Cahiers du Cinema: The New Wave in a New World

All these directors are, by now, critically heralded, so it can be surprising to to be reminded of the mixed reception that greeted now-canonical films such as Raging Bull (too violent, thought some) and Manhattan, which drew a Joan Didion diss in the New York Review of Books and complaints from some of the film's own actors. "I went to see Manhattan," Meryl Streep said, "and I felt like I wasn't even in it."

The vintage reviews and essays will make scribes pine for the days when a piece of print could change the world. Kael's takedown of Eastwood, for instance, is set up by that book's author as an "unfair and inaccurate" attack that exerted a shaping effect on Eastwood's career. It's hard to deny that these sorts of aesthetic arguments raged more fully — with real consequences — in days past.

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These days, Cahiers is moving into a period of expansion: Editorial director Valérie Buffet told the Weekly its editors plan to commission books "dedicated to all aspects of cinema, from introductions to contemporary directors and essays on specific genres to film theory and comprehensive studies on iconic figures and periods." It's an ambitious slate at a time when many worry about the death of print. We're also in an era when French — once the culture world's lingua franca — seems increasingly marginal.

There's a farewell to the old Cahiers vision near the end of the Almodóvar volume, where Sotinel dubs the man from La Mancha, alongside Nanni Moretti and Jim Jarmusch, the last auteurs. They have no heirs, he writes, since directors of the next generation "do not attain (nor do they claim to do so) the status of major artists."

All of this puts Cahiers in a funny position, almost the opposite of its youthful, giant-slaying, Hollywood-championing past. By asserting the importance of artistically serious directors, and by working in the medium of print, Cahiers now seems dedicated to conserving rather than radically challenging our notions of film and culture. It's not breaking open but shoring up.