Emilie Bickerton, author of A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema, and film critic – on the glory days of Cahiers du cinéma and politically engaged film-making for the New Statesman:
The Cahiers story is juicy, to say the least, full of putsches, expulsions, mock-trials, mass exoduses, new blood. … The journal came out of the dark and magical comfort of Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque française, as critics believed cinema had lost its innocence and their task was to pick out the ideologies lurking behind the pictures and interrogate the role of the spectator. …
[Cahiers du Cinema’s] history and archive are glorious, a treasure trove that still has much to teach about cinema’s old masters, and about how to understand, in specifically cinematic terms, what the pictures we see are telling us.
Read the full article here.
Emilie Bickerton works for the news agency Agence France-Presse in Paris. She is on the editorial board of New Left Review and writes regularly on film, literature and anthropology for publications including the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian.
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