‘A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma’ by Emilie Bickerton

Do revolutionary minds ultimately embrace safer, conventional wisdom? That’s what Emilie Bickerton argues in her incisive book, “A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma.” Cahiers du Cinéma -- the venerable journal of world cinema criticism / activism -- has done just that. It’s as if Entertainment Weekly had started as a serious chronicle of cinematic inquiry.

Founded in 1951 in Paris, Cahiers rallied for a crucial re-evaluation of standards of taste in the world of French film criticism. “In” were films that celebrated France and the French experience. “Out” were Orson Welles, film noir and Hitchcock -- somewhat surprising to learn considering that these are now so universally loved. The early critics followed a new creative progression -- as Jacques Rivette put it, “The only true criticism of a film is another film” -- and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut had by the late 1950s become filmmakers themselves.

Cahiers’ yellow covers graced increasing numbers of French newsstands as well as film schools abroad. Critical concerns were marked by changes in editorial focus led by benevolent father-figure André Bazin and the posterity-seeking Eric Rohmer. Editor Rivette’s vision of cinema as a dynamically political option inspired his leading the coup that ousted Rohmer and Cahiers’ shift from the purely aesthetic to almost solely political.

Godard left in 1969; Truffaut removed his name from the masthead a year later, citing the shift from the aesthetic to the starkly political. Although the cachet remained, Cahiers -- “a dead sun,” as Bickerton poetically eulogizes it -- became increasingly pedantic and muddled. The passion for the mise-en-scène had withered while the passion for the political scene flowered.

Bickerton deftly details how Cahiers critics waited until 1962 to write about the New Wave, which by then had crested and crashed. Writers were increasingly reduced to defining a certain cinematic style, hidebound to differentiate its various forms while rarely applauding them on the level of the movie lover. Cinema became an object to be broken down and analyzed in one academic exercise after another. The real, tangible egalitarianism spawned by the New Wave was scarcely mentioned in Cahiers, if at all. In a final bid at relevance that resembled journalistic zombification, Godard returned briefly in 1972, amid the rise of Maoist sentiment that heralded departures of members of the long-standing editorial board. As subscribers continued to jump ship through the 1980s, Cahiers changed hands from press syndicate Le Monde in 1998 to art-book publishers Phaidon last year.

“In the eighties,” Bickerton writes, “Cahiers lost its belief in . . . the capacity of the public to engage in serious ideas about cinema. It traded this in for a money-making model, and in the same motion gave up its aspiration to make history.”

The author masterfully unveils the power and the joy that rose up from the pages during the formative years of Cahiers. One need only visit Cahiers online to witness today its near-total forsaking the avant-garde for the vox populi. It’s the naive reader who will fail to notice the deeply venomous irony in an ad campaign in Cahiers that presents aerobic leftist Jane Fonda as the current face of L’Oréal Cosmetics. There’s a world of difference between Godard’s scathing 1972 documentary “Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still” and reading letters about Jane, with no investigation about a shill.

Cotner is a contributing writer to LA Weekly.