Introduction

Contrary to popular assumption, Cahiers was not more interested in, or

committed to, American cinema than other cinemas: the contents of Cahiers
simply do not support any such assumption.! Although it was primarily
over responses to American cinema that Cahiers writers argued most
among themselves and with other French critics, and although this was
what marked them off most from Anglo-Saxon critics, a great deal of
Cahiers was devoted to what in Anglo-Saxon film culture we would call
'art cinema', generally European. We might express it in this way: as critics
involved in polemics, American cinema preoccupied them most; as future
film-makers they were very much drawn (and not only by necessity) to
European cinema.
There is in Godard's,2 Truffaut's,3 and Rivette's4 writing of this period
(in Cahiers and elsewhere) about Ingmar Bergman, for example, a recog-
nition of the proximity between Bergman's situation as a film-maker and
their own actual or potential situations, as well as a recognition of some
shared attitudes to both the world and the cinema. It may seem odd that
Ber.gman, in many ways the epitome of 'art cinema' ('difficult', intense,
seriOUS, personal, innovatory, or at least formally self-conscious), should
~e championed by Cahiers and especially by Godard ('the most original
fIlm-maker of the European cinema: Ingmar Bergman'), but the reasons
for. this are revealing. Truffaut emphasizes Bergman's simplicity, his explo-
rat~on of essentially personal concerns, the viewer's sense 'at the start of
a film that Bergman himself doesn't yet know how he'll end his story'.5
~odard calls Bergman an 'intuitive artist' rather than a 'craftsman': 'The
cmerna is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean team-work. One is
always alone; on the set as before the blank page. And for Bergman, to
be alone means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer
them. Nothing could be more classically romantic.'6 Bergman's own
comrn:nt on this passage is apt: 'He's writing about himself.'?
But m the struggle for a new, or different, French cinema, the example

175
 Italian Cinema

of the Italian cinema - Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, but especially and most
consistently Rossellini - was most crucially important, particularly during
the early and mid-1950s. Eric Rohmer's conclusion to his 'Rediscovering
America' is that as well as loving America and American cinema, they
should also love Italy and its cinema: 'It is perhaps because of its amicable
, I if not harmonious juxtaposition of the most modern and the most ancient
,,I
that Italy ought to have had the high reputation in European cinema
which French cinema has enjoyed since the demise of the silent film. It is
only a matter of knowing, now, how to take over.'8 Rivette, concluding
his 'Letter on Rossellini', also 1955, says: 'Here is our cinema, those of us
:1
who in our turn are preparing to make films (did I tell you, it may be
soon).' This introduction and the articles which follow try to give some
explanation of this relationship.
'Neo-Realism and Phenomenology' (1952) by Amedee Ayfre, a Catholic'
priest, forms a clear and close link with Andre Bazin's pre-Cahiers writings
on neo-realism, 9 perhaps his most lastingly important work on realism
and representing important shifts from the position on realism outlined
in 'The Evolution of the Language of Cinema':l0 Bazin's brief note on
Umberto D from the Cannes Festival in 1952 can serve to remind us of the
general tone and stance of those writings. Ayfre draws heavily on Bazin's
significant insights into the workings ot for example, Bicycle Thieves l1
while trying to draw out some of the underlying assumptions which
Bazin does not make explicit. In turn, Bazin explicitly approved of Ayfre's
formulations. 12 At many points Bazin and Ayfre are exceptionally close
in their judgments, for example in their agreement on the necessity of
'fundamental ambiguity' or their approval of 'social polemic ... but not
propaganda'.13 Ayfre's 'by giving primacy to existence over essence in all
things, the method comes strangely close to what the philosophers call
phenomenological description ... Rossellini and a few others have tried
... to go ... to things themselves, to ask what they manifest through
themselves' can be set alongSide Bazin's 'Neo-realism knows only imma-
nence. It is from appearances only, the simple appearance of beings and
the world, that it knows how to deduce the ideas that it unearths. It is a
phenomenology.'14 Bazin's conclusion to his essay on Bicycle Thieves - 'No
more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the
perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema'15 - also finds
strong echoes in Ayfre's essay; Bazin in turn borrowed his definition of
the 'wholeness' of reality from Ayfre. Iii
Rohmer's review of Viaggio in Italia and Rivette's 'Letter on Rossellini'
(both 1955), stimulated by the generally unsympathetic critical response
to that film, indicate just how strong and central a tradition Bazin's and
Ayfre's 'phenomenological realism' and its 'neutral form' was in Cahiers
in the 1950s (this was precisely the tradition so wholly attacked by later
Marxist positions 1?). Rohmer's virulently Catholic defence of 'sacred art'
in relation to Viaggio in Italia reminds us particularly strongly of the
religious base to these notions of immanence.

176
 Introduction

Rivette's long article, while recognizing the centrality of Catholicism in

Rossellini, is more complex and interesting for additional reasons. The
exemplary status Rivette gives Rossellini's cinema was certainly not new.
As early as 1952 Godard recalls an encounter with Rohmer in which
Rohmer argued that 'the real lesson of the Italian cinema has not yet been
generally understood ... I know of no film which better celebrates the I
,:
traditional virtues like courage and generosity than Rome, Open City. Yet
it is shot in a very rough and ready manner . . . French cameramen are
too preoccupied with composition, but the cinema has nothing to do with
painting.'lB Cahiers admired the American cinema but, generally classicat
popular and industrial as it was (despite the way a Nicholas Ray might :,

be discussed 19), it was not a cinema they could aspire to emulate. At the
same time, Cahiers disliked the typical French films of the period for
their lack of the traditional moral virtues as much as for their formal
'academicism', by which was meant both their literary quality (thus
Rivette's comment that 'nothing could be less literary or novelistic' than
Rossellini) and their pictorial conventions. 20 But Italian cinema represented
I,

something which new French film-makers could aspire to, and Rossellini .
I
in particular exemplified both moral values Cahiers could generally espouse .!.

and a 'modern', non-academic photographic style and non-literary narra-

tive style which suited both their tastes and the production conditions and , ,"
I;

possibilities in France. It is this 'modernity' - stylistic and thematic - which

Rivette's article seeks to define: . . .'
.! "
.1;,.
For there is no doubt that these hurried films, improvised out of very slender
means and filmed in a turmoil that is often apparent from the images, contain ;:

!~
the only real portrait of our times . . . How could one fail suddenly to reco- 1,
gnize, quintessentially sketched, ill-composed, incomplete, the semblance of i~
11
our daily existence? These arbitrary groups, these absolutely theoretical collec- ·1,
.:
tions of people eaten away by lassitude and boredom, just exactly as we know Ii
,.l'
them to be, as the irrefutable accusing image of our heteroclite, dissident, l'
;.
discordant societies. jI
i!
:1
This, together with Rivette's sympathetic definition of Rossellini's
~onstant theme that 'human beings are alone, and their solitude irreduc-
Ible; that, except by miracle or saintliness, our ignorance of others is
co~plete', and so on, offers pretty convincing exemplification of the
ty~lcal Cahiers thematic proposed by John Hess. 21 But, as an auteur, Rossel-
lim was interesting for other reasons, also exemplary: when Rivette
expresses his 'wonder at the fact that our era, which can no longer be )1.
I

shocked by anything, should pretend to be scandalized because a film- '1

maker dares to talk about himself without restraint', he is arguing for a

central role for the 'personal' in art,n an important aspect of at least the .!

early nouvelle vague films.23 Though Rivette's conception here of auteur

and 'creativity' is largely conventional, he makes interesting distinctions
between 'isolated masters' (such as Renoir, Hawks, Lang, in their
maturity) whose work is self-justifying, autonomous (and which therefore

177
 Italian Cinema

cannot be learned from), and the 'exemplary' status of Rossellini's work

('everything in it is instructive, including the errors'), somehow 'shackled
to time', tied to the present. 24 Knowing as we do the interesting turns that
Rivette took subsequently as critic and as film-maker in the 1960s and
beyond, perhaps we can in this difficult but provocative essay also see
the beginnings of a concerted engagement with ideas about 'modernism' .25
The Cahiers view of the auteur/creator can also be assessed from the two
Rossellini interview extracts, interesting for the way Cahiers interviewed
as much as for Rossellini's views. In the Cahiers interview style we see a
paradoxical combination of veneration (there is, almost, a definite 'truth'
to be got from the director) with an interrogatory stance implying firm
equality, and thus a level of detailed questioning unusual for the time. 26
Cahiers' questions are very directly informed by the positions associated
with Bazin, and Rossellini's responses tend to confirm those positions, in
both their moral (and therefore political) and their formal senses. Rossel-
lini's manifesto-type responses, particularly in the 1959 interview, certainly
inform his later, didactic television work; unsurprisingly, their general
impetus closely resembles that of the nouvelle vague itself.

Notes
1 See also the Cahiers Annual Best Films Listings, in Appendix 1.
2 See, for example, in Godard on Godard, 'Bergmanorama' (originally published
in Calliers 85, July 1958), pp. 75-80, and a review of Summer with Monilca
(originally published in Arts 680, July 1958), pp. 84-5.
3 See, for example, in Fran~ois Truffaut, Films in My Life, 'Bergman's Opus'
I'
(originally publish ed in 1958), pp. 253-7.
4 See, for example, 'L' Arne au ventre', a review of Summer Interlude (Sommarlek),
Calliers 84, June 1958, pp. 45-7.
5 Truffaut, op. cit., p. 256.
6 Godard, op. cit., p. 76.
7 Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (interviews with Ingmar Bergman by
Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns, Jonas Sima), London, Seeker & Warburg, 1973,
p.60.
8 Ch. 7 in this volume.
9 Collected in Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2; Umberto 0 is discussed in the
essays 'De Sica: Metteur en Scene' (pp. 61-78) and 'Umberto 0: A Great Work'
(pp. 79-82).
iI 10 Reprinted in Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1.
!I 11 See particularly the essays 'Bicycle Thief' and 'De Sica: Metteur en Scene' in
Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2.
1
12 'In Defence of Rossellini', ibid., p. 97.

!
I
13 Cf. Bazin, 'Bicycle Thief', ibid., p. 51.
14 'De Sica: Metteur en Scene', ibid., pp. 64-5.
15 'Bicllcle Tllief' , ibid., p. 60.
16 'In Defence of Rossellini', ibid., p. 97.
17 See, for example, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, 'Cinema/Ideologyl
Criticism (I)" originally published Cahiers 216, October 1969, translated in

178
 Introduction

Screen, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1971, reprinted in Screen Reader 1 and Nichols,
Movies and Methods.
18 Godard, op. cit., p. 32.
19 See, for example, Rivette's comments on Nicholas Ray in 'Notes on a Revol-
ution', Ch. 8 in this volume.
20 See my introduction to the section on French cinema in this volume, and
particularly the comments on Truffaut's 'A Certain Tendency of the French
Cinema'.
21 See Introduction to this volume.
22 Cf. Fran~ois Truffaut on Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi, Ch. 1 in this volume,
among many other examples.
23 See, for example, Jacques Rivette's 'Du cote de chez Antoine', on Truffaut's
Les 400 Coups, Cahiers 95, May 1959, translated as 'Antoine's Way' in David
Denby, The 400 Blows, New York, Grove Press, 1969.
24 Cf., in a slightly different sense, Truffaut's treatment of the Japanese film
Juvenile Passion as exemplary, in Truffaut, Films in My Life, pp. 246-7.
25 Cf., for example, Rivette's contribution to the 1959 editorial discussion of Hiro-
shima, mon amour, Ch. 6 in this volume.
26 Cf. extracts from interview with Nicholas Ray, Ch. 15 in this volume.

': I

~ .. '

179