French critics' tangled web

Trevor Johnston gives his verdict on the online edition of Cahiers du Cinéma.

Mar  5 2007

Famous? Indisputably. Influential? Very definitely. Yet who on this side of the English Channel, outside a coterie of Francophiles and academics, has ever perused the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma?

The Parisian magazine has been a by-word for informed and passionate film criticism for 55 years, while the roll call of key film-makers who started out on their pages is startling – from Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette in the mag's formative decades up to the likes of Pascal Bonitzer and Olivier Assayas today. Indeed, while we may not have been poring over its pages, the Cahiers legacy – that once-radical notion of treating film-makers like great artists – has brought la politique des auteurs down to us in its broadest sense, shaping the director-led way most of us think about cinema on a daily basis.

How does the current incarnation of Cahiers stand up to the legend? Well, for the very first time, the non-Francophones among us can find out when the new website www.e-cahiersducinema.com goes live on March 9, offering a free English translation of the issue which hit French newsstands a couple of days previously. After all, with our mental image of Cahiers probably stuck in the glory days when the giants of the Nouvelle Vague roamed its pages enthusing about Hitchcock and Preminger, we've some catching up to do.

After an austerely politicised post-'68 phase when six years went by without reviewing any commercial releases, the magazine's certainly moved on, with subsequent regimes – whose leading lights have included the much-lionised, ill-fated Serge Daney and current editor-in-chief Jean-Michel Frodon – re-establishing enthusiasms for old masters and breaking global talents. While the last issue devoted much of its attention to Eastwood and Lynch, Cahiers has also recently lauded the astonishing fecundity of world cinema, from Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-Hsien to Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jia Zhangke (not yet as widely recognised on these shores). Other choices can seem wonderfully bizarre. The top American film of 2006? M Night Shyamalan's widely-derided 'Lady in the Water', mais oui! The best film of the 1990s? 'Carlito's Way' naturellement! All rather perverse from our perspective – but then again if it wasn’t perverse it wouldn’t be Cahiers.

The début e-Cahiers issue promises a Rivette event, a focus on Catherine Deneuve and a survey of US TV including 'The Sopranos' and 'The West Wing'. If the online dummy's anything to go by (sneak a look at www.virtuel-book.com/cdc/cdc00), we can expect our preconceptions of both critical judgments and writing style to be tested. Stéphane Delorme's absorbing attempt to get to grips with David Lynch's perplexing 'Inland Empire', for instance, shows the instinctive, poetic, quizzical prose favoured by Cahiers scribes proving intermittently ungainly in English. Some of the sample pieces do read better than others (Hervé Aubron's zesty review of William Friedkin's 'Bug' for one), though one suspects that readers used to the more prosaic pronouncements of the English critical fraternity will find their Gallic cousins' philosophical free-flow demands a certain mental adjustment. Still, when much of what passes for criticism on this side of the Channel is little more than PR puffery or fanboy fluff, expanded horizons can only be a good thing.

As the annual website survey in the Time Out Film Guide amply illustrates, there's such a degree of maturity in the internet cineaste community these days that e-Cahiers faces tough competition for the attention of the discerning surfer. Whether it's the invaluable Australia-based critical resource that is www.sensesofcinema.com, or the taste-defining writing coming out of the hyper-cool www.rouge.com.au and Canada's clued-up www.cinema-scope.com, there's no shortage of informed comment and anoraky zeal in cyberspace. Cahiers joins the fray with, quite rightly, the most-fêted reputation in the critical firmament, and is hugely welcome at the party. Gallic self-confidence notwithstanding, however, it'll have to continue to prove itself against myriad eager Anglophone rivals. It promises to be a fascinating spectacle.

The English language Cahiers will be at www.e-cahiersducinema.com from Mar 9.

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