L’amour du cinema: 50 ans de la revue Positif

Similar to what I wrote about the Actes Sud description of Positif; the best descriptions of the magazine usually comes from its home base whether it is in its editorials, table of contents, reviews etc. Just like how on the Actes Sud website Positif's different generational writers emphasizes its diversity: “This coexistence of generations creates a perpetual dialogue, lively and sometimes contradictory, which makes Positif a magazine that we can truly say has a "spirit" or "tone" that has evolved with its new writers, rather than replacing one group by the direction of an other.” 

Another good description of Positif comes from the back-jacket of their collection of fifty years of their writing (Gallimard, 2002), which is a more thorough overview than the American edition. The book consists of fifty essays that have concise contextualized introductions that place the review within the director’s career and its place within the magazine's history. There are also great introductory text by Stéphane Goudet, Michel Ciment and Alain Masson. In an unsigned text, though the anthology was put together by Goudet, the back-cover highlights another important aspect of Positif, “how to best express and convey one's love for the seventh art?” - D.D

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Known by cinephiles around the entire world, the magazine  Positif is celebrating its fifty year anniversary. One of the best ways to celebrate this anniversary consists of republishing some of the articles that have marked its history. This anthology tries to best reflect the tastes the aesthetic and political positions of the magazine. Fifty years of film criticism all the way to the present, but all of the texts were contemporary of when these films came out. Without excluding its polemics (like on the New Wave or Rossellini), the priority was accorded to the analyses that were founded on enthusiasm and to the directors that represent the singular indentity of Positif. The ensemble of around fifty films composes a rich and varied panorama of half-a-century of world cinema, all the while trying to answer the fundamental question of all criticism: how to best express and convey one's love for the seventh art?