The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax David Fresko (bio) The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax. University of Amsterdam Press. 2021. 2 vols. 880 pages. $250.00 hardcover; also available in open access e-book. Reading Daniel Fairfax's The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973), a spirited, brilliantly researched, and cogently written reevaluation of the militant period of the world's most famous French-language film magazine, is to be reminded of a time when film theory, practice, and politics were conceived as one. The year 1968 has long been mythologized in France as a rupture that brought the country to the brink of revolution and radicalized a generation; it also transformed French film criticism into a political enterprise above all through the efforts of Cahiers du cinéma. While the narrative of Cahiers du cinéma's revolution from an avatar of postwar cinephilia, which launched the careers of François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette as part of the French New Wave, into a radical organ of ideological struggle by the end of the 1960s is well known, it has only been available in piecemeal fashion to Anglophone readers. Fairfax not only synthesizes preexisting literature on the subject in French and English but also provides the opportunity to assess anew the theoretical nuances of this attempt to create a Marxist materialist theory of cinema and society. To this end, Fairfax addresses three key questions about Cahiers du cinéma's political project. First, how did it attempt to intervene in its contemporary historical moment? Second, how did it help shape the development of film theory in the Anglo-American world? And third, how might these texts illuminate not only the cinema in the decades since but also our contemporary audiovisual ecology? [End Page 203] The saga of Cahiers du cinéma in addition to its significance for the development of film studies has been abundantly covered by scholarship on the subject, above all across four volumes of English-language translations consisting of 131 articles and featuring in-depth overviews by their editors as well as a two-volume history in French penned by Antoine de Baecque.1 Despite drawing extensively on the work of Nick Browne and Bérénice Reynaud, who authored introductions covering the years 1969 to 1978, Fairfax faults existing literature on the Red Years for two reasons. On the one hand, Fairfax claims that English-language overviews of film theory tend to reduce Cahiers du cinéma's theoretical contributions to four widely anthologized articles—"Cinéma/idéologie/critique" ("Cinema/Ideology/Criticism") by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, portions of Comolli's six-part series "Technique et idéologie" ("Technique and Ideology"), the editorial collective's analysis of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and Jean-Pierre Oudart's two-part essay "La suture" ("Cinema and Suture")—in order to subsume their influence within a subset of the so-called discourse of political modernism now commonly referred to as apparatus theory.2 On the other hand, de Baecque understands the Red Years to be a stain on the magazine's reputation. Having rejected cinephilia as well as the conceptual legacies of its co-founder and first editor-in-chief, André Bazin, in favor of Althusserian Marxism, according to de Baecque, Cahiers du cinéma only regained its proper footing at the beginning of the 1980s when it once again became a more conventional film magazine. To be sure, the Red Years left its critics "bruised, even traumatized," according to Fairfax, but the experience is to be more properly understood he writes as "a mixture of nostalgia and regret, bitterness and exhilaration."3 Fairfax interweaves these two interventions, building his chief arguments around dismantling Cahiers du cinéma's contemporary position within Anglo-American histories of film theory and recovering a Bazinian investment in ontological realism at the height of its militancy. Disentangling the multiple threads woven by Anglo-American film theory into apparatus theory allows Fairfax to distinguish false equivalencies made between Cahiers du cinéma...