Books in the Harvard Film Studies series

Providing an understanding of the important changes that took place in cinema and film criticism in the 1960s and beyond, this book looks at the French film journal "Cahiers du Cinema" and its contribution to the new directions in film-making and film criticism which began in the 1960s.

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship.

"Cahiers du Cinema" is the most prestigious and influential film journal ever published. An anthology devoted entirely to its writings, in English translation, is long overdue. The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts racked the world of film criticism with their provocative views an international cinema--American, Italian, and French in particular. They challenged long-established Anglo-Saxon attitudes by championing American popular movies, addressing genres such as the Western and the thriller and the aesthetics of technological developments like CinemaScope, emphasizing "mise en scé ne" as much as thematic content, and assessing the work of individual filmmakers such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray in terms of a new theory of the director as author, "auteur," a revolutionary concept at the time. Italian film, especially the work of Rossellini, prompted sharp debates about realism that helped shift the focus of critical discussion from content toward style. The critiques of French cinema have special interest because many of the journal's major contributors and theorists Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol were to become same of France's most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave. Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, the selections have far the most part never appeared in English until now. Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whale. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixeddoctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film.