What do you think?
Rate this book
Cahiers du Cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave
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 rocked the world of film criticism with their provocative views on 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 scene 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 some 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 for the most part never appeared in English until now. Jim Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whole. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film.
The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts rocked the world of film criticism with their provocative views on 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 scene 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 some 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 for the most part never appeared in English until now. Jim Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whole. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film.
328 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 1985
26 people are currently reading
606 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 16, 2020
این کتابْ مهمترین مقالههای کایهدو را در بر نگرفته است. بلکه مترجمِ انگلیسی مقالاتی را که کمتر در دنیای انگلیسیزبان بهشان توجه شده است، برگزیده است. بنابراین انتخاب کتاب برای ترجمه به فارسی بنظر چندان منطقی نمیآید، با توجه به نبود کتابی که ترجمهی مقالات اساسیتر کایهدو باشد (شاید بجز کتاب سینما چیستِ بازن). اما علاوه بر آن، بدلیل خارج شدن مطالب کتاب از بافتار تاریخی، روح بسیاری از آنها از بین رفته است و نامفهوماند.
از ترجمهی نهچندان دلپسند هم نگذریم. هرچند که نشر بان در این ویراست جدید (چاپ نخست در نشر آگه)، از زهره اکسیری و نسرین اسدی استفاده کرده، اما مشکلات هنوز پابرجا هستند.
اما سوای همهی اینها، نویسندگان کایه بیش از آنکه به تحلیل فنی و موشکافانه بپردازند، با فیلمها احساسی برخورد میکنند و با نثری شورانگیز؛ که البته همین واکنشهای غیر عمیقِ این جوانانِ موج نویی در فضای نقد آن زمان، بدیع بودند - مثل توجه به روسلینی و ری.
بخش چهارم کتاب، تحت عنوان بحث و جدل، برایم جالبتر بود. مثلا اینکه برخلاف نظر چپهای استالینیست، فیلمهای آمریکایی خیلی بهتر تضاد منافع طبقاتی را نشان میدهند و رئالیسم انقلابی عبارتی پارادوکسیکال است.
از ترجمهی نهچندان دلپسند هم نگذریم. هرچند که نشر بان در این ویراست جدید (چاپ نخست در نشر آگه)، از زهره اکسیری و نسرین اسدی استفاده کرده، اما مشکلات هنوز پابرجا هستند.
اما سوای همهی اینها، نویسندگان کایه بیش از آنکه به تحلیل فنی و موشکافانه بپردازند، با فیلمها احساسی برخورد میکنند و با نثری شورانگیز؛ که البته همین واکنشهای غیر عمیقِ این جوانانِ موج نویی در فضای نقد آن زمان، بدیع بودند - مثل توجه به روسلینی و ری.
بخش چهارم کتاب، تحت عنوان بحث و جدل، برایم جالبتر بود. مثلا اینکه برخلاف نظر چپهای استالینیست، فیلمهای آمریکایی خیلی بهتر تضاد منافع طبقاتی را نشان میدهند و رئالیسم انقلابی عبارتی پارادوکسیکال است.
September 29, 2015
سینما یعنی نیکلاس ری...
خواندن این کتاب بر دوستداران سینمای اروپا امری است واجب.
هزاران صفحه کایه دوسینما آنقدر غنی است که می توان دست کم پنج کتاب دیگر مثل این را از آن استخراج کرد.
علاوه بر مقالاتی که مستقیما از کایه ترجمه شده اند، بخش هایی هم در کتاب وجود دارد که توسط جیم هیلی یر نوشته شده و شرح می دهد آنچه را که در دهه ۱۹۵۰ بر سر هیئت تحریریه ی این نشریه و عقایدشان آمده...
خواندن این کتاب بر دوستداران سینمای اروپا امری است واجب.
هزاران صفحه کایه دوسینما آنقدر غنی است که می توان دست کم پنج کتاب دیگر مثل این را از آن استخراج کرد.
علاوه بر مقالاتی که مستقیما از کایه ترجمه شده اند، بخش هایی هم در کتاب وجود دارد که توسط جیم هیلی یر نوشته شده و شرح می دهد آنچه را که در دهه ۱۹۵۰ بر سر هیئت تحریریه ی این نشریه و عقایدشان آمده...
March 29, 2022
I don't think that any director can assert that his style is the long shot, the medium shot or the closeup, unless he has the mind of a civil servant. One thing is certain, time and space play no role at all in the construction of a film, the cinema is unaware of them; a scene can carry you into another world, another age. One simply tries to capture, in flight, moments of truth, as much by thought as by intuition, instinct, or . . . too rarely . . . by flashes of inspiration. And those moments of truth can be either comic or tragic if one is dealing with kings great enough to fall. That is how a film is made, the rest is simply a question of looking at life and people. - Nicholas Ray
What is mise en scène? My apologies for asking such a hazardous question with neither preparation nor preamble, particularly when I have no intention of answering it. Only, should this question not always inform our deliberations?” - Jacques Rivette
What is cinema, if not the play of actor and actress, of hero and set, of word and face, of hand and object? - Jacques Rivette
A shortage of themes, says the honest man! As if themes were not what auteurs make of them! - Claude Chabrol
Such, it seems to me, are the possibilities and the dangers of phenomenological realism in the area of religious expression. But the bigger danger would certainly be to want to take greater care of God's interests than He does himself by trying to direct events by force and constrain the audience to read in them a meaning which is only accessible to those who discover it freely. - Amédée Ayfre
Such freedom, absolute, inordinate whose extreme license never involves the sacrifice of inner rigour, is freedom won; or better yet, earned. - Jacques Rivette
All art may perhaps reach fruition only through the transitory destruction of its means, and the cinema is never more great than in certain moments that transcend and abruptly suspend the drama… - Jacques Rivette
Here is our cinema, those of us who in our turn are preparing to make films (did I teil you, it may be soon); as a start I have already suggested something that intrigues you: is there to be a Rossellini school? and what will its dogmas be? 1 don't know if there is a school, but I do know there should be: first, to come to an understanding about the meaning of the word 'realism', which is not some rather simple scriptwriting technique, nor yet a style of mise en scène, but a state of mind: that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points (judge your De Sicas, Lattuadas and Viscontis by this yardstick). Second point: a fig for the sceptics, the rational, the judicious; irony and sarcasm have had their day; now it is time to love the cinema so much that one has little taste left for what presently passes by that name, and wants to impose a more exacting image of it. As you see, this hardly comprises a programme, but it may be enough to give you the heart to begin. - Jacques Rivette
Is it the task of the cinema to bring into art a notion whose great riches the whole of human genius had not yet known how to uncover: the notion of the miracle? - Eric Rohmer
As far as I am concerned it is primarily a moral position which gives a perspective on the world. It then becomes an aesthetic position, but its basis is moral. - Roberto Rossellini
I always try to be impassive. I find that whatever is astonishing, unusual and moving in men, it is precisely that great actions and great deeds come about in the same way, with the same resonance as normal everyday occurrences. I try to relate both with the same humility: there is a source of dramatic interest in that. - Roberto Rossellini
The only advantage of film is that you can include ten different things at the same time in one frame. You don't have to be analytical on film - while at the same time you are. - Roberto Rossellini
Most of all I want to get them made. Starting off with the research and the documentation, and then going on to the dramatic themes, but in order to represent things as they are, to remain on the terrain of honesty. Yes, the cinema has to teach men to know, and to recognize, one another, instead of continuing to teil the same old story. It's all variations on the same theme. Everything there is to know about robbery we know. We know everything there is to know about hold-ups. Everything there is to know about sex: not as it really is, of course, but we do know all its surrounding areas. But what does death mean now? What does life mean? What does pain mean? Everything has lost its real meaning. I repeat, we need to try and see things again as they are, not in some plastic form, but in real substance. There is no doubt that that's the solution. Then, perhaps, we shall be able to begin to have a sense of direction. -Roberto Rossellini
In cinema as elsewhere, the antinomy between the real and the dream, between reality and truth, is the inexhaustible source of all artistic creation. - Jean Domarchi
To a certain extent at least, the auteur is a subject to himself; whatever the scenario, he always tells the same story, or, in case the word 'story' is confusing, let's say he has the same attitude and passes the same moral judgments on the action and on the characters. Jacques Rivette has said that an auteur is someone who speaks in the first person. It's a good definition; let's adopt it. - Andre Bazin
I feel there are two symmetrical heresies, which are (a) objectively applying to a film a critical all-purpose yardstick, and (b) considering it sufficiënt simply to state one's pleasure or disgust. The first denies the role of taste, the second presupposes the superiority of the critic's taste over that of the author. Coldness . . . or presumption! - Andre Bazin
To conclude: the politique des auteurs seems to me to hold and defend an essential critical truth that the cinema needs more than the other arts, precisely because an act of true artistic creation is more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere. But its exclusive practice leads to another danger: the negation of the film to the benefit of praise of its auteur. I have tried to show why mediocre auteurs can, by accident, make admirable films, and how, conversely, a genius can fall victim to an equally accidental sterility. I feel that this useful and fruitful approach, quite apart from its polemical value, should be complemented by other approaches to the cinematic phenomenon which will restore to a film its quality as a work of art. This does not mean one has to deny the role of the auteur, but simply give him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept. Auteur, yes, but what of? - Andre Bazin
How does one talk about Mizoguchi without falling into a doublé trap: the jargon of the specialist or that of the humanist? - Jacques Rivette
The difference between the cinema and anything else - including the novel - is, primarily, the impossibility of telling a lie, and secondly the absolute certainty, shared by the spectator and the author alike, that on the screen everything will be resolved with time. If the director - the filmmaker - actually intervenes anywhere in the making of the film it is essentially here. He runs a course between two realities: the image through which he observes the world and the duration within which the resolution comes. - Alexandre Astruc
Mise en scène isn't necessarily the will to give a new meaning to the world, but nine times out of ten it is built on the secret certainty of holding some fragment of truth, first about man, and then about the work of art - indissolubly linked. - Alexandre Astruc
The world of an artist is not the one that conditions him, but the one which he needs in order to create and to transform perpetually into something that will obsess him even more than that by which he is obsessed.
The obsession of the artist is artistic creation. - Alexandre Astruc
Art lives not necessarily in what is new, but in what is discovered; that is what unbends the most stubborn and emboldens the most timid. - Jacques Rivette
The essence of art is to respect, not destroy: but the glass through which it invites us to look is constantly altered. - Eric Rohmer
What is mise en scène? My apologies for asking such a hazardous question with neither preparation nor preamble, particularly when I have no intention of answering it. Only, should this question not always inform our deliberations?” - Jacques Rivette
What is cinema, if not the play of actor and actress, of hero and set, of word and face, of hand and object? - Jacques Rivette
A shortage of themes, says the honest man! As if themes were not what auteurs make of them! - Claude Chabrol
Such, it seems to me, are the possibilities and the dangers of phenomenological realism in the area of religious expression. But the bigger danger would certainly be to want to take greater care of God's interests than He does himself by trying to direct events by force and constrain the audience to read in them a meaning which is only accessible to those who discover it freely. - Amédée Ayfre
Such freedom, absolute, inordinate whose extreme license never involves the sacrifice of inner rigour, is freedom won; or better yet, earned. - Jacques Rivette
All art may perhaps reach fruition only through the transitory destruction of its means, and the cinema is never more great than in certain moments that transcend and abruptly suspend the drama… - Jacques Rivette
Here is our cinema, those of us who in our turn are preparing to make films (did I teil you, it may be soon); as a start I have already suggested something that intrigues you: is there to be a Rossellini school? and what will its dogmas be? 1 don't know if there is a school, but I do know there should be: first, to come to an understanding about the meaning of the word 'realism', which is not some rather simple scriptwriting technique, nor yet a style of mise en scène, but a state of mind: that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points (judge your De Sicas, Lattuadas and Viscontis by this yardstick). Second point: a fig for the sceptics, the rational, the judicious; irony and sarcasm have had their day; now it is time to love the cinema so much that one has little taste left for what presently passes by that name, and wants to impose a more exacting image of it. As you see, this hardly comprises a programme, but it may be enough to give you the heart to begin. - Jacques Rivette
Is it the task of the cinema to bring into art a notion whose great riches the whole of human genius had not yet known how to uncover: the notion of the miracle? - Eric Rohmer
As far as I am concerned it is primarily a moral position which gives a perspective on the world. It then becomes an aesthetic position, but its basis is moral. - Roberto Rossellini
I always try to be impassive. I find that whatever is astonishing, unusual and moving in men, it is precisely that great actions and great deeds come about in the same way, with the same resonance as normal everyday occurrences. I try to relate both with the same humility: there is a source of dramatic interest in that. - Roberto Rossellini
The only advantage of film is that you can include ten different things at the same time in one frame. You don't have to be analytical on film - while at the same time you are. - Roberto Rossellini
Most of all I want to get them made. Starting off with the research and the documentation, and then going on to the dramatic themes, but in order to represent things as they are, to remain on the terrain of honesty. Yes, the cinema has to teach men to know, and to recognize, one another, instead of continuing to teil the same old story. It's all variations on the same theme. Everything there is to know about robbery we know. We know everything there is to know about hold-ups. Everything there is to know about sex: not as it really is, of course, but we do know all its surrounding areas. But what does death mean now? What does life mean? What does pain mean? Everything has lost its real meaning. I repeat, we need to try and see things again as they are, not in some plastic form, but in real substance. There is no doubt that that's the solution. Then, perhaps, we shall be able to begin to have a sense of direction. -Roberto Rossellini
In cinema as elsewhere, the antinomy between the real and the dream, between reality and truth, is the inexhaustible source of all artistic creation. - Jean Domarchi
To a certain extent at least, the auteur is a subject to himself; whatever the scenario, he always tells the same story, or, in case the word 'story' is confusing, let's say he has the same attitude and passes the same moral judgments on the action and on the characters. Jacques Rivette has said that an auteur is someone who speaks in the first person. It's a good definition; let's adopt it. - Andre Bazin
I feel there are two symmetrical heresies, which are (a) objectively applying to a film a critical all-purpose yardstick, and (b) considering it sufficiënt simply to state one's pleasure or disgust. The first denies the role of taste, the second presupposes the superiority of the critic's taste over that of the author. Coldness . . . or presumption! - Andre Bazin
To conclude: the politique des auteurs seems to me to hold and defend an essential critical truth that the cinema needs more than the other arts, precisely because an act of true artistic creation is more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere. But its exclusive practice leads to another danger: the negation of the film to the benefit of praise of its auteur. I have tried to show why mediocre auteurs can, by accident, make admirable films, and how, conversely, a genius can fall victim to an equally accidental sterility. I feel that this useful and fruitful approach, quite apart from its polemical value, should be complemented by other approaches to the cinematic phenomenon which will restore to a film its quality as a work of art. This does not mean one has to deny the role of the auteur, but simply give him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept. Auteur, yes, but what of? - Andre Bazin
How does one talk about Mizoguchi without falling into a doublé trap: the jargon of the specialist or that of the humanist? - Jacques Rivette
The difference between the cinema and anything else - including the novel - is, primarily, the impossibility of telling a lie, and secondly the absolute certainty, shared by the spectator and the author alike, that on the screen everything will be resolved with time. If the director - the filmmaker - actually intervenes anywhere in the making of the film it is essentially here. He runs a course between two realities: the image through which he observes the world and the duration within which the resolution comes. - Alexandre Astruc
Mise en scène isn't necessarily the will to give a new meaning to the world, but nine times out of ten it is built on the secret certainty of holding some fragment of truth, first about man, and then about the work of art - indissolubly linked. - Alexandre Astruc
The world of an artist is not the one that conditions him, but the one which he needs in order to create and to transform perpetually into something that will obsess him even more than that by which he is obsessed.
The obsession of the artist is artistic creation. - Alexandre Astruc
Art lives not necessarily in what is new, but in what is discovered; that is what unbends the most stubborn and emboldens the most timid. - Jacques Rivette
The essence of art is to respect, not destroy: but the glass through which it invites us to look is constantly altered. - Eric Rohmer
October 8, 2008
Cahiers Du Cinema most far and away the most important film magazine during the 50's and 60's. It contained the film theories of Bazin, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and all the other pioneers who forged the New Wave. This collection contains excellent and extensive intellectual essays on Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Mann, Hitchcock, and many other directors who made the 50's such an extraordinary and rich period of cinematic creativity. Jacques Rivette has a magnificent essay on the dimensions of cinemascope, and Godard has such an enthusiastic piece on Nicholas Ray, it probably contributed to his belated stardom as an auteur.
This is an important collection for any serious film student.
This is an important collection for any serious film student.
June 8, 2019
یکی از بدترین ترجمه ها و بدترین ویرایش هایی که تا بحال در عمرم دیدم/خوندم.
Read
July 19, 2025Läste inte allt (det är inte den typen av bok). Det jag läste var mestadels pretentiöst strunt och onödigt krångligt, men det var ju ändå det jag var ute efter. Jag tycker speciellt om Godards recension där han spenderar halva recensionen på att fantisera om vilka jobb regissörer skulle ha om filmer inte fanns.
July 16, 2021
This book has wonderful insights and information, but right now is just so heavy in content and academic phrasing that it was difficult to get through. I’m definitely picking it up again someday though to get more out of it!
July 11, 2022
what incredible passion these people bring towards the art form.
July 9, 2024
Very well put together book. Provides a nice glimpse into the ideas culminating in the French New Wave. The writing itself is insufferable, though.
September 29, 2014
Read selections
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews