Patrick Ciccone wrote:

> the
> underlying critical method from Bazin to Rohmer and Godard and
> Rivette and afterward to Sarris is that cinematic form creates
> meaning on a director-by-director basis. Maybe this is not a new
> idea or interprestaion but the depth to which Cahiers or Sarris and
> their successors grasped upon this idea and used it to explain the
> film and careers of their charished directors seems to me a crucial
> shift, or at least evolution.


It was certainly a shift if, like most everyone, all one had been
exposed to was writing in the daily newspaper. And equally in Europe,
"normal" people don't sit around contemplating movie auteurs and the
magic of god-cinema. But I have already cited the June 1930 number of
La Revue du Cinema in which the editors did exactly the things you cite.
And that was their "politique," which did not change much until the mid
60s. (They even used the same techniques and vocabularly and critical
"methods" to try to market Rossellini in 1954 as they had for Vidor in
1930. For me Rohmer is the greatest writer on Rossellini, and no one
was writing about Rossellini in 1930, but without those people in 1930
Rohmer would not have written the way he did.) It's a little unfair to
cite four of the history's great critics (but in another sense they
weren't "critics" at all, more like poets singing of their loves)
against the inevitably less inspired writing of the 1930s. But these
four were all loyal children of the earlier generation which, in
essence, was the one that parented Cahiers and the New Wave.

> Godard's essay on THE WRONG MAN or
> Rivette's on BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT. Again, maybe there are
> precedents.
>
Curious you should mention the Godard essay. I was a grad student at
NYU in 1969 and, at prof's request, read in class a translation I'd made
of that essay, and every cinema-studies student there was bowled over --
they'd never imagined anyone approaching a movie in that fashion.

I think for various reasons France in the early 50s offered great
opportunities for this sort of essaying, not only for such (until then)
rare extended analysis of scenes, but for Godard's paeons to Ray and
Sirk which were probably not too intelligible even to Cahiers' readers
at the time.

So there're no argument here that this was something "new." But that
begs the question of how new something has to be in order to be new.
The sort of analysis that I've been doing in French magazines, for
example, would have been impossible in the 1950s, but I'm standing on
Godard's shoulders, and he too has many feet and stands on many
shoulders. Yes, there are precedents.

>