, 185, 187, Baye, Nathalie, 393
188, 572, 627, 657, 658 Bazin, André, 14, 17, 21-24, 26, 30, 33, 40, 41, 55,
Angelopoulos, Theo, 615, 708 91, 98, 128, 133-136, 141, 151, 158, 161, 164-169,
Antonin, Arnold, 620 207, 238, 246, 253, 351, 389, 401, 426, 427,
Antonio, Emile de, 224, 365 433, 434, 445, 448, 456-458, 464, 465, 470, 471,
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 76, 79, 246, 334, 335, 478, 506, 508, 527, 533, 566, 573, 582, 589, 592,
436, 439, 443, 456, 605, 728, 739, 753 607-609, 621, 627, 628, 631-633, 637-661, 695,
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 548 696, 699, 702, 713, 718-722, 724, 730-735, 738,
Aprà, Adriano, 372 739, 749, 750, 758, 760, 762, 763, 768, 771, 785,
Aragon, Louis, 139, 239, 272 786, 788, 790, 792, 795, 796, 799, 804, 805
Arnheim, Rudolf, 17, 581 Beauviala, Jean-Pierre, 348, 711
Artaud, Antonin, 132, 133, 271, 528, 560, 574 Bellochio, Marco, 85, 291, 292, 544, 554, 555
Assayas, Olivier, 331, 536 Bellour, Raymond, 117, 227, 427, 450-452, 576, 579,
Astruc, Alexandre, 218, 478 592, 709, 798
Auerbach, Erich, 581 Belmont, Charles, 332
Augustine, St., 246, 718 Ben Barka, Mehdi, 465
Aumont, Jacques, 14, 19, 20, 29-32, 72, 113, 114, Benayoun, Robert, 138, 440, 441, 521, 524, 526
190, 202, 203, 211, 215-217, 222, 230, 245, Bene, Carmelo, 29, 223, 427, 428, 528-530, 572,
252-254, 261, 272, 280, 283, 287, 290, 291, 594, 757
302, 304, 312, 327, 334, 371, 428, 437, 442, 453, Benjamin, Walter, 21, 102, 169, 424, 447
467-469, 471, 479, 480, 487, 495, 497, 498, 520, Benoit, Ted, 393
521, 528-530, 533, 548, 555-557, 563, 571-594, 597, Benoliel, Bernard, 370, 371
617, 629, 634, 758, 759, 777, 786-790, 796, 801 Bérégovoy, Pierre, 398
Auriol Jean-George, 478 Bergala, Alain, 21, 203, 287, 316, 330, 354, 580,
604, 605, 751, 759,
Bachelard, Gaston, 66, 308, 577 Bergman, Ingmar, 57, 76, 79, 86-88, 247, 496,
Badiou, Alain, 21, 40, 61, 63, 102, 239, 276, 277, 536, 548, 572, 590, 593, 594, 605, 615, 644, 734,
425, 552, 697 758, 769, 787,
808  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Bergson, Henri, 750, 757, 760, 768 Breton, Émile, 239, 364, 365, 372, 393
Bergstrom, Janet, 372 Brewster, Ben 104, 115, 116, 178, 184
Berri, Claude, 229, 617, 618 Brocka, Lino, 615
Berroyer, Jackie, 741 Browne, Nick, 17, 116, 117, 192, 199, 200, 536
Bertheau, Julien, 250 Browning, Tod, 245
Berto, Juliet, 471 Brya, Nadia, 407, 408
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 84, 85, 88, 211, 221, 292, Büchner, Georg, 388
293, 300, 364, 443, 530, 531, 544 Bullot, Érik, 371
Beylie, Claude, 249 Buñuel, Luis, 29, 79, 86, 118, 228, 278, 303, 354,
Biberman, Herbert, 311, 315 428, 435, 468, 471, 477, 480, 517-522, 526, 536,
Bickerton, Emilie, 18, 27 610, 651, 728, 730
Biesse, Jean-Pierre, 216 Burch, Noël, 449, 450, 712, 722
Biette, Jean-Claude, 125, 127, 129, 209, 225, 331, Burdeau, Emmanuel, 529
442, 612, 614, 741, 796, 798 Buscombe, Edward, 182
Bismarck, Otto von, 424
Blanchot, Maurice, 21, 76, 480 Calle, Sophie, 606, 710, 711
Blümlinger, Christa, 712 Capdenac, Michel, 246
Bobrowski, Edouard, 365 Capra, Frank, 72
Bočan, Hynek, 474 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 188
Boetticher, Budd, 281, 511, 512, 703 Carax, Leos, 331, 615, 616
Bogart, Humphrey, 214, 381 Cardin, Pierre, 229
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 208 Cardinale, Claudia, 392
Boland, Bernard, 331 Carles, Philippe, 73, 171
Böll, Heinrich, 127 Carné, Marcel, 73, 218, 222, 537, 799
Bonis, Jacques de, 239 Carow, Heiner, 374
Bonitzer, Agathe, 744 Carrière, Jean-Claude, 741
Bonitzer, Pascal, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 30, 72, 103, Carrilho, Arnaldo, 558
112-114, 130, 141, 142, 150, 161, 163, 181, 201-203, Carroll, Noël, 42, 176, 186, 187, 191, 572
242-246, 248, 253, 254, 257, 258, 261, 263, Casetti, Francesco, 17
270-274, 278, 282, 285, 287, 292, 293, 297, Cassard, Philippe, 758
298, 305, 315, 316, 325, 326, 330, 336, 343-346, Cassavetes, John, 260, 590
349-353, 363, 424, 437, 439-441, 445, 446, 450, Castro, Fidel 220
455-457, 463, 468, 469, 472, 476, 485, 486, 498, Cavani, Liliana, 343-345, 686, 753
520, 529, 531, 534-536, 544, 545, 548, 554, 557, Ceausescu, Nicolae and Elena, 785
562-567, 574, 575, 579, 584, 604, 629-633, 644, Cervantes, Miguel de, 727
645, 647-656, 658, 661, 666, 711, 717-745, 751, Cervoni, Albert, 239, 269
752, 753, 761-766, 796, 805 Chabrol, Claude, 14, 33, 218, 222, 432
Bontemps, Jacques, 21, 209, 210, 225, 244, 260, Chahine, Youssef, 410
299, 485, 796 Chalandon, Albin, 395
Bordwell, David, 41, 176, 187, 188, 191, 572, 577, Chaplin, Charles, 169, 242, 371, 432-434, 443, 545,
578, 669 640, 653, 722, 758
Borowczyk, Walerian, 223, 243 Chapouillié, Guy, 337, 341
Bory, Jean-Louis, 213, 558 Charisse, Cyd, 606
Böttcher, Jürgen, 374 Charles-Roux, Edmonde, 398
Bouchaud, Nicolas, 608 Chengelaia, Georgi, 361
Boulez, Pierre, 78, 209, 431, 432 Cherchi Usai, Paolo, 190
Bourdieu, Pierre, 131, 257 Chéreau, Patrice, 140
Branco, Paolo, 796 Chiang Kai-Shek, 640
Brasillach, Robert, 162 Chirac, Jacques, 395, 396
Brasseur, Claude, 393 Chytilová, Věra, 29, 84, 129, 428, 475, 544,
Braudel, Fernand, 400, 408 546-548
Braunberger, Pierre, 229 Ciment, Michel, 137, 138
Brecht, Bertolt, 21, 140-142, 177, 208, 244, 249, Cixous, Hélène, 184
250, 312, 313, 317, 330, 344, 363-365, 404, 405, Clarke, Shirley, 260
424, 434, 436, 437, 448, 455, 525, 537, 555, 560, Clay, Jean, 581
575, 604, 628, 700 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 738
Bresson, Robert, 47, 76, 77, 133, 476, 477, 575, 652, Coe, Brian, 159
669, 670, 672-674, 676, 682-687. 691, 738, 762, Cocteau, Jean, 47, 134, 369, 445, 789
765, 766 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 244, 308
Index of Names Cited 809

Coleman, Ornette, 171 Defoe, Daniel, 532

Coltrane, John, 171 Deguy, Michel, 244
Comolli, Jean-Louis, 14-20, 22-25, 27-30, 32, Delahaye, Michel 21, 31, 77, 80, 97, 99, 112, 127,
39-42, 46, 47, 49-61, 63, 66-68, 71-91, 96-99, 209, 221, 225, 226, 229, 244, 261, 304, 381, 434,
112-114, 118, 138, 141, 144, 145, 149-172, 177, 435, 436, 452, 494, 495, 527, 547, 707,
184-186, 193, 199-201, 209-211, 213, 219-222, Deleuze, Gilles, 16, 30, 315, 347, 633, 686, 718,
225, 227-229, 238, 239, 242, 245-248, 251, 253, 749-772, 791, 804
254, 256, 258-263, 270, 272-274, 276, 278, 279, Delluc, Louis, 478
283, 288, 289, 298, 301, 303, 304, 327, 331, 342, Delmas, Jean, 241
351, 385-410, 424, 426, 433, 437, 439-444, 479, Demarcy, Richard, 140
480, 482, 483, 486, 494-497, 508, 522-528, 534, DeMille, Cecil B., 710
545, 549-554, 574, 575, 579, 583, 587-589, 600, Demy, Jacques, 281, 432, 604, 611
621, 627, 629-631, 634, 637, 641-643, 645, 660, Deng Xiaoping, 335, 353, 354
674, 699, 714, 719, 720, 721, 750, 760, 761, 777, Denis, Claire, 476
778, 783, 786, 790-796, 803-805 Depardieu, Gérard, 392
Conley, Tom, 108 Depardon, Raymond, 396
Conner, Bruce, 590 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 21, 29, 41, 49, 68, 126, 129,
Cook, Pam, 183 130, 132-136, 185, 192, 244, 271, 312, 427, 455,
Cooper, Gary, 75 463, 481, 483-486, 488, 506, 509, 512, 532, 537,
Cooper, Merian C., 710 559, 562, 718, 721, 752, 781, 804
Coppola, Francis Ford, 350, 614, 615 Deslandes, Jacques, 159
Corbucci, Sergio, 703, 706 Deswarte, Bénie, 728
Corman, Roger, 214 Diderot, Denis, 658
Cornand, André, 390 Didi-Hubermann, Georges, 796
Corneille, Pierre, 124, 129, 131, 132, 135, 137, 141, Diegues, Carlos, 281, 555, 558
734, 766 Dietrich, Marlene, 498-502
Costa, José Sarney, 558 Dimitrov, Georgi, 249
Costa, Pedro, 136, 792 Disney, Walt, 788, 799
Costa-Gavras, Constantine, 28, 51, 58, 64, 141, Doane, Mary Ann, 185
202, 229, 256, 258, 259, 292, 425, 455 Dolphy, Eric, 621
Cottafavi, Vittorio, 213 Domarchi, Jean, 33
Cournot, Michel, 82, 222 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 14, 46, 47, 50, 77,
Courtelin, Georges, 448 207-209, 229, 230, 279
Cozarinsky, Edgardo, 381 Dort, Bernard, 33, 177, 208
Cukor, George, 97, 114, 286, 428, 494, 502-506 Dosse, François, 464
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 63, 727
Dahl, Gustavo, 554 Douchet, Jean, 21, 75, 78, 120, 208, 796
Dahl, Roald, 731, 732 Douglas, Stephen, 107
Daney, Serge, 14, 15, 19, 21, 22, 28-31, 72, 80, 96, Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 58, 96, 97, 127, 129, 373,
100, 105, 112, 114, 118, 130, 142, 144, 150, 156, 493-497, 572, 575, 617, 619, 739, 762, 787
185, 192, 193, 200-204, 211-213, 215, 220, 246, Dubois, Philippe, 790
248, 276, 278-280, 282, 284, 287, 290-292, Dubroux, Danièle, 180, 215, 331, 332, 337
297, 298, 316-319, 325-336, 339, 343, 344, Dudow, Slatan, 249, 250
346, 348-354, 366, 391-393, 423, 426, 428, Duras, Marguerite, 136, 475, 593, 703, 726, 730,
445-447, 454, 475, 476, 482-485, 503, 510-513, 733, 761, 764
517, 522, 523, 525, 535-539, 543, 545-547, Durruti, Buenaventura, 410
553-555, 574, 575, 597, 598, 604, 607-621, Dutronc, Jacques, 393
627-629, 631-634, 641, 645, 647, 651-656, Duvalier, François, 620
658-660, 680, 687, 696, 703, 717, 740, 750-753,
759, 761, 762, 765-772, 775-777, 781-786, 789, Edel, Ulrich, 613
796-800, 803, 805 Edison, Thomas, 159
Daquin, Louis, 367 Edwards, Blake, 244
Davis, Robin, 617 Egoyan, Atom, 789
Dayan, Daniel, 667, 675-677 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 252, 481
De Palma, Brian, 350, 511, 601 Eisenschitz, Bernard, 14, 20, 29, 72, 114, 152, 153,
De Sica, Vittorio, 640 203, 211, 213, 215, 230, 242, 247, 252, 261-264,
Debord, Guy, 220, 447, 791, 792 279, 281-283, 359-382, 385, 446, 525, 530, 629,
Debray, Régis, 607 666, 668, 707, 796
Defferre, Gaston, 397, 409 Eisenschitz, Willy, 213
810  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Eisenstein, Sergei, 17, 21, 56, 76, 90, 97, 132, 137, Friedkin, William, 601
141, 169, 170, 227, 246, 248, 251-253, 256, 259, Freud, Sigmund, 41, 53, 107, 132, 157, 178, 182, 451,
271, 301, 304, 305, 337, 363, 367, 370, 375, 376, 469, 501, 520, 534, 548, 562, 576, 579, 629, 631,
397, 432, 454, 464-467, 481, 506, 507, 529, 555, 642, 652, 653, 696, 697, 736, 750
557, 560, 573, 575-582, 584, 593, 646, 647, 720, Fuller, Samuel, 212, 363, 364, 758, 772
726, 731, 732, 734, 735, 738, 787, 788, 799 Funès, Louis de, 138
Eisner, Lott, 379
Ekk, Nikolai, 375 Gabin, Jean, 312
Ellington, Duke, 72 Gable, Clark, 242
Ellis, John, 117 Galassi, Peter, 583
Emshwiller, Ed, 733 Gallagher, Tag, 126, 371, 796
Endfield. Cy, 213 Gance, Abel, 367
Engels, Friedrich, 52, 160, 226, 532, 629 Gardner, Ava, 606
Epstein, Jean, 397, 582, 584, 589, 593, 721, 787 Garrel, Philippe 29, 136, 202, 220, 221, 223, 427,
Epstein, Marie, 218 428, 464, 468, 473, 479, 526, 527, 528, 572, 593, 615
Espinosa, Julio, 138 Gaudin, Jean-Claude, 397, 409
Eustache, Jean, 75, 88, 209, 216, 292, 293, 354, Gaudreault, André, 42, 189
477, 738 Gaulle, Charles de, 15, 73, 202, 219, 238, 259, 330,
343, 395
Falk, Peter, 399 Géré, François, 251
Fargier, Jean-Paul, 24, 47, 64-66, 87, 177, 331 Getino, Octavio, 257, 258, 464, 554
Fairbanks, Douglas, 214 Ghali, Samia, 407-409
Fansten, Jacques, 455 Gidal, Peter, 186
Farocki, Harun, 712, 789 Gide, André, 386
Farrow, Mia, 599 Giraud, Thérèse, 180, 203, 215, 280, 316, 331-333, 620
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 354, 615 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 330, 343, 616, 617
Faye, Jean-Pierre, 47, 253, 479 Gledhill, Christine, 182
Fellini, Federico, 29, 410, 425, 428, 442, 531, Glucksmann, André, 204
533-536, 564, 616, 644, 695 Godard, Jean-Luc, 14, 15, 25, 33, 41, 47, 50, 51, 53,
Féret, René, 753 57, 65, 76, 78, 84, 86, 134, 136, 142, 170, 177,
Ferréol, Andréa, 392 199, 202, 203, 210, 217-219, 221, 226, 227, 229,
Ferreri, Marco, 244, 281, 292, 293 240, 243, 259, 260, 261, 270, 273, 274, 276,
Ferro, Marc, 347 277, 285, 297-320, 336, 339, 353, 365, 366,
Feuillade, Louis, 393 371, 378, 381, 382, 397, 399, 423, 424, 428, 432,
Field, Simon, 181 438, 439, 443, 444, 448, 449, 456, 464-466, 468,
Fieschi Jean-André, 31, 75, 77, 139, 140, 202, 209, 471, 477, 479, 481, 483, 522, 529, 533, 548, 555,
225, 240, 253, 261-263, 281, 360-362, 381, 449, 556, 559, 572, 575, 580-582, 593, 594, 600, 603,
696, 796 604, 610, 611, 615, 617, 619, 632, 647, 658, 669,
Filipacchi, Daniel, 39, 50, 202, 209, 210, 215, 217, 678, 687-689, 700, 703, 720, 726, 727, 730, 731,
223, 226-229, 237, 303, 350, 468 734-736, 739, 740, 749, 751, 754-757, 762, 765,
Fillières, Sophie, 741 767, 769, 772, 783-785, 787, 789, 792, 793, 795
Finkielkraut, Alain, 203 Goebbels, Josef, 380
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 79, 735 Goldmann, Lucien, 484
Flaherty, Robert, 640, 711, 712 Goldring, Maurice, 140
Focillon, Henri, 497 Gombrich, Ernst, 581
Fonda, Henry, 107, 108, 592 Goodis, David, 367
Fonda, Jane, 306, 312 Gordon, Douglas, 789
Ford, John, 16, 25, 41, 58, 72, 79, 80, 96-120, Goretta, Claude, 686
125-127, 248, 326, 468, 470, 471, 497-499, 502, Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 53, 303, 306, 308, 309,
520, 566, 567, 575, 652, 687, 703, 789, 799 311-316, 365, 366, 556
Forman, Miloš, 475 Gramsci, Antonio, 53, 330, 403
Fortini, Franco, 144 Grant, Cary, 506, 740
Fossey, Brigitte, 392 Grant, Paul, 220
Foucault, Michel, 21, 203, 343, 345-348, 354, 449, Gregorio, Eduardo de, 242, 281, 365, 386, 512, 532
486, 532, 580, 603, 631, 718, 738, 750, 754, 804 Grierson, John, 711
Fournier, Frank, 776 Griffith, D.W., 26, 97, 114, 163, 190, 246, 248, 286,
Fox, Terry, 377 363, 364, 373, 376, 428, 432, 448, 466, 494, 502,
Francastel, Pierre, 151, 581, 631, 682, 697, 718, 724 506-510, 575, 589, 652, 710, 731, 732, 737
Frege, Gottlob, 667 Grimblat, Pierre, 782
Index of Names Cited 811

Groulx, Gilles, 84, 544 Issartel, Marielle, 332

Guattari, Félix, 315, 750, 752, 754, 756 Ivens, Joris, 138, 334
Guedj, Aimé, 140
Guégan, Gérard, 438 Jacobs, Lewis, 188
Guerra, Ruy, 216, 556 Jakobson, Roman, 435
Guicheteau, Gérard, 393 Jancsó, Miklos, 29, 88-90, 136, 215, 217, 223, 303,
Guillermin, John, 710 386, 390, 425, 428, 480, 544, 548-554, 563
Gunning, Tom, 189, 572 Jarry, Alfred, 546
Guynn, William, 181 Jay, Martin, 193, 484
Jensen, Wilhelm, 562
Habib-Deloncle, Michel, 780 Jia Zhang-ke, 136, 792
Hani, Susumu, 560-562 Jiang Qing, 278
Hanin, Roger, 395 Johnston, Claire, 183
Hanoun, Marcel, 47, 65, 66 Jost, François, 759
Hansen, Miriam, 508 Joubert-Laurencin, Hervé, 22, 23, 160, 456, 457,
Harlan, Veit, 374 627, 631, 632, 638, 652, 658, 660
Harvey, Sylvia, 17, 191, 221 Jouhandeau, Marcel and Élise, 606
Haustrate, Gaston, 136 Jourdheuil, Jean, 346
Havel, Václav, 394 Joyce, James, 271, 480
Hawks, Howards, 72, 75, 76, 79-82, 212, 366, 367, July, Serge, 352, 611, 618
448, 494, 511, 512, 544, 575, 617, 651, 743
Heath, Stephen, 17, 117, 178, 182, 183, 185, 186, 192, Kafka, Franz, 544, 760
565, 593, 667, 674, 677, 678 Kandinsky, Wassily, 142
Heidegger, Martin, 76, 640, 672 Kané, Pascal, 14, 19, 20, 29, 96, 201, 203, 242-246,
Heinich, Nathalie, 180, 215, 331 278, 282, 286, 287, 291, 325, 326, 330, 333,
Hegel, G.W.F., 23, 24, 48, 52, 59, 76, 166, 433, 508, 336, 349, 350, 352, 353, 391, 428, 455, 468, 469,
539, 547, 566, 581, 765 476, 477, 499, 502-506, 512, 532, 533, 551, 574,
Hellman, Monte, 753 575, 597-607, 618, 620, 629, 741, 752, 753,
Henderson, Brian, 116 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 437, 581
Hennebelle, Guy, 313, 315, 342 Kast, Pierre, 33, 50, 77, 208, 218, 220, 230, 279,
Henric, Jacques, 271 527
Henry, Jean-Jacques, 331 Karmitz, Marin, 28, 222, 256, 257, 311-315, 363,
Hepburn, Katherine, 503-505 366, 425
Hergé, 393 Kazan, Elia, 378, 511, 513, 514, 602
Herpe, Noël, 77 Keaton, Buster, 454, 671, 700, 734
Herzog, Werner, 686 Khuruschev, Nikita, 553
Heynowski, Walter, 361 Kiarostami, Abbas, 136, 789, 792
Hirszman, Leon, 555 Kiejman, George, 228
Hitchcock, Alfred, 47, 76, 80, 82, 83, 183, 184, 227, King, Henry, 376
243, 450, 451, 471, 510, 584, 590, 593, 601, 617, 619, Kleiman, Naum, 376
673, 678, 681, 682, 731, 733, 736-738, 751, 752, 789 Kleinhans, Chuck, 118, 181, 285
Hitler, Adolf, 303, 374, 380, 689 Kleist, Heinrich von, 647-649
Hjemslev, Louis, 437 Klossowski, Pierre, 565, 752
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 691 Kluge, Alexander, 221
Holbein, Hans, 736 Koch, Karl, 250
Hondo, Med, 333 Konchalovsky, Andrei, 360
Horace, 510 Kozintsev, Grigori, 217, 252, 254, 255, 273, 364,
Huillet, Danièle, 23, 25, 29, 41, 57, 86, 125-145, 687
151, 177, 178, 203, 211, 258, 269, 273, 297, 298, Kozlov, Leonid, 375
316, 317, 372, 423, 424, 484, 495, 533, 559, 575, Kracauer, Siegfried, 17
589, 593, 600, 604, 615, 655, 687, 689, 690, 726, Kramer, Robert, 25, 28, 29, 57, 136, 202, 217, 230,
730, 759, 761, 764-768, 784 240, 258, 260-263, 303, 347, 362, 363, 373,
Huleu, Jean-René, 330 424, 481, 527, 610, 687-689, 784
Huppert, Isabelle, 686 Kretzschmar, Laurent, 609
Husserl, Edmund, 152, 586 Kristeva, Julia, 16, 21, 29, 41, 141, 151, 161, 162, 178,
Huston, John, 216, 652 184, 203, 241, 271, 427, 455, 463, 480-483, 488,
498, 506, 532, 534, 553, 579, 752, 804
Iosselliani, Otar, 360, 366 Krohn, Bill, 19, 317, 483, 691, 796
Irigaray, Luce, 184 Kubrick, Stanley, 590, 687-691
812  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Kuleshov, Lev, 252 Lindeperg, Sylvie, 408

Kunetz, Claude, 741 Linhardt, Robert, 276
Kuntzel, Thierry, 574 Linnaeus, Carl, 760
Kurdi, Alan, 776 Littin, Miguel, 335, 727
Lo Duca, Joseph-Marie, 494
Labarthe, André S., 84, 90, 303, 386, 442, 473, Loach, Ken, 291, 687
477, 523, 524, 549. 721 London, Artur, 258, 259
Lacan, Jacques, 16, 21, 24, 30, 41, 49, 68, 107, 110, Loo, Charles-Émile, 402
111, 116, 129, 182, 185, 187, 270, 278, 291, 293, Loridan, Marceline, 334
312, 317, 435, 451, 452, 466, 484-486, 498, 505, Losey, Joseph, 208, 213, 511, 512
510, 520, 537, 552, 553, 565, 575, 629-633, 639, Lounas, Thierry, 529
647, 652, 661, 666-668, 672, 673, 679, 680, 682, Lovell, Alan, 192
687, 695, 697, 712, 717, 718, 729, 735-737, 749, Lu Xun, 305
752, 804 Lubitsch, Ernst, 119, 214, 475, 743
Lachize, Samuel, 270 Lucas, George, 733
Lagny, Michèle, 371 Luchini, Fabrice, 742
Lajournade, Jean-Pierre, 64, 65, 66, 67, 528 Lukàcs, Georg, 105, 484, 536, 537,
Lang, Fritz, 76, 109, 127, 134, 208, 212, 214, 269, Lumet, Sidney, 350
360, 370-372, 378-380, 521, 575, 584, 601, 619, Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 159, 167, 581-583,
670, 673, 674, 681, 682 604, 639, 682, 731, 732, 740, 790
Lang, Jack, 353 Lunacharsky, Anatoli, 375
Langlois, Henri, 20, 217-221, 227, 229, 350, 369, Lyotard, Jean-François, 589, 590, 784
370, 375, 448, 526, 750, 758
Lanzmann, Claude, 276, 338, 339 Maaskri, Zohra, 407
Lardeau, Yann, 331 MacCabe, Colin, 17, 178, 182, 183, 628
Lauretis, Teresa de, 184, 185 McCarey, Leo, 212, 269, 510
Lautréamont, Comte de 41, 271, 423, 480, 486 Macciocchi, Maria-Antonietta, 272
Lawaetz, Gudie, 728 McGilligan, Patrick, 379
Le Masson, Yann, 728 Macherey, Pierre, 21, 40, 61-63, 88, 102, 239, 532,
Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 395, 399, 402-406 804
Le Pen, Marine, 406 Mackenzie, Compton, 503
Le Péron, 21, 203, 285, 287, 316, 330, 334, 337, Madsen, Axel, 99
338, 352 Makavajev, Dušan, 223, 544, 547, 548
Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 471, 582 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 132, 133, 143, 480, 486, 527
Lebedev, Nikolai, 254 Malle, Louis, 343-345, 686
Lebel, Jean-Patrick, 23, 41, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, Malraux, André, 209, 210, 219, 432, 591, 592
158, 159, 161, 270, 271, 274, 277, 719, 722, 725, Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 78-80, 138, 602
739 Mann, Anthony, 703
Leblanc, Gérard, 23, 24, 47, 64, 102, 158, 165, 166, Mann, Thomas, 536
177, 306, 313, 528, 642, 712 Mannoni, Laurent, 219
Leboutte, Patrick, 399 Mannoni, Octave, 632, 722
Ledoux, Jacques, 370 Mao Zedong, 271, 272, 275, 276, 278, 292, 300,
Leenhardt, Roger, 97, 478 307, 330, 334, 537, 544,
Legendre, Pierre, 347 Marchais, Georges, 240, 241, 567
Lellis, George, 49, 88, 191, 312, 574, 575 Marclay, Christian, 789
Lelouch, Claude, 222, 256, 363, 782 Marc’O, 129
Lenin, V.I., 23, 102, 166, 217, 252, 287, 375, 424, 703 Marcorelles, Louis, 98, 554
Leone, Sergio, 703, 705, 706 Mardore, Michel, 393
LeRoy, Mervyn, 109 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 159
Leroy, Roland, 780 Marie, Michel, 190, 365, 574, 580, 759
Lesage, Julia, 181, 182, 285 Marivaux, Pierre de, 532
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 581 Martin, Adrian, 796
Leutrat, Jean-Louis, 282, 381, 575, 758 Martin, Karlheinz, 584
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 78, 209, 431, 432, 501 Martin, Marcel, 139, 262
Lewis, Jerry, 29, 57, 212, 425, 428, 522-526, 541, Martin, Paul-Louis, 546
548, 700, 701, 708, 736 Marker, Chris, 347, 370, 372, 377 381, 382,
Leys, Simon, 275 728-730, 785
Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne, 571 Marx, Karl, 24, 52-54, 66, 104, 165, 254, 351, 364,
Lincoln, Abraham, 104-112, 115, 124, 566 501, 532, 578, 579, 629, 644, 703, 750
Index of Names Cited 813

Marx Brothers, 242, 366 277, 281-283, 285-289, 298, 299, 303, 304,
Massa, Norbert, 161 312, 319, 320, 327, 336-340, 342, 343, 348,
Masumura, Yasuzo, 560-562 349, 353, 372, 387, 410, 423, 426, 434, 437, 439,
Matias, Diana, 177 441, 445, 447-449, 451, 452, 455-457, 464-472,
Mattei, Jean-François, 398, 399 474-476, 479-481, 483, 484, 493-497, 519, 520,
Mattelart, Aramnd, 335 522, 524, 527-531, 544-546, 548, 551-553, 556,
Maupassant, Guy de, 247 557, 565, 574, 575, 579, 600, 604, 613, 627, 629,
Maurin, François, 139, 262 631-633, 637, 639, 642, 645, 650, 656, 657, 707,
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 375 711, 719, 749-752, 754-759, 761, 765-767, 773, 774,
Mayo, Archie, 109 796, 804, 805
Meddeb, Abdelwahad, 337 Naruse, Mikio, 758
Médici, Emílio Garrastazu, 556 Navasky, Victor, 367
Medvedkin, Aleksandr, 381 Nero, Franco, 706
Meerson, Mary, 218 Nestler, Peter, 143
Mégret, Bruno, 402-404 Newman, Paul, 83
Méliès, Georges, 582, 604, 740, 770, 790 Nichols, Bill, 116, 185
Melville, Herman, 377 Nièpce, Nicéphore, 48, 639
Melville, Jean-Pierre 224, 782 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 567
Mendeleev, Dmitri, 760 Niney, François, 712
Mennucci, Patrick, 408, 409 Noguez, Dominique, 242, 365, 548
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 76, 448, 586, 589, 632
Metz, Christian, 21, 29, 115, 117, 177, 185, 278, 301, O’Brien, Charles, 582
309, 310, 427, 437-442, 447-452, 466, 481, 509, Oddos, Christian, 487, 488
572-574, 576, 579, 718, 720, 721, 759, 763, 804 Oliveira, Manoel de, 736
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 375, 700 Olivier, Laurence, 134
Miéville, Anne-Marie, 316 Ollier, Claude, 470
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 192, 552, 667, 668, 670, 677 Olmi, Ermanno, 84
Millet, Jean-François, 390 Ophuls, Marcel, 246, 343, 345
Milner, Jean-Claude, 204, 276 Ophuls, Max, 367
Minnelli, Vincente, 366, 738 Oshima, Nagisa, 29, 244, 273, 274, 286, 303, 425,
Mitchell, Julian, 614 428, 432, 471, 485, 559, 563-567, 752, 758, 769
Mitterand, François, 202, 330, 353, 395, 396, Osugi, Sakae, 485
398, 402, 782, 789 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 14, 16, 21, 105, 108, 111, 112,
Mitry, Jean, 17, 23, 41, 151, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 130, 150, 156, 177, 181, 192, 227, 228, 242, 245,
168, 188, 190, 439, 440, 574, 642, 719-721, 739, 248, 254, 255, 278, 287, 291, 302, 325, 330, 351,
763 353, 364, 518-522, 530, 536-540, 543, 551-553,
Mizoguchi, Kenji, 372, 443, 465, 560, 673, 799, 800 570, 579, 629, 633, 661, 665-691, 695, 697, 701,
Moinot, Pierre, 218 702, 718, 719, 733, 771, 781, 782, 805
Montand, Yves, 258, 306, 312, 314, 782 Overney, Pierre, 289
Montrelay, Michèle, 499 Ozu, Yasujiro, 560, 762
Morin, Edgar, 500
Morrey, Douglas, 465, 466 Pabst, G.W., 216
Moullet, Luc, 199, 209, 227, 245, 447, 448, 527, Païni, Dominique, 241, 370, 371, 535
529, 605, 796 Pakradouni, Philippe, 28, 31, 171, 279, 282- 284,
Mourlet, Michel, 208, 213, 603 286, 287, 325-327, 329
Muer, Julie de, 410 Paradjanov, Sergei, 615
Müller, Marco, 367 Parker, Charlie, 72
Mulvey, Laura, 17, 178, 183, 184, 185, 678 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 29, 202, 221, 244, 301, 397,
Murnau, F.W., 63, 76, 468, 470, 510, 575, 584, 788 427, 438, 439, 442-449, 452, 528, 582, 593, 610,
Musser, Charles, 189 643, 701, 765
Muybridge, Eadweard, 159 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 131, 257
Paul, Bernard, 58, 64, 256, 257, 291
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 791 Pêcheux, Michel, 504
Narboni, Jean, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22-25, 27, 28, 30, Peck, Raoul, 741
39, 41, 42, 45- 47, 49-52, 54-61, 63, 66-68, Peckinpah, Sam, 298
71-74, 78-86, 96, 97, 99, 112-114, 126, 128-141, Pedro, Dom, 389
143-145, 150, 176, 183, 192, 199, 201-203, 209, Peirce, Charles Sanders, 639, 760, 768
211, 213, 220, 222, 225-229, 238, 240, 241, Pennebaker, D.A., 396
246-248, 251, 254-257, 260-262, 272-274, 276, Perrault, Pierre, 64, 88, 89, 136, 223, 386
814  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Pétain, Philippe, 343 Revault d’Allonnes, Fabrice, 571

Petri, Elio, 213 Reynaud, Bérénice, 18, 32, 289, 290, 330, 334, 487
Petrovic, Aleksandar, 547 Riboud, Jean, 229
Pezet, Michel, 397, 398 Ricardou, Jean, 479
Pialat, Maurice, 245, 353, 668 Richardson, Tony, 312
Picard, Raymond, 487 Riefenstahl, Leni, 374
Picasso, Pablo, 523 Rissient, Pierre, 208
Pierre, Sylvie, 14, 19, 20, 31, 72, 114, 115, 118, 119, Riva, Emmanuelle, 199, 799
211, 215, 225, 229, 245, 260, 279, 280, 282, 331, Rivette, Jacques, 14, 20, 33, 39, 45, 49-51, 75, 77-
453-455, 464, 465, 468, 472-474, 476, 479, 519-521, 80, 84, 88, 90, 100, 136, 199, 201, 202, 208-210,
526, 528, 529, 534, 545, 537, 549, 551, 554-558, 561, 218, 222-224, 229, 230, 243, 245, 246, 256, 261,
562, 572, 579, 629, 666, 703-705, 707, 711, 798, 799 279, 353, 376, 423, 431-436, 452, 464-477, 479,
Pigoullié, Jean-François, 608 547, 548, 559, 574, 575, 590, 615, 632, 647, 741,
Pinochet, Augusto, 335, 361 743, 753, 759, 788, 796, 799, 800, 804, 805
Pirandello, Luigi, 525 Rivière, Joan, 499
Pirès, Gérard, 782 Rivière, Pierre, 343, 346-348
Pirosmani, Niko, 361 Robert, Jacques, 286
Plateau, Joseph, 159 Robespierre, Maximilien, 389
Plato, 158, 485, 686 Rocha, Glauber, 29, 84, 136, 223, 224, 303, 354,
Plekhanov, Georgi, 102 425, 428, 554-558, 563, 572, 575
Pleynet, Marcelin, 24, 25, 40, 47-49, 51, 55, 64, Rocha, Paolo, 558
66, 90, 91, 150, 151, 155, 241, 253, 272, 470, 471, Rochet, Waldeck, 240
718, 719, 736, 739 Rodowick, D.N. 16, 17, 42, 63, 64, 179, 191, 192,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 671 193, 481, 667, 751, 789
Poitevin, Christian, 402 Roger, Jean-Henri, 303
Polan, Dana, 191, 574 Roger, Philippe, 621
Polanski, Roman, 242, 598-602 Rohdie, Sam, 176
Polonsky, Abraham, 138, 214, 223 Rohmer, Éric, 14, 20, 30, 75, 77, 78, 80, 201,
Pollet, Jean-Daniel, 57, 64, 65, 320, 439, 464-466, 207-209, 244, 281, 353, 423, 431, 470, 475, 478,
478, 479, 522, 681, 712 494, 575, 611, 615, 631, 637, 640-651, 736, 739,
Pompidou, Georges, 330 740, 743, 758, 765, 788, 796, 799, 804
Pontecorvo, Gillo, 199, 256, 259, 260, 474, 476, Rollet, Patrice, 118, 581, 798
799, 800 Romm, Mikhail, 252, 254, 452
Poujade, Pierre, 432, 448 Rooks, Conrad, 226, 227
Preminger, Otto, 208 Roosevelt, Franklin, 105
Prévost, Claude, 240 Rose, Jacqueline, 186
Proust, Marcel, 657 Rosen, Philip 60, 105, 728, 731
Rosenbaum Jonathan, 608, 609, 796
Rabelais, François, 727 Rosi, Francesco, 298
Radford, Michael, 614 Rossellini, Roberto, 13, 47, 58, 76, 96, 215, 373,
Ramsaye, Terry, 188 410, 438, 494, 537, 575, 619, 640, 656, 657, 698,
Rancière, Jacques, 239, 336, 347, 372, 750, 791, 731, 760, 769, 770, 783, 785, 788
792, 796, 804 Rossi, Giovanni, 386-391
Rauger, Jean-François, 371 Rothman, William, 677
Ray, Nicholas, 76, 214, 372, 377-379 Rouch, Jean, 88, 216, 218, 382, 396, 400, 432, 510,
Ray, Satyajit, 217 575, 651, 673, 691, 711, 713, 793
Rayé, Marie-Odile, 406 Roud, Richard, 132
Reagan, Ronald, 353 Roulet, Sebastien, 242
Reich, Wilhelm, 344 Rousseau, Henri, 548
Reinach, Geneviève, 242 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 532
Reisz, Karel, 312 Ruiz, Raúl, 603, 735, 736, 739, 741, 743, 770, 784
Rembrandt van Rijn, 120 Rutledge, Ann, 111, 115
Renoir, Jean 28, 47, 73, 95, 112, 164, 167, 202, 218,
240, 246-251, 269, 273, 363, 366, 370, 392, Sade, Marquis de, 24, 242, 446
449, 468, 471, 537, 584, 651, 657, 687, 698, 721, Sadoul, Georges, 23, 151, 158, 162, 188, 369, 378
760, 789 Sadoul, Ruta, 369
Renoir, Pierre, 392 Sainsbury, Peter, 181
Resnais, Alain, 84, 219, 301, 368, 410, 432, 438, Saint, Eva Marie, 740
439, 464, 468, 471, 611, 619, 738, 800 Salt, Barry, 677
Index of Names Cited 815

Samson, Michel, 399-403 Spielberg, Steven, 118, 613

Sanbar, Elias, 618 Spinoza, Baruch, 759
Sanchez Garzón, Omayra, 776 Srour, Heiny, 337
Sanjines, Jorge, 335 Stalin, Josef, 251, 254, 577
Sanmarco, Philippe, 409 Stamp, Terence, 446
Saraceni, Paulo Cezar, 555 Sternberg, Josef von, 25, 97, 104, 114, 183, 184, 212,
Sarris, Andrew, 260 217, 428, 494, 497-502, 561, 652, 687
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 132, 188, 203, 276, 448, 484, Stiegler, Bernard, 791
586, 589, 632, 729 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 127, 473
Saura, Carlos, 221 Straschek, Günter, 143
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 29, 187, 427, 437, 478, Straub, Jean-Marie, 23, 25, 29, 41, 57, 86, 125-145,
480, 579-581, 630, 721, 750 151, 177, 178, 203, 211, 221, 240, 258, 260, 261,
Sautet, Claude, 257 269, 270, 273, 274, 277, 286, 297, 298, 300,
Scheer, Léo, 372 303, 313, 316, 317, 366, 372, 373, 423, 424, 428,
Schefer, Jean Louis, 133, 278, 347, 582, 589, 590, 459, 481, 483, 484, 495, 527, 533, 559, 575, 589,
631, 633, 680, 682, 697, 717-724, 750, 758, 796, 593, 600, 603, 604, 615, 617, 632, 655, 687-690,
804 703, 726, 730, 759, 761, 764-767, 784
Scheumann, Gerhard, 361 Stravinsky, Igor, 130, 473, 523, 558
Schlöndorff, Volker, 613 Stroheim, Erich von, 372, 582, 640
Schoedsack, Ernest B., 710 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 687, 689, 733, 735, 761,
Schönberg, Arno, 142, 373 764, 770, 771
Schroeder, Barbet, 208, 741, 751 Sydow, Max von, 88
Schwartz, Louis-George, 639
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 786 Tacchella, Jean-Charles, 371
Sclavis, Louis, 404 Tapie, Bernard, 402
Scorsese, Martin, 350, 511, 601 Tarantino, Quentin, 743
Scott, Ridley, 350 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 354, 360, 615
Seguin, Louis, 49, 137, 138, 143, 331, 381 Tashlin, Frank, 522
Séguret, Olivier, 605, 606 Tati, Jacques, 221, 246, 545, 696-700, 744
Sélavy, Rose, 745 Tavernier, Bertrand, 82, 754
Sembene, Ousmane, 221, 244, 485, 544 Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio, 258, 269, 270, 281,
Séry, Patrick, 600 286, 428, 481, 531-533, 542
Seton, Marie, 557 Taylor, Cecil, 171
Shinoda, Masahiro, 29 Téchiné, André, 209, 494, 495, 741
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 377 Tesson, Charles, 328, 331
Sichère, Bernard, 330 Thatcher, Margaret, 353
Silverman, Kaja, 184, 667, 678, 679 Thibaudeau, Jean, 47, 48, 241, 272, 479, 718, 736
Simsolo, Noël, 529 Thoraval, Anne, 280
Sirk, Douglas, 212, 374 Thorez, Maurice, 249, 314
Sklar, Robert, 189 Todd, Mary, 107
Skolimowski, Jerzy, 29, 84, 85, 211, 217, 300, 428, Todorov, Tsvetan, 271, 600
477, 544-546, 548, 736 Tolstoy, Leo, 62, 63, 102
Skorecki, Louis, 80, 209, 212, 255, 316, 331, 602, Toubiana, Serge, 20, 203, 279, 282, 283, 287, 292,
603, 612, 624, 691 319, 325-331, 335, 336, 343, 348-353, 391, 424,
Smith, Alison, 390 604, 607, 618, 659, 687, 691, 735, 753, 754, 796,
Smolensky, Pierre, 212 799
Snow, Michael, 610 Tourneur, Jacques, 72, 76, 603
Sodri, Adriano, 410 Trauberg, Leonid, 217, 254, 255, 273, 364, 687
Sokhona, Sidney, 333 Trotsky, Leon, 102, 375
Sokurov, Aleksandr, 789 Truffaut, François, 14, 15, 33, 50, 77, 79, 80, 127,
Solanas, Fernando, 29, 138, 224, 257, 258, 428, 221, 227, 229, 230, 246, 276, 350-352, 354,
464, 554 423, 432, 450, 475, 485, 611, 613, 615, 647, 657,
Sollers, Philippe, 47, 64, 65, 203, 241, 271-273, 752, 805
287, 320, 334, 427, 439, 463-465, 478-480, 522, Tynyanov, Yuri, 252, 481
681
Sollima, Sergio, 245, 703, 704 Ullmann, Liv, 88
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 62 Ulmann, Georges, 557
Soto, Helvio, 335 Ulmer, Edgar, 214
Spellerberg, James, 153 Uzal, Marcos, 798
816  THE RED YEARS OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA (1968-1973)

Valenti, Jack, 219 Wayne, John, 224, 511

Van der Keuken, Johan, 689 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 789
Van Gogh, Vincent, 738 Welles, Orson, 76, 98, 134, 164-167, 178, 188, 243,
Vancheri, Luc, 571 381, 438, 529, 558, 575, 584, 593, 679, 721, 735,
Varda, Agnès, 789 760, 787, 788
Vecchiali, Paul, 209, 611 Wenders, Wim, 377, 615
Velázquez, Diego, 449, 683, 737, 738 Wiazemsky, Anne, 244
Verne, Jules, 532 Widerberg, Bo, 701
Vernet, Marc, 759 Wiene, Robert, 584
Vertov, Dziga, 21, 90, 154, 169, 170, 248, 273, Wilder, Billy, 213, 326
304, 305, 375, 481, 581, 593, 711, 726, 732, 734, Willemont, Jacques, 89, 224, 404, 474
792 Williams, Christopher, 182
Vidor, King, 367 Williams, Linda, 184
Vigo, Jean, 370, 371 Wollen, Peter, 17, 110, 115, 184, 185, 639
Vigouroux, Robert, 398 Woo, John, 789
Villain, Dominique, 215, 331, 337 Woods, Gregory, 143
Viola, Bill, 789 Wyler, William, 98, 118, 164, 165, 167, 257, 762
Virilio, Paul, 30, 784
Virmaux, Alain, 574 Yamada, Koichi, 559
Visconti, Luchino, 29, 105, 428, 442, 536-539, 682 Yoshishige Yoshida, 29, 244, 258, 428, 485,
Volonte, Gian-Maria, 308 560-563
Youngblood, Gene, 790
Wajda, Andrzej, 613 Yutkevich, Sergei, 375
Wakao, Ayako, 561
Walsh, Martin, 178 Zabunyan, Dork, 571
Walsh, Raoul, 79, 183, 208, 242, 605 Zanuck, Darryl F., 105
Warburg, Aby, 581, 788 Zarifian, Christian, 283
Warhol, Andy, 260 Žižek, Slavoj, 667, 679, 736, 737
Watts, Philip, 457 Zucca, Jerôme, 605
 The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also
had a revolutionary effect on the country’s most
prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis
Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma
embarked on a militant turn that would govern the
journal’s work over the next five years. Inspired by
Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, the “red years”
FILM
CULTURE
of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical
outpouring that was seminal for the formation IN TRANSITION
of film studies and is still of vital relevance for
the contemporary audiovisual landscape.

The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973)

gives an overview of this period in the journal’s
history and its aftermath, combining biographical
accounts of the critics who wrote for Cahiers in
the post-1968 period with theoretical explorations
of their key texts.

Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film

Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and an
editor of the online film journal Senses of Cinema.

“Daniel Fairfax’s book is an impressive work that casts new light on the history of Cahiers du cinéma.
Thanks to exhaustive archival research, Fairfax re-establishes the coherent yet complex trajectory
of the journal. It is an exemplary study: the outcome of true dedication, astute critical sensibility
and a great passion for film.”
FRANCESCO CASETTI , YALE UNIVERSITY

“During its ‘red years,’ the core contributors to Cahiers du cinéma rethought cinema in ways that
have had lasting influence for contemporary film studies. This is an extraordinarily comprehensive
work that not only yields a tremendous amount of information and theoretical nuance, but also
offers new ways of understanding Cahiers in its Marxist phase.”
PHILIP ROSEN , BROWN UNIVERSITY

9 789463 728607

AUP.nl