"Every film is political," trumpeted Comolli/Narboni in "Cinéma/idéologie/critique," at the precise moment, in late 1969, that *Cahiers'* political outlook came to be unabashedly informed by revolutionary Marxism.<fnref n="1" /> Politics was absolutely central to the *Cahiers* project of the late 1960s and 1970s. *Everything* during this period—and not least the cinema—was to be read through the lens of the militant left-wing politics to which the journal's editors were committed. But the tenor of *Cahiers'* political approach to film writing in the post-1968 period also owed a debt to the journal's critical heritage. Indeed, the very phrase used by the editors in "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism" was a conscious echo of Rivette, who had, a year earlier, in September 1968, boldly affirmed that "all films are political," proceeding to explain: "what is most important *politically* is the attitude that the filmmaker takes with regard to all the aesthetic criteria—or rather, so-called aesthetic criteria—which govern art in general and cinematic expression, in triple inverted commas, in particular."<fnref n="2" /> Furthermore, the core of *Cahiers'* approach to political questions in the cinema can be traced back further, to the legendary equation between morality and the tracking shot made conjointly by Moullet and Godard, as well as Rivette's text "De l'abjection." In this brief but seminal review of Gillo Pontecorvo's *Kapò* (1960), the critic dissects a shot where Emmanuelle Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on the electric fence of a concentration camp, pronouncing the edict that "the man who decides, at this moment, to make a forward tracking-shot to re-frame the corpse from a high-angled view, taking care to precisely inscribe the hand raised at an angle to the final framing, deserves only the most profound contempt."<fnref n="3" /> It is here that Rivette establishes the idea, fundamental for *Cahiers*, that filmmaking consists both of "showing certain things" and "*at the same time*, and by the same operation, showing them a certain way; these two acts being rigorously indissociable.<fnref n="4" /> In line with Rivette's exhortations, *Cahiers'* project consisted, as Browne has noted, of "a

<footnote n="1">1 Comolli/Narboni, "Cinéma/idéologie/critique," p. 12 [p. 253]. Symptomatic of the journal's political and theoretical tergiversations in this era, the proclamation would soon be subject to critique by *Cahiers* itself, with Aumont stating, in late 1971, "This was *Cahiers'* formulation two years ago, but we have since reassessed it in order to refine and clarify it—for in that form it practically presented nothing but dangers." Jacques Aumont, "Lettres," *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 234-235 (December 1971-January-February 1972), pp. 101-102, here p. 101.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Rivette, "Le temps déborde: entretien avec Jacques Rivette," *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 204 (September 1968), p. 20 [p. 36].</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 See Jacques Rivette, "De l'abjection," *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 120 (June 1961), pp. 54-55, here p. 54.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Ibid., p. 55.</footnote>
politics, not a poetics, of representation.”<fnref n="5" /> Comolli has likewise argued that the journal's “central problem” was the politics of form, and more specifically the question of “how to articulate a reflection on film form with political questions. In my opinion there is a very strong link between the political scope of a film and its form. The form does not have to absolutely be in the avant-garde, but the film must intervene in a cultural field, an ideological field, and this intervention must have political meaning.”<fnref n="6" />

Whereas Part I centered on the development of theories of the ideological nature of the “cinematic apparatus” during *Cahiers*’ Marxist period, here the focus will be on the journal’s encounters with politics *sensu stricto*. A specific concern for interventions into the political arena chiefly took two forms in the period of its engagement with the far left. Firstly, and notwithstanding the notion that all films are political by nature, there was the critical discussion of films with explicitly political subject matter, which were to be judged, following the precepts of “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” primarily on a formal basis, on the level of their “signifiers” rather than their signified. Secondly, there was, throughout this period, interaction in various guises with the far-left movements and organizations that were simultaneously energized by the spirit of revolt flowing out of the May protests and paralyzed by paranoia, doctrinaire rigidity and internecine sectarian quarreling during the post-1968 period, tendencies from which *Cahiers* itself was not immune.

*Cahiers*’ phase of political radicalization, therefore, also marked one of the periods where the journal’s internal critical evolution was most visibly articulated with broader historical events. For the most part, however, this nexus was marked by a chronic temporal displacement: the journal’s own political turns were—slightly but crucially—out of synch with the broader shifts in the political climate of France. The rapprochement *Cahiers* enacted with the PCF in 1969-1971, for instance, came at a moment when the party was *most* politically discredited among the far left, having aided in dampening the utopian spirits of the May ‘68 revolt, while the subsequent turn to Maoism in 1972-1973 took place after the “pro-Chinese” movement in France had already reached its apogee and entered a stage of terminal decline. As Daney recognized, the history of the journal during this time is that of a *décalage* (a discrepancy or lag),<fnref n="7" /> and it is this missed encounter

<footnote n="5">5 Nick Browne, “Introduction,” p. 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Comolli, “Yes, we were utopians (Part 1).”</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Serge Daney, interviewed by Bill Krohn, “Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977: Entretien avec Serge Daney par Bill Krohn,” in Daney, *La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. I*, pp. 17-31, here p. 21.</footnote>
with Politics with a capital “P” that accounts for the tragi-comic nature of
this period in the journal’s history, which led to the near-collapse of *Cahiers*
after the failure of the “Front culturel” policy of 1973. Bonitzer admits that
“Between 1971 and 1973, *Cahiers* almost fell into the abyss of a definitive
*hors-champ*,”<fnref n="8" /> while Daney, mindful perhaps of Marx’s apothegm that
history happens “first as tragedy, then as farce,” recalls having nurtured
the project of writing a comedy about the political extravagances of the
journal’s Maoist period but ended up renouncing the project. “In any case,”
he surmised, “who would have laughed about these excesses?”<fnref n="9" />

Owing to *Cahiers’* contorted relationship with the currents of history dur-
ing the 1960s and 1970s, Part II will assume a chiefly chronological structure,
and for this reason it also serves as a surrogate for a more detailed history of
the journal during this time. As Kané has noted in conversation with Comolli
and Narboni, what is most striking about this period is “the extraordinary
mobility of the political positions” successively taken by the journal; when
Comolli responded by noting that this was a more general phenomenon
that was not specific to *Cahiers*, Kané retorted that “the difference is the
speed” with which *Cahiers* switched its political allegiances.<fnref n="10" /> In the late
1960s and early 1970s, the journal was in a constant state of flux: renouncing
claims it had made in previous issues, peremptorily modifying theoretical
stances it had peremptorily taken in the first place, launching disputes
with other journals (notably *Tel Quel, La Nouvelle Critique* and *Cinéthique*)
and then reconciling with them, and purging its ranks of those members
of the team unable to keep up with the latest political turn. Nonetheless, it
is possible to discern four distinct phases in *Cahiers’* political engagement,
which conform to four of the chapters in this section.

The first period consists of the progressive process of radicalization
that took place between 1963 (when Rivette took over as editor-in-chief
from Rohmer) and the 1969 editorial. Throughout this time, *Cahiers* did
without an official political line and remained steadfastly independent of
partisan politics. While, under Rivette and then Comolli/Narboni, it came
to be identified with the left and with an ardent opposition to Gaullist rule,
it remained ideologically eclectic. The prevailing sentiment around the
editorial team nonetheless perceptibly shifted from a soft-left, Mitterrandist

Translated as T.L. French [Bill Krohn], "Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968-1977: Interview with Serge Daney," *The Thousand Eyes* no. 2 (1977), pp. 18-32, here p. 21.

<footnote n="8">8 Pascal Bonitzer, *La Vision partielle* (Paris: Capricci, 2015), p. 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Daney, *L'Exercice a été profitable, monsieur*, p. 298.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 *À voir absolument (si possible): Dix années aux Cahiers*, dir. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, 2011.</footnote>
outlook in the mid-1960s to the more radically anti-capitalist mood of the end of the decade.<fnref n="11" /> This evolution was shaped not only by broader historical forces, in particular the radicalization of the student and cultural milieux in the late 1960s, but also by *Cahiers'* own encounters with filmmakers undergoing the same trajectories (among them Godard, Garrel and Pasolini) and the forms of political activity its editors embarked on: battles against censorship (of *La Religieuse*, notably), state repression (the dismissal of Langlois from the Cinémathèque française) and the commercial imperatives of its proprietor, media tycoon Daniel Filipacchi, which ended in *Cahiers* winning its economic independence after a four-month ownership dispute.

With the Filipacchi contretemps resolved in early 1970, the next 18 months were marked by an attempted rapprochement with the PCF, judged to be the only viable political force worth orienting towards, even after the disreputable role it had played during the May protests. This period coincides with what is undeniably the journal's most theoretically fertile moment, marked notably by critical work on Renoir's *La vie est à nous*, 1920s Soviet cinema (particularly Eisenstein's films and theory), Robert Kramer's *Ice and, in a negative light, fictions de gauche* such as Costa-Gavras' Z. The *Cahiers* editors have stressed that this strategy was principally an attempt to relate to the party's intellectual layers, and specifically the cultural organ *La Nouvelle Critique*, rather than its considerably more doctrinaire political leadership. However, increasing dissatisfaction with the PCF, combined with the pull of *Tel Quel*, led to a violent rupture in late 1971, as *Cahiers* came under the sway of a “Marxist-Leninist,” Maoist orientation for the next two years. With its political intolerance, alienation from cinematic concerns and jargon-laden texts (which, the consensus has it, “have not aged well”<fnref n="12" />), this era is widely viewed as an unmitigated disaster, not least by the *Cahiers* editors themselves. For Bonitzer it was “a sinister era,” while for Narboni it represented an “arid, dogmatic and closed-off period”—and these two critics were among the chief proponents of the turn to Maoism.<fnref n="13" /> Although it may have few defenders, I will not, in this chapter, be content

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Following the 1965 presidential election, which pitted socialist candidate François Mitterand against the incumbent de Gaulle, Fieschi noted that, “We all voted Mitterrand, albeit without any particular joy.” Jean-André Fieschi, “Le cahier des lecteurs,” *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 174 (January 1966), pp. 5-6, here p. 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² The phrase is Daney's. See Serge Daney, *La Rampe* (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983), p. 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Interview with Pascal Bonitzer, April 30, 2014; and Jean Narboni, “Du côté des noms,” in François Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon (eds.), *Gilles Deleuze et les images* (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2008), pp. 21-30, here p. 24. The duo was nicknamed “Narbonitzer” within *Cahiers*, such was their shared zeal during the Maoist turn. Interview with Jacques Aumont, March 11, 2014.</footnote>
with a condescending denunciation of the shortcomings of the journal's Maoist period. Rather, I will seek out a political understanding of why this path should have been taken, and the reasons for the impasse it led to. It should be recalled that French Maoism was a significant and vibrant, albeit short-lived, political movement in the early 1970s, around which gravitated some of the most charismatic figures in the student left, as well as a large number of intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Godard, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers. It is as a part of this broader phenomenon that *Cahiers'* turn must be understood.

While the first year of *Cahiers'* Maoist period was marked by a continu-
ation of their theoretical outpouring, the second year consisted chiefly of
preparations for the "Front culturel révolutionnaire." When the launch of this
project at Avignon in the summer of 1973 resulted in a dispiriting debacle,
the *Cahiers* editorial team evaporated. Comolli, Narboni and Aumont all
departed, and it was left to Daney and Serge Toubiana to form the nucleus
of a new team, a pairing which would last until Daney's resignation in 1981.
This whole period can be seen as a "post-gauchiste" phase in the history of
*Cahiers*. Abandoning Maoism, the journal's critics nonetheless continued
to identify with the far left, but they did so with an increasing pessimism
as to the concrete prospects of revolutionary social change. But this era
was also marked by a return to film criticism, and insightful writing on
the cinema was published—by Daney, Bonitzer, Kané and Oudart, as well
as newer critics such as Serge Le Péron, Thérèse Giraud and Alain Bergala.

These four chronologically sequenced chapters will be interspersed
with three further chapters, serving as excurses from the political history
of the journal. The first (Chapter 10) will look at the long relationship that
*Cahiers* entertained with Jean-Luc Godard, which reached a high point with
the long studies devoted to the Groupe Dziga Vertov films in 1972, a time
when, along with Straub/Huillet, Godard was virtually the only filmmaker
defended by the journal. The other two chapters will look at the legacy of
*Cahiers'* political engagement in the subsequent work of a pair of former
editors: Eisenschitz, who as a card-carrying PCF member continued to
write for *La Nouvelle Critique* after his expulsion from *Cahiers* in 1972 while
furthering his activities as a film historian, and Comolli, whose theory and
filmmaking up to the present day continue to be impregnated by a strident
political radicalism. They are the only two members of the *Cahiers* team
who continue to broadly identify as Marxists; tellingly, perhaps, neither
was fully implicated in the excesses of the Maoist turn. Those who were
have a perceptibly more traumatized response to their political past. But it
is notable that all the *Cahiers* editors remained avowedly on the left after
the demise of the post-1968 militant period. None embarked on the kind of spectacular conversions to neo-conservatism staged by contemporaries of theirs such as Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann or Jean-Claude Milner. Daney was perhaps the most scathing about *Cahiers'* tumultuous engagement with politics, to the point of confessing: "I even hoped that it would create nothing. Can you imagine if our general line had succeeded. It was horrifying!"<fnref n="14" /> But even he came to be unrepentant about this period: "I no longer have any desire to apologize because once, fifteen years ago, we were lacking in the good manners of bourgeois *arrivisme*. For the first time, I would actually prefer to plead for the defense."<fnref n="15" />

## Works Cited

Pascal Bonitzer, *La Vision partielle* (Paris: Capricci, 2015).

Nick Browne, "Introduction: The Politics of Representation: *Cahiers du Cinéma* 1969-1972," in idem. (ed.), *Cahiers du Cinéma vol. III: 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation* (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-20.

Jean-Louis Comolli, interviewed by Daniel Fairfax, "'Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am...': An Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 1)," *Senses of Cinema* no. 62 (April 2012), sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/yes-we-were-utopians-in-a-way-i-still-am-an-interview-with-jean-louis-comolli-part-1/ (accessed January 1, 2021).

— and Jean Narboni, "Cinéma/idéologie/critique," *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 216 (October 1969), pp. 11-15. Translated as "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," trans. Daniel Fairfax, in Jean-Louis Comolli, *Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited* (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 251-259.

Serge Daney, interviewed by Bill Krohn, "Les *Cahiers du cinéma* 1968-1977: Entretien avec Serge Daney par Bill Krohn," in Daney, *La Maison cinéma et le monde vol. I: Les temps des Cahiers 1962-1981* (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), pp. 17-31. Translated as T.L. French [Bill Krohn], "Les *Cahiers du Cinéma* 1968-1977: Interview with Serge Daney," *The Thousand Eyes* no. 2 (1977), pp. 18-32.

Serge Daney, *La Rampe* (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983)

—, *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur* (Paris: P.O.L., 1993).

—, *Persévérance* (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), p. 143. Translated as *Postcards from the Cinema*, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Serge Daney, *Persévérance* (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), p. 143. Translated as *Postcards from the Cinema*, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 119.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Daney, *L'Exercice a été profitable, monsieur*, p. 300.</footnote>
Jean-André Fieschi, “Le cahier des lecteurs,” *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 174 (January 1966), pp. 5-6.

Jean Narboni, “Du côté des noms,” in François Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon (eds.), *Gilles Deleuze et les images* (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2008), pp. 21-30

Jacques Rivette, “De l’abjection,” *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 120 (June 1961), pp. 54-55.
—, interviewed by Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni and Sylvie Pierre, “Le temps déborde: Entretien avec Jacques Rivette,” *Cahiers du cinéma* no. 204 (September 1968), pp. 6-21. Translated as “Time Overflowing,” trans. Amy Gateff, in Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.) *Rivette: Texts and Interviews* (London: BFI, 1977), pp. 9-38.
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