Cahiers du cinéma

A French film magazine founded in 1951, known for shaping postwar cinephile criticism and advancing the auteur theory of cinema.

André Bazin: A French film critic and theorist who co-founded Cahiers du cinéma and championed realist approaches to cinema. His criticism and editorial leadership established the magazine’s early intellectual foundations.
Postwar French cinema: French filmmaking and film culture in the decades following the Second World War. Cahiers took shape amid debates about France’s postwar film production and critical institutions.
Cinephilia: A deep attachment to cinema expressed through sustained viewing, discussion, collecting, and criticism. The magazine grew from a cinephile culture built around repeated viewing and passionate debate.
French New Wave: A French filmmaking movement of the late 1950s and 1960s marked by personal authorship and formal experimentation. Several Cahiers critics became directors whose films defined the movement.
Positif: A French film magazine founded in 1952, known for criticism often opposed to Cahiers du cinéma’s positions. Its rival critical tradition disputed Cahiers’ judgments and its emphasis on auteurism.
François Truffaut: A French film director and critic who helped lead the French New Wave. His polemical 1954 essay in the magazine challenged France’s established film culture.
La Revue du cinéma: A French film journal published in two periods, from 1928 to 1931 and from 1946 to 1949. André Bazin and other future Cahiers contributors wrote for this predecessor journal.
Auteur theory: A critical approach that treats a film director as a recurring creative author across films. Cahiers critics made directorial authorship a central way to evaluate cinema.
Une certaine tendance du cinéma français: François Truffaut’s 1954 Cahiers du cinéma essay criticizing the conventions of established French screenwriting. The essay became a defining intervention in the magazine’s campaign against the cinéma de qualité.
Marxist film theory: Approaches to cinema that analyze films through class, ideology, and material relations. This framework displaced director-centered criticism in parts of Cahiers during its political turn.

Linked from 17 pages