Encounters with Structuralism

Abstract

This chapter outlines Cahiers du cinéma’s relationship with structuralist theory in the 1960s and 1970s. The journal’s encounter with structuralism first manifested itself in 1963, when then-editor Jacques Rivette arranged for a series of interviews with Roland Barthes, Pierre Boulez and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The dialogue with Barthes was by far the most stimulating of these interviews and initiated a relationship that lasted until the literary theorist’s death in 1980. But fruitful exchanges were also had with the pioneer of film semiology, Christian Metz, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who combined filmmaking with his own take on Saussurean linguistics. And yet, although Cahiers was often a venue for debates between different structuralist thinkers, its critics were never entirely satisfied with the semiological approach to film analysis and in the post-1968 era were concerned more with how a film’s formal structures could subvert the cinema’s status as a signifying practice.