I'm posting this grad paper on the history of French film criticism, which I wrote for a Foucault-Archaeology grad seminar, to coincide with some recent French videos and podcasts that were put online: 'Le cinéma français : une affaire d'État', Dominique Païni sur Henri Langlois, and Antoine de Baecque's Petite archéologie de la critique du cinéma (I, II, III, IV, V). - D.D.
The Pioneers of French Film
Criticism
What
are the group of statements and positivies that contributed to a film culture
in France that led to the formation of the film magazines Cahiers du Cinema in 1951 and Positif
in 1952? Michel Foucault describes a positivity as the historical and formal a
priori that are comprised of a group
of statements which are in themselves acts of formulation (speech acts)
that have an enunciative function in an associative domain. What concepts are
being discussed in this particular realm and what are its successions?
Foucault, in discussing what should be
asked from an archeological analysis, highlights,
which strata should be isolated from
others? What types of series should be established? What criteria of
periodization should be adopted for each of them? What system of relations
(hierarchy, dominance, stratification, univocal determination, circular
causality) may be established between them? What series of series may be
established? And in what large-scale chronological table may distinct series of
events be determined?[1]
Without
going into pre-cinematic apparatuses (e.g chronophotography, the zoetrope etc.),
the apparatus known as cinema started in France in 1895 with the Lumière
brothers who projected their footage of workers leaving their factory. In the United
States around this same time, to cite some examples, there was Eadweard
Muybridge who took photographs of Leland Stanford’s running horse in close
succession, thus creating the impression of motion, and Thomas Edison, who
would eventually build his own studio The Black Maria, made films to be shown
in Nickelodeons.
It was the Pathé Brothers who would greatly
contribute to the industrializing of French film production and distribution,
nationally and internationally, before World War I. The war stopped production
during this period, and consequently Hollywood would then expand
internationally, reducing the presence of French films. But it is in this
period, shortly before and after WWI, that, according to Tom Gunning, in
France, there was “the first widespread and coherent cinema movement, both in
writing and filmmaking, the first attempt to articulate the nature of cinema
and offer a theory of cinema’s unique aesthetic.”[2]
This was encouraged by how the city of
Paris was the international capital of modern art and it was branching out
towards this new medium. This burgeoning French film culture was nurtured by a
new breed of intellectuals who founded film journals, created alternate forms of
film exhibition in both cine-clubs and specialized theaters, and fostered close
contact with filmmakers, painters and poets. The avant-garde movements, like
Surrealism, would greatly impact experimentation with this new medium (e.g. Un Chien Andalou), which too would offer
alternative viewing experiences and responses as well as an artistic traditions
to contextualize it.
Some important early writers include
Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein, along with Alexandre Arnoux, Yhcam and Jean
Prevost. Jean George Auriol would create Revue
du Cinema, which would later become the model for Cahiers. There were also directors who would write about their
films, cinema, and its possibilities. These directors include Georges Méliès,
Louis Feuillade, Abel Gance, and Jean Cocteau. The director Roger Leenhardt,
who would later become a big influence on the younger Cahiers writers also started out writing criticism. Henri Langlois in
1935 would create the Cinematheque Francaise, one of the first of its kind, but
it was then called the Cercle du Cinema. Jean Painlevé and Georges Sadoul
presided over the Federation Francaise des Cine-Clubs.
To focus solely on one of these writers,
to better illustrate their work and impact, Epstein provides a rich case study.
Tom Gunning writes about Epstein,
It is not simply that Epstein’s
proclamations of the boundless novelty of cinema seem as inspired today as they
did in the twenties; he saw cinema as more than a form of entertainment, a mass
medium, or even a new art form. For Epstein, cinema offered a mechanical brain,
a machine eye – a portal into a new world transformed by technology: a way for
human perception to penetrate into the very life of matter. Epstein’s
conviction that cinema would open onto new domains of knowledge of the world by
going beyond the limits of human consciousness represents more than just the
quaint forgotten utopia prediction of a new medium from its first decade.[3]
As
illustrated by the following Epstein quote, from Bonjour Cinéma, which was one of the first French film magazines,
as far back as 1921 there was already a trend for more poetic and
impressionistic writing. This short verse is beautifully able to articulate
cinema’s position within a bourgeoning luxurious social activity (e.g. Epstein
emphasis on being “well-shaved”) as well as its enrapturing capabilities (e.g.
“I am taking you”). As well Epstein clearly identifies cinema with a specific
Parisian theater.
“I
have been to the Belle Hélène theatre
I
was well-shaved –
Cinema
– I am taking you” – Jean Epstein, Bonjour Cinéma (1921)[4]
Richard
Abel in French Film Theory and Criticism
provides his own archeology of the developments in French film criticism of
this period. Abel breaks up the period from 1907 to1929 into the following categories: 1907-1914, Before
the Canon, 1915-1919, Photogénie and
Company, 1920-1924: Cinégraphie and
the Search for Specificity, 1925-1929: The Great Debates.[5]
The decisive turning point that the film writing of this period is leading up
to is cinema’s technological development of the use of sound recording and its
accompanying changes in film production and distribution. This transition to sound
would be the center of debates from 1929 to 1934 and then there will be an
emphasis on the culture and politics during the Popular Front Era from 1934-39.[6]
Abel’s rigorous Foucaultian methodology
provides a general framework for research on this period. Able writes,
From 1907 to 1914, we encounter something
akin to what Foucault has called the initial threshold of a discursive practice. Two assumptions are relevant
here. First, out of a network or weave of accepted discursive practices and
established institutions, as he might put it, a series of conflicts or
struggles erupts – to clear a space for a thing distinct but not yet
autonomous. Here that network includes, without being exhaustive, several
sciences and technologies, the socioeconomic institutions of an emergent
monopolistic capitalism, the journalistic practices of disseminating
information and advertising, the cultural institutions of popular spectacles,
the practice and criticism of the established arts, as well as then-current
philosophies of aesthetics and related theories of perception and cognition.
Second, just as no one text on the cinema in this period can be said adequately
to mark a point of origin for French film theory and criticism, so too are
nearly all texts constituted as combinatoire,
by more or less synthesized bits and pieces of other discourses.[7]
Following
this bourgeoning period, WWI greatly interrupted the practice and discourse on
cinema. Afterward the war the discussion of cinema in regards to aesthetic,
moral, philosophical and ideological positions will become intensified, especially
around the debates over cinema as either being a mass entertainment or a new
art form. Abel writes about the various positions people engaged with cinema as,
According to how they take up and answer
a number of crucial questions – concerning the raw material of cinema, the
possible forms of films and their methods of realization, and the value or
function of cinema – these half-dozen positions establish a range of both
actual and potential, narrative and non-narrative film practices.[8]
The
majority of the earliest specialized film journals, in its invention and
pioneering period, were closely associated with the major French film companies
of the time. Of the many of them the “most important” of these, according to
Abel, was Ciné-Journal by Georges
Dureau as it worked as an intermediary, between production, distribution,
exhibitors and an audience. Many of the other magazines to emerge in this
period include Filma, Le Courrier cinematographique, Cinema-Revue, Le Cinema, L’Echo du Cinema
and Le Film. By 1913, the specialized
film journals had become numerous enough to form their own professional
organization, the Association professionnelle de la press cinematographique,
and Cinema-Revue was distributing one
of the earliest annuals devoted exclusively to the cinema. There were also
books and manuals on film, mostly practical books directed to workmen (e.g. “How
to work a projector” etc.). A second, larger arena encompassed the daily
newspapers in Paris, whose interest in the cinema, whether as popular spectacle
or as a new art form, quickly picked up on what the specialized film journals
were doing. This public forum is to be exclusively Parisian. Abel describes
this writing, “These essays, as well as others, suggest that a number of
discourse modes, each associated with a set of established institutions and
practices, were competing for dominance within the early French writings on the
cinema and that the cinema-as-art discourse was only marginally significant, at
least at this point.”[9]
The movie theater was a new social space
that was breaking traditional class boundaries. As Miriam Hansen has argued, in
regards to early cinema spectatorship in relation to public life, “one of the
reasons why this question may have proved so troubling was that the cinema
constituted a new social space that threatened to blur or even undermine the
conventional boundaries between public and private, upper classes and lower
classes, adults and children, even male and female.”[10]
The medium was also multi-faceted in its use and it could be applied to different
sectors like the educational, pedagogical, religious, industrial, business, and
governmental ones. There were also questions of power and politics that were
called into question by this apparatus especially in terms of the ideologies of
films and potential propaganda effects. Censorship was also another important
topic. The movie theaters were in close partnership with the distributors, the
cine-clubs had their own political affiliations, and communist rallies also
screened political and agitprop films. There was a need for a space for film to
be received on its own terms. This brings us to the start of Cahiers and Positif.
Post-WWII French Film
Criticism
As
many French film critics have discussed, from Jean Douchet to Antoine de
Baecque to Serge Daney, this post-WWII period was a unique social phenomenon in
world history. Daney in particular would emphasize the routine experiences of
this time as a social phenomenon, which would later end with the rise of the
television and its accompanying alienation. Who were these individuals going
from cinema to cinema? What is the name for this kind of person? What exactly
is this scopohilia, which Freud building upon the Greeks described as “the love
of looking”? What causes it and what are its effects?
There was a new culture being born.
Douchet talks about how the early young Cahiers
writers, like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques
Rivette and Claude Chabrol; would escape the oppressing realities of the Occupation
by watching films as a form of protest. After the war, these cinephiles would
join groups and identify with certain directors, writers, and programmers. There
was an increase in screenings around Paris in this period and the same group of
people would spend their time going from one screening to the other where they
discovered the history of cinema. The social routine of going to see films led
to passionate post-screening discussions. There were friendly discussions and
more polemical debates that were happening during this period. Within the
context of France’s rich intellectual history there were different camps that
the audience fell under and this impacted their responses.
The Cahiers
discourse was building upon the intellectual debates of the period that
included engaging with the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux who were
important philosophers of the time. There were many of Sartre’s ideas that were
appropriated like that of existential philosophy and a firm insistence on
taking a position and remaining loyal to it, and of the ontology of the arts
(c.f. Bazin’s The Ontology of the
Photographic Image). These would remain formative influences for the
writers at Cahiers.[11]
One of the unique traits that
characterized the early Cahiers
writers was their polemical spirit and combative appreciation of American
Hollywood films. This energy was inseparable from a generational gap with older
cinephiles that fetishized silent cinema or more socially engaged works that
disregarded film form. There were arguments over Hollywood and its ideology and
production, especially amongst the communist, but also by the nationalist and
French technicians, especially after Léon Blum in 1946 signed a
political-economic accord to allow the infiltration of American films into the
French market, solely leaving its own production to a thirty percent share of
the market.
There is also a social history unrolling.
In a later series at Positif entitled
“le cinéma et nous” many first
generation Positif critics wrote about,
among other things, their experiences from their youth during this Post-WWII
era. The series was initiated in a convivial spirit to get some of the
magazines writer’s to answer two questions: What is the value for you of seeing
a good movie? What exactly do you expect to take in from seeking out films? One
of its goals was to elaborate on what animated the individual writers and to
better articulate the spirit of the magazine.
Robert Benayoun writes, “What do I expect
from cinema? Not that this answer is exhaustive, but I want it to enlighten,
for it to bring forth something new in myself. It's vital that its imagery be
both stimulant and exalting.” Emmanuel Carrère writes, “I don’t know any better
words to describe the cinema then those by Cocteau, who was amazed by its power
to show, “death at work.” Paul-Louis
Thirard writes, “The cinema brought forward my first political conscience. For
many years, I saw no contradiction between my taste for engaged, militant
films, [...] where eroticism and revolution were on the same plane.” Françoise
Audé describes her youth at ciné-clubs, “Seeing a film at a film-club, was for
me, the occasion of a nocturnal outing and an encounter with people. It was
also now indistinguishable of a prolonged discussion where I started to feel
the political tensions between the attendants. The cinema then is thus
associated in my emotional memory to the euphoria of the Liberation –
everything is possible – and to the idea of liberty and to the idea of
engagement.” And Michel Sineux writes, “Like for many people of my generation,
I had the chance to discover cinema in its temples – caves unlike anything
you’ve ever seen, between a rococo theater and a musical (Le Parisiana!) – and
not in these multiplex, that are all over the place today and that are reducing
the experience to a collective televisual spectacle.”[12]
The seeds of cinematic modernism were
also being sown in this period. András Bálint Kovács in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980 elaborates on
the genealogy of forms that contributed to cinema’s modernist evolution. There
was a clear contrast between classic films and modernist ones. De Beacque
describes how Rear Window and Monika are modern in terms of employing
a surrogate viewer character into the films themselves that interrogates the
role of the spectator.[13]
The cinema has evolved over the century, experiencing the terrors of the
Holocaust, and the films were now ready to bear witness. There was an original
naivety that had been lost. There were also new film festivals taking place
where films from all over the world were being discovered along with new film
movements from these cinematically unexplored territories. This was the moment
when film was becoming an art form, more so than before, and criticism would be
its mediator.[14]
In this period, there was a shift in
criticism from a focus on art criticism, on say a painting, with great texts by
Denis Diderot and Charles Baudelaire, or literary criticism, by Stéphane Mallarmé
and Roland Barthes, towards the cinematic apparatus, the Seventh art form,
which was viewed as synthesizing all of the previous ones. After the six
previous art forms, as Hegel describes them in Lectures on Aesthetics, which includes architecture, sculpture,
painting, dance, music, and poetry; then came cinema and it required a new form
of analysis.[15]
As Godard writes about the original Cahiers
project, “We have won by getting people to admit the principle that a film by
Hitchcock, for example, is as important as a book by Aragon or Chateaubriand.
The auteurs of films, because of us, have definitively entered the History of
art.”[16]
So then there was a new set of questions
that needed to be asked: how to talk and write about the cinema? What kind of
writing is it? How should it look like? What problem faced the film writer?
There is then also its slow introduction into universities. What departments
have more validity and authority over the emergence of cinema studies? Is film
criticism just rehashing its plot? A description of its images? These questions
needed to be thought about and answered. What was needed was a poetic of a critique
that was able to bring a passion to the analysis of visual detail, with a taste
for enumeration. [17]
Though it wasn’t until the
cinematographic magazine that cinema found its greatest ally and cinema writing
found its most suitable outlet. There would be house writers arguing for
certain directors and aesthetics. Its monthly output created a sense of urgency.
Its legacy would become a trace of cinema’s history. This is compared to ephemeral
pieces of journalism that would be read and then discarded, and books that take
longer to publish and reflect solely one individual’s perspective.
Cahiers du Cinema and
Positif
Jim
Hillier on this period at Cahiers
writes, “It is still a pretty widespread, though rather vague, idea that film
criticism and theory as we know it today – and even film-making too – owe
almost everything to French film criticism in the period since 1945, and
particularly to the achievements of the journal Cahiers du Cinema, founded in 1951.”[18]
As the archeology of this period illustrate, there were many important
contributions leading up to the creation of these two magazines. The aesthetic
positions at Cahiers and Positif were also already formed before
their first issues. The magazines would provide a permanent home for their
debates. They would evolve over time. Especially Cahiers as it was riddled with many internal contradictions that
led to changing chief editors, writers and publishers. Positif has always been more consistent.
The debates in this period centered more
over certain films. Some of the most stimulating writing arose within these
debates. To illustrate this with one example there is the famous debates over
the reception of Citizen Kane between
Bazin and Sartre. De Baecque writes about it as being “the first great critical
debate of the postwar period.” De Baecque in his essay Bazin in Combat writes,
First, Sartre attacks Citizen Kane, for fairly bad reasons and
with fairly bad arguments. Since it is an American film, the Communist Party
falls in behind him in the nascent cold war atmosphere. It is is Bazin who
retaliates, in issue 16 of Temps Modernes,
early 1947. Fully cognizant of the stakes at hand, he adamantly establishes the
artistic and cinematic nature of Citizen
Kane by comparing the film to many major benchmarks of artistic thought,
whereas Sartre had denigrated the film as a substitute for a novel, an ersatz
of outdated literature. Bazin deploys two strategies. First, he cites
prestigious literary references, like Joyce and Dos Passos, to situate Welles’
film prominently within the history of American literary forms, forms that
Sartre appreciated so much himself. Thus Bazin skillfully steps into his
opponent’s terrain the better to counter him. Second, he demonstrates the
film’s style to be more than mere free play; neither formalist nor aesthetic;
it corresponds to the auteur’s cinematic, even philosophical project.[19]
The
two magazine’s founders can help distinguish the differences between the magazines.
The spiritual father of Cahiers Bazin
became a martyr figure and his most famous texts were published together in What Is Cinema?, which would become a
standard academic text. All the while Positif's
founder, Bernard Chardère, has almost been totally ignored, even though he has
been immensely prolific. The notoriety of the former suggests the popularity of
grand all-encompassing statements compared to the latter whose more modest aim was
that of spectatorship and the pleasure of analysis. Another major difference
between Bazin and Chardère are their geographic and religious views: Chardère's
Lyonais Jansenism proposes an open humanism while Bazin's Parisien Catholicism
is more dogmatic. Chardère discussing his approach writes, "We will say
positive things about the films. Talk about its good qualities. It's humanity
[…] We have to save the images, these old films. It's not easy, were a
minority."[20]
The layout organization of both magazines
is also important. At Cahiers there
was a rough and cramp mise en page
that was more similar to alternative newspapers. While at Positif since they had fewer essays there was a more open concept
and it looked closer to a literary journal with a strong emphasis on creative
graphic design. Both magazines were interested in writing about contemporary
films, to survey director’s entire body of work, and review the growing field
of film literature.
Michel Ciment, the current head of Positif, writes about the origins of the
magazine in his essay For Your Pleasure:
A Brief Overview of Fifty Years of Positif,
What made Positif distinctive in the 1950s, which were heavily influenced by
the Left. Particularly in the cultural area through the domination of the
Communist party and its fellow travelers, was its ability to merge a love of
cinema in all its forms (particularly Hollywood movies) far from Stalinist
puritanism, and at the same time, become actively involved in political
battles. Anyone who did not live through the period would find it difficult to
imagine how deep and intense were the political differences elicited by the
colonial wars, the still-powerful influence of the Church and its moral order,
and the role played by censorship. Although one might criticize the magazine
for having missed out on important filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini and
Alfred Hitchcock, the editors at the time could well reply as Jean-Paul Sartre
might in another context, but with better reasons than he had: “We were wrong,
but we were right to be wrong.” For defenses of Rossellini and Hitchcock were
to be found elsewhere, in the name of “grace” or other religious values, with
an emphasis on “miracles” or “confessions.” At the time, it appeared to be more
important to defend other values.[21]
Another
one of Positif’s unique quality is
its closeness with the Surrealist movement. Many of its original writers were part
of André Breton’s group of friends and their unique approach to film analysis
emphasized the fantastic as they opened up the images of the screen towards their
own creativity as spectators. Even though the Positif writers are less known today because they did not become famous
filmmakers, there were still some that did go on to make films like Benayoun, Chardère,
Kyrou and others would also go on to make documentaries. There were also many
of their writers that were also novelist and poets like Carrère, Vitoux,
Rambaud, Kral.
Chardère was twenty when he created Positif and its other writers included
Roger Tailleur, Guy Jacob, Paul Lauis Thirard, Ado Kyrou, Marcel Oms, Raymond
Borde, along with other guest writers. From Positif’s
first review of Claude Autant-Lara’s L’Auberge
Rouge, a film lumped into Truffaut’s attack on the tradition of quality
since it was written by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, in their first issue,
they were already reacting to the intellectual bullying of the Parisian
magazine. And since then its more modest and humble history, which is still
going strong, could be seen as being a response to Cahiers’ more eccentric interpretations.
Conclusion
In
conclusion, the post-WWII period in France reflected a wide net of ideas
regarding politics, morality, social space and aesthetics. The cinema and the
debates around it played a significant role that led to the birth of a new film
culture, which was not at all singular but varied, and the creation of Cahiers and Positif are solely one artifact reflecting these tensions and their
longevity is a testament to the project’s original value. There were many small
and large histories that intersected at this time, which included engaging with
the major films and filmmakers, celebrity thinkers, and major events. Whether
one camp is right or wrong, what is impressive about this project is to
consider it within the emergence of a conscious cinephilia that was at the time
an essential characteristic of France in the Fifties. This phenomenon was an
important part of the post-WWII intellectual life.
[1] Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith.
Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2002.
[2] Gunning, Tom. “Preface.” In Keller,
Sarah and Jason N. Paul, ed. Jean
Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2012.
[3] Gunning. Ibid.
[4] Keller, Sarah and Jason N. Paul.
[5] Abel, Richard, ed. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology – 1907-1939 –
Volume I: 1907-1929. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
[6] Abel, Richard, ed. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology – 1907-1939 –
Volume II: 1929-1939. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
[7] Abel.
[8] Abel.
[9] Abel.
[10] Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
[11] De Baecque, Antoine. Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Histoire d’une revue – Tome I: À l’assaut du
cinema. Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinéma, 1991.
[12] Goudet, Stéphane, ed. L’amour du cinéma: 50 ans de la revue
Positif. Saint-Amand: Editions Gallimard, 2002.
[13] De Baecque, Antoine. La Cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944-1968.
Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2003.
[14] Kovács, András Bálint. Kovács, András
Bálint. Screening Modernism: European Art
Cinema, 1950-1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
[15] Kovács, András Bálint. Ibid.
[16] De Baecque.
[17] Goudet.
[18] Hillier, Jim, ed. Cahiers du Cinéma – The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985
[19] Andrew, Dudley and Hervé
Joubert-Laurencin ed. Opening Bazin:
Postwar Film Theory & Its Afterlife. New York: Oxford University Press,
2011.
[20] Goudet.
[21] Ciment, Michel and Laurence Kardish, ed. Positif 50 Years: Selections from the French
Film Journal. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
