In 1951, the French critics Andre Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze founded in Paris the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, which immediately became the most influential site devoted to the study of film as an art form.
For two decades, Cahiers became the dominant critical voice in European and American cinema, due to a number of reasons.
Bazin, who co-edited the magazine until his (untimely) death, in 1958, surrounded himself with a cohort of talented writers-devotees, including Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette.
Eventually, most of them went on to become distinguished directors, providing the core for what became known as La Nouvelle Vague.
Equally important was Cahiers’ reevaluation of mainstream Hollywood cinema, elevating the reputation and prestige of such “commercial” filmmakers as Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, and Nicholas Ray, who weren’t necessarily or always taken seriously by American critics.
Cahiers established a critical tradition that didn’t distinguish between serious art films and commercial entertainment, an approach later embraced by the two most powerful critics in American history: Andrew Sarris, then writing for the Village Voice, and Pauline Kael, the reviewer for the New Yorker.
The approach translates into according the same serious analysis to Jonathan Demme’s horror flick, The Silence of the Lamb, as to his more prestigious but pretentiously earnest drama, Beloved.
