Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life as a Free Jazz Critic/Thinking Free Jazz as an Avant-Garde of the Masses

Abstract

IntroductionThe analysis contained here was spurred by a seemingly arbitrary affiliation, and one that requires a brief historical overview if it is to be brought to light. In November of 1964, Cahiers du Cinema underwent a significant visual overhaul that replaced the now legendary yellow covers adorning the magazine's preceding issues with a color palette along with substantial changes in both format and layout. Accompanying this aesthetic revamping, the magazine's 160th edition introduced a member to the editorial team, Jean-Louis Comolli, who was anointed the title ofAssociate Editor by then Chief EditorJacques Rivette. At the start of the 1960s, many members of Cahiers' original roster were busy making their own films, and as the nouvelle vague quickly became the purveyor of aesthetic value, Rivette and his newly assembled critical team seized control of Cahiers and ushered in a critical militancy that drastically departed from the comparatively apolitical, nonconfrontational turn the magazine took while under the guidance of Rivette's predecessor, Eric Rohmer.Comolli's refusal to separate cinema from ideology is well-regarded today as a crucial turn in film analysis, and articles such as Cinema/Ideologie/Critique and Technique et Ideologie have become indispensable to film theory anthologies as a result. However, what film scholarship has failed to recognize is that during Comolli's coeditorship at Cahiers he regularly contributed to Jazz Magazine, a Paris-based publication that featured an extensive exploration of free jazz (popularly coined the new thing in France) from 1965 onward. As a result, Comolli's critical output during the 1960s has suspiciously succeeded in living out a double-life, and how exactly he managed to simultaneously serve as a coeditor at Cahiers and writer for Jazz Magazine without provoking or necessitating some degree of crosspollination is difficult to fathom. Perhaps his contemporary readership managed to identify certain links; yet, in both jazz and film scholarship today, there is, or at least there appears to be, little effort to highlight the implicitly multidisciplinary nature of Comolli's critical initiative leading up to May 1968.In turn, the research I am presenting here implicitly suggests that an investigation of Comolli's lineage as a free jazz critic allows us to identify a series of discursive points that may accommodate a reexamination of his ideas relating to cinema and the critical methodology he employed; but more explicitly, my analysis insists that the stakes are in fact much higher, and that Comolli's free jazz writings offer valuable if not entirely necessary tools pertaining to larger discussions concerning the specific relationship between aesthetics and politics.Comolli here serves as a crucial link between Cahiers and Jazz Magazine, and, by proxy, film and jazz criticism. Yet, if an overlap ofpersonnel is insufficient to feed the suspicion of a discursive correspondence, another relation is perhaps more telling: beginning in February of 1965, Jazz Magazine began running fullpage advertisements for Cahiers either directly preceding the table of contents or on the inside of the magazine's back cover. It would seem reasonable to suspect that Comolli's contribution to both publications had something to do with the advertising space that was allotted, and my investigation here seeks to build off this suspicion: notably, the aforementioned placement of the advertisements is telling, since it strategically featured Cahiers' entire front cover as if to indicate that the covers of the two magazines could be viewed as interchangeable.The task of determining the relevance of Comolli's critical duality faces a distinct set of unique challenges that have proven highly instructional in the collection of my research. Ultimately, my goal here is not to determine what exactly Comolli was thinking with his multidisciplinary project, but rather, what does his project allow us to think? …