Conclusion

Serge Daney once declared that there is one quality, above all, that defines *Cahiers du cinéma*: it resembles its time.<fnref n="1" /> This quality is embodied, perhaps more than any other generation of *Cahiers* critics, by Daney's own cohort, whose formative moments came in the years surrounding May '68. At that time, the journal was an avatar of the historical moment, a microcosm of the near-revolution's dramas, tensions and contradictions. The *Cahiers* critics felt, with full force, both the highs and the lows of these years, the giddy moments of utopian dreaming, followed by the crushing return of the political real. Comolli undoubtedly speaks for all of his comrades when he confesses that these *années terribles* still haunt him today, a half-century later.<fnref n="2" /> For all of the *Cahiers* critics, this period left an indelible imprint on their lives, one that leaves them alternating between immense pride at their achievements in the arena of film criticism and theory and uneasy discomfort, even trauma, at the impasses they came up against, the infighting, dogmatism and cruel intransigence to which the journal's Marxist orientation led them.

And yet this resemblance to their time, this fundamental contemporaneity
with the broader sweep of historical events, was not limited to the post-1968
era. After 1973, the équipe splintered, its members setting off on dispersed
biographical pathways. But they have all retained a fidelity to the emancipa-
tory kernel of the era of late 1960s-early 1970s militancy and its globally
critical mode of thinking. None of them have unequivocally disavowed their
past or beaten a path towards the political right, as so many of their peers
were to do in the conservative wave of the late 1970s and 1980s. Moreover,
they have all remained contemporary with their times and with the cinema
of these times, throughout the decisive shifts and changes that have marked
the decades since the radical years of their youth. Those Cahiers critics who
are still alive have now entered their seventies. To their immense credit,
however, they have not nostalgically wallowed in their own past or the past

<footnote n="1">¹ Daney, *La Rampe*, p. 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Comolli, *Cinéma contre spectacle*, p. 18 [p. 58].</footnote>
of the cinema. Rather, they have consistently engaged with (and made) new
works and sought to re-read the films of old through the light of the present,
its events, social phenomena and ideas. In spite of their advanced age, many
of them are now more active in film culture than they ever have been, and
none of them hesitated to articulate their views when I proposed to interview
them. At the risk of seeing this book pass steadily into obsolescence, I can
only hope that their present fecund output continues well into the future.

For this reason, restricting my study of the work that this generation of *Cahiers* critics produced to the years 1968-1973 was not an option—despite the fact that this has been the dominant approach adopted in earlier examinations of this moment in film criticism. Fundamental continuities link the later (and, in some cases, earlier) output of these writers with the texts they yielded when they were unified as a group. They simply demand to be read together. The result is that an intellectual universe has opened up—one that spreads out in myriad directions while still remaining centered on a series of core ideas relating to ideology, politics, aesthetics and ontology in the cinema. The length of these two volumes attests not only to the immense body of work that the figures under study have generated over the course of more than half a century of thinking about the cinema, it also points to the multiplicity of theoretical tendencies that exerted an influence on the journal and the daunting number of theorists, philosophers, filmmakers, artists and writers with whom the *Cahiers* critics have entered into dialogue.

As I have consistently argued, two intellectual traditions, above all, have distinguished the post-1968 generation of critics: the film theory of Bazin, which was further developed at *Cahiers* under the stewardship of Rohmer and Rivette before the baton was passed onto Comolli and Narboni; and the critical theory of Althusser, Lacan, Barthes and a panoply of other contemporary thinkers (Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Rancière, Macherey, Schefer and Metz, to name only a few). Throughout the shifting attitudes that the *Cahiers* critics had towards these two lineages, their critical project was consistently marked by attempts to synthesize them with each other. But the constituent elements were combustible when brought together, and the resulting theoretical fusion was highly unstable. If the volatile history of *Cahiers* in the years following 1968 was a reflection of broader historical paroxysms, it was also, we can posit, determined by the conceptual convulsions that the journal's mix of theoretical elements generated. And yet, while the answers the *Cahiers* critics came up with may have been constantly changing, a fundamental question was persistently posed: namely, what is *behind* images? What do they reveal about our ideological formations, our political structures, our artistic movements? What do they reveal about the real itself?
This is a question that is more pertinent than ever, even with the sweeping transformation of our media environment in the period since the apogee of “political modernism” in film studies. For this reason, my study is conceived not merely as a historical overview, taking stock of a distinct period that can be safely confined to the past. Rather it is intended as a clarion call for the present, prompting us to follow the lead of the *Cahiers* critics and think about the cinema, and society with the same radical rigor and critical insight that they adopted in the 1960s and 1970s. In his essay on “Le traveling de *Kapò*,” Daney recalls photocopying Rivette’s “De l’abjection” to disseminate among his pupils while teaching at Paris-III in the early 1970s—a “‘red’ period when some students were trying to glean a bit of the political radicalism of ‘68 from their professors.” Already, he could feel the pertinence of the text fading for this younger generation of cinephiles: “the most motivated of them consented to see ‘De l’abjection’ as an interesting historical, but slightly dated document.” Writing in 1992, he imagines that, should he repeat the experiment with a newer crop of students, “I wouldn’t be so concerned as to whether or not they understood the tracking shot, but I would have my heart set on knowing that they saw some trace of abjection.” Daney’s fear, however, was that this would not happen, which he read as “a sign that not only are tracking shots no longer a moral issue, but that the cinema is even too weak to entertain such a question.”<fnref n="3" /> As students of *Cahiers*, of texts such as “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” “De l’abjection,” “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” “Technique et idéologie,” “La suture,” *Le Champ aveugle*, “Le travelling de *Kapò*,” *Cinéma contre spectacle* and *tutti quanti*, it is imperative that we disprove Daney’s gloomy hypothesis and that we keep this theoretical legacy alive—not simply as a museum piece from a past era but as a living, organically evolving way of thinking about and practicing the cinema. As spectators, critics, scholars and filmmakers, we too must resemble our time. The survival of the cinema depends on it.

## Works Cited

Jean-Louis Comolli, *Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited*, trans. Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

Serge Daney, “Le travelling de *Kapò*,” *Trafic* no. 4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 5-19. Translated as “The Tracking Shot from Kapò,” in idem., *Postcards from the Cinema*, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 17-35.

—, *La Rampe* (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983).

<footnote n="3">3 Daney, “Le travelling de Kapò,” pp. 30-31 [p. 28].</footnote>
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