Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s

Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave

Edited by Jim Hillier

    A good case can be mode for the 1950s as the most stimulating decode in the annals of film criticism. Credit for this goes largely to the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma, which nurtured and published a small band of iconoclasts who later moved into active filmmaking and became the core of the influential New Wave group. Jean-Luc Godard and the late François Truffaut were probably its most important members, with Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chobrol right at their heels...Jim Hillier's collection...concentrates on the 1950s, assessing the pre-New Wove cinema of France, as well as classical Hollywood film and Italy's neo-realist school. It also treats such technical issues as the essence of mise en scène and the advent of CinemaScope...This is a fascinating and provocative book that casts a keen light on the ideas (and by extension, the films) of such astonishing cinéastes as Godard and Rivette, while also showing their affinities with the incisive thought of André Bazin, the group's mentor...This collection deserves a wide readership among casual and committed filmgoers alike.
       --Christian Science Monitor

    This isn't simply an anthology of interesting film criticism; it's something much more rare and intriguing--the documentary history of an important intellectual shift...By treating movies as movies, not as poor relations to books or plays, the Cahiers critics helped introduce a new art form to the century that produced it.
       --New York Times Book Review

    Wonderfully intellectual and anti-academic at the same time, the articles are, more than anything else, supremely personal...These are immensely serious people, self-consciously bent on nothing less than changing the history of cinema. In important ways they first taught us how to look at movies, especially our own.
       --American Film

  • Cover: Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s

Jim Hillier is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Bulmershe College of Higher Education, Reading, England.