Comolli and Narboni's October 1969 manifesto-editorial "Cinéma/idéologie/critique" marked one of the most significant turning points in the history of *Cahiers*. From its birth in 1951 until this watershed issue (no. 216), the journal had always been, officially at least, a politically neutral organ—even if, at times (during the Algerian crisis, most pointedly), its façade of apoliticism was hard to defend. As of Comolli/Narboni's concise yet momentous text, *Cahiers* would now be placed under a revolutionary Marxist political outlook, with historical materialism as its theoretical bedrock. More spectacularly, the editorial so incensed its proprietor Daniel Filipacchi that *Cahiers* was shut down for four months—between November 1969 and March 1970—until a dispute over the journal's ownership was resolved. Furthermore, "Cinéma/idéologie/critique" laid the groundwork for the future texts written by the *Cahiers* critics during its Marxist phase. It also represented one of the first contributions to what would come to be known as "apparatus theory," which was developed in France through debates between *Cahiers*, *Cinéthique*, *Tel Quel* and *La Nouvelle Critique* and carried into the English-speaking domain by *Screen* and other politicized film journals in the UK and North America. Nonetheless, the notion of a clear rupture occurring with the appearance of "Cinéma/idéologie/critique" needs to be mitigated. Prior to its publication, the political vacillations masked behind *Cahiers'* notional ecumenism were often sharp and acrimonious, particularly in the early 1960s when Comolli and Narboni were both starting out as critics. By the mid-1960s, however, it was abundantly clear that the journal under Rivette's stewardship had been re-directed to an increasingly overt left-wing orientation, a tendency that found favor with the younger cohort of critics (and readers) and escalated with the events of May '68. These political peripeteia, both within the journal and among French society more broadly, will be further discussed in Part II.

Here, by contrast, I will focus on the field of reflection concerning the ideological nature of the cinema that opened up in France in the late 1960s. It should be recalled that, far from being a relatively unified, homogeneous theoretical undertaking, as it often tends to be presented today, "apparatus theory" is an umbrella term that unites figures who engaged in long and often venomous debates with each other. To some degree, of course, this dissension can be ascribed to the taste for polemic prevalent among French film critics and the far left at the time. But this should not conceal the fact that trenchant points of difference are discernible within the barbed vitriol, and this is undeniably true in the debates conducted between *Cahiers* and its rival journals. Here, the key point of contention concerns the very nature of the relationship between cinema and ideology—with the latter term understood in its Althusserian Marxist sense—and, more specifically, the extent to
which the cinema is an innately “ideological” apparatus. Notably, between the time of the October 1969 editorial and Comolli’s later, equally pivotal text “Technique et idéologie” (published between May 1971 and October 1972), *Cahiers’* editorial team unequivocally rejected the notion that the cinema by its very nature reproduces bourgeois ideology, a proposition put forth by *Tel Quel’s* Marcelin Pleynet, vocally supported by *Cinéthique*, and which finds echoes in later texts in *Screen*. Instead, their standpoint adheres more closely to Althusserian precepts: it is not the cinematic image that provides an ideological falsification of an otherwise undistorted reality. Rather, our very understanding of “the real” is structured by prevailing ideologies, which themselves, far from being static and monolithic, are multiple, contradictory and subject to transformation. Here, the cinema—and consequently the act of film analysis—can play a privileged role in gaining knowledge about the ideological nature of reality itself.

This hypothesis was exhaustively interrogated by the prolonged work of psychoanalytic film theory carried out in *Cahiers* during its Marxist period, a dynamic that will be discussed more thoroughly in Part IV. Intriguingly, such a standpoint brings the *Cahiers* of the post-1968 era in proximity to the thinking of Bazin—a trait recognized, and mocked, by the journal’s adversaries. For Bazin, the cinema is a privileged instrument for perceptually and conceptually gaining access to the reality of the world. The *Cahiers* of “ Cinéma/idéologie/critique ” assents to this viewpoint, as long as it is disburdened of Bazin’s supposed “idealism,” and is instead combined with an Althusserian understanding of the suffusion of this same reality by ideology. I thus begin this study with a close reading of the October 1969 editorial, one that situates the article within multiple contexts: Althusserian texts on the general question of ideology, and the relationship between ideology and art more specifically (these include works not only by the philosopher himself but also acolytes of his such as Badiou and Macherey); the potential liaison between such a reading and a Bazinian account of cinematic practice; and contemporaneous debates about the cinematic apparatus with *Tel Quel* and *Cinéthique*, which notably earned a 10,000-word direct reply from *Cahiers* in its following issue (November 1969). From this point, I will take a step back and look at Comolli and Narboni’s prior cinephilic and critical practice, which for both of them stretches back to their youth in French-occupied Algeria before they migrated to Paris in the early 1960s and began writing for *Cahiers*. This output, written between 1962 and 1969, is a rich offering in the critical appreciation of cinema at one of its key historical turning points: the demise of the classical Hollywood system and the rise of *nouveaux cinémas* on a
global level. Foreshadowing Comolli and Narboni's later critical practice, these articles offer an additional angle from which “Cinéma/idéologie/critique” can be understood.

A pair of key interpretative texts from 1970, implicitly illustrating critical categories established in the 1969 editorial, form the central two chapters in this part of my study. The first is one of the most prominent textual readings in the history of film theory: the collective analysis “*Young Mr. Lincoln* de John Ford.” Comolli and Narboni played a key role in the composition of this 1970 text, whose methodology derives chiefly from Althusser’s *Lire le Capital*, Barthes’s S/Z (published the same year) and some concepts from Freud and Lacan, but they were joined in this communal endeavor by their team of younger collaborators. Its influence on film interpretation has been so widespread as to have almost rendered the original text banal, its novelty invisible. Nonetheless, I insist that a new reading of this supremely canonical text—one that places it in the context of the long and tumultuous history of Ford reception in *Cahiers*—is a profitable endeavor. As a pendant to the Hollywood classicism of Ford, meanwhile, Narboni’s treatment of Straub/Huillet’s *Othon* (1969) in “La vicariance du pouvoir” provides a template for the modernist poetics defended by *Cahiers* in terms of subject matter, theoretical reference points and even the critic’s own writing style. In the legendary “Battle of *Othon*” that pitched *Cahiers* and the PCF-aligned *Nouvelle Critique* against *Positif* and virtually the entire critical establishment, Narboni calls upon figures as diverse as Derrida, Lautréamont and Bazin to make his case in support of the film. Indeed, if a materialist reading of Bazin’s film theory can be authorized, its practical application may find no better exemplar than the work of Straub/Huillet, whose œuvre, along with that of Godard, was granted unstinting support by the journal.

A somewhat later text, stretched out over more than a year's worth of issues and intervening into an increasingly divisive political environment, can be seen as the summation of *Cahiers'* theoretical attempts to grapple head-on with the question of ideology and the cinematic apparatus. Comolli's six-part "Technique et idéologie" is arguably the most prolonged, intensive theoretical engagement carried out under the auspices of *Cahiers du cinéma* during this time; it, too, has earned a certain canonical respectability. In arguing for the economic and ideological determination of the birth and early history of the cinema, following the model of plural historical temporalities sketched out by Althusser and Kristeva, Comolli also dealt a blow against what he called the "technicist ideology" apparent in the texts of Jean-Patrick Lebel and Jean Mitry. In many ways, the ambition surpassed the man: taxed with other commitments, Comolli left the series unfinished.
Its central ideas, however, would impregnate his later film theory, discussed
in greater detail elsewhere in this book.

A final chapter will look at the “afterlives of the apparatus”—namely,
the various ways in which the ideas developed and fostered on the pages
of *Cahiers*, invariably in debate with other French critical traditions, dis-
seminated into other, primarily academic approaches to the cinema. This
overview will focus on the seminal status that “Cinéma/idéologie/critique”
and “*Young Mister Lincoln* de Jean Ford” had for a generation of anglophone
scholars: from the excitement the texts generated on the pages of *Screen*,
*Wide Angle* and *Jump Cut* to the positivist and formalist critiques offered
by David Bordwell, Noël Carroll and Richard Allen in the 1980s, whose
denunciations were so efficacious that even sympathizers with the tradition
of “political modernism” such as Rodowick had to admit to the historical
exhaustion of its productive potential.<fnref n="1" /> As a counterpoint to this elegiac
position, dominant within the discipline since the 1980s, André Gaudreault
has recently attested that the interrogation of film history in “Technique et
idéologie” was an important precursor to the “new film history” movement
beginning in the 1980s—just one example of the *Cahiers* writers exert-
ing influence in diverse, and sometimes unexpected, quarters.<fnref n="2" /> As I will
demonstrate in the following chapters, a more lasting, positive legacy for
the strain of film theory developed by the journal in the post-1968 period
can be found not simply by re-reading the well-thumbed *Cahiers* texts but
also through an exploration of the multifarious theoretical and practical
body of work these writers produced since that time.

There is nonetheless an irony in this part of my study: whereas I generally
maintain the decisive importance of the group as a whole in *Cahiers* over
any of its individual writers, here the focus lies squarely on two figures:
Comolli and Narboni. This is not without justification: slightly older than
their co-conspirators, the pair of critics joined *Cahiers* significantly earlier,
in the early 1960s, and their collaboration stretches back to their youth in
Algeria. Although the preeminence of their role within the journal would
gradually give way to a more genuine collectivity, for a time (the time,
precisely, of “Cinéma/idéologie/critique” and the initial turn to Marxism),
Comolli and Narboni were effectively “first among equals” at *Cahiers*. It is
for this reason that, in the next few chapters, the Comolli/Narboni couple
largely stands in for the *Cahiers* group.

<footnote n="1">1 Rodowick, *The Crisis of Political Modernism*.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 See André Gaudreault, *Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema*, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), pp. 11-16.</footnote>
Works Cited

André Gaudreault, *Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema*, trans.

Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

D.N. Rodowick, *The Crisis of Political Modernism*, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>