The Red Years of Cahiers Du Cinéma (1968-1973)

1. The first distinguishing feature of the proposed book is its combination of intellectual history and theoretical inquiry. In charting the biographies of the ten individuals involved in the Cahiers project in the years 1968-1973, some of the most fundamental questions facing film studies are addressed. Texts and films discussed as part of this endeavour range from canonical works in the field to unjustly neglected pieces, and in many cases a discussion of the latter sheds valuable light on the former. Moreover, Cahiers during this period was an unparalleled site for encounters between contemporary French critical theory (Althusser, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Ranci鋨e, Macherey) and the analysis of cinema. Importantly, no significant work until now has discussed the work of the Cahiers critics in the years after they left the journal, and this will be one of the major innovations of the proposed study. 2. In tandem with this, my historiographic method was based on important primary research carried out in France. This entailed not only a consultation of material already in the public domain (principally, the publications of the Cahiers critics themselves), but also accessing previously undiscovered archival material (from the Biblioth鋂ue du Film, the Biblioth鋂ue Nationale de France, the Institut m幦oires d'嶮ition contemporaine, and other institutions) and, perhaps most importantly, interviews with the remaining living members of the Cahiers editorial team. This oral testimony will be amply used to give precious first-hand accounts of the events covered in the book, and the attitudes the critics take today towards their past work and life. 3. Finally, the theoretical stance taken in this book sets it apart from much of the prevailing discourse in film studies today. Whereas the realist tradition of Andr?Bazin and the structuralist tradition of apparatus theory have been overwhelmingly held to be in opposition to each other in standard accounts of the history of film theory, I argue that, in the case of Cahiers, its post-1968 editorial team drew substantially from both theoretical tendencies - but that this strategy produced a convulsive dialectic in the journal that overdetermined much of the journal's tumultuous nature during this period.