31ª Mostra Internacional de Cinema

Jornal da Mostra

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FRENCH CINEMA ICON IS FOR SALE

The news was already known in the French editorial backstage since April 2008, but it was officially announced during the 61st Cannes Festival: the magazine CAHIERS DU CINEMA, nowadays published by the newspaper LE MONDE, is for sale. The announcement came in the editorial “Travaux Ouverts” (Open Works), signed by Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean-Michel Frodon. It was the editorial of the no. 634 edition, from May 2008, of CAHIERS DU CINEMA. The ones signing the editorial are, respectively, the chief editor and the director of the magazine.

Danger surrounds this French cinema icon, which had some critics who became famous filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and many other young film enthusiasts. Thanks to them the “author’s policy” would appear, which gave authoring status to film directors, who, up until then, were treated by Hollywood producers as mere employees of the studios. This stimulating concept to review and discuss films started with André Bazin, who, from 1951 to 1958 was the first director of CAHIERS.

The selected group of critics would also be responsible for the rise of the cinematographic movement known as Nouvelle Vague, which adds freshness and braveness to world cinema in the end of the 1950’s and changes the conventions of production of films. It goes to the streets, just like its predecessor, Italian neo-realism, and is in touch with reality around it. Also part of the movement, even not being writers for CAHIERS, were the names in its lovely gallery: Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Jean Rouch, Roger Vadim, Jacques Rozier, Claude Berri, Alain Resnais and Maurice Pialat. Out of the movement, but equally influential, there was the cinema made by Claude Lelouch and Jean-Pierre Melville. And the generation that followed, influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and that makes the rules of the movement even more dinamic: Jean Eustache, André Téchiné, Jacques Doillon , Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Sautet, Michel Deville and Jean-Paul Civeyrac…

« We don’t know what the future of CAHIERS will be, even if the directors of LE MONDE are concerned that the new owners, whoever is chosen, swear loyalty to the magazine’s history and assure its progress », say the editors.

According to Frodon, there are eleven groups interested in giving editorial continuity to CAHIERS DU CINEMA. We also hope that this new story of threats to film enthusiasm has a happy ending.

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