Byline: Philip French

Cahiers du Cinema, the world's best-known film magazine, is, according to Emilie Bickerton in her admirable history, "limping on today as another banal mouthpiece of the spectacle". It will be 60 next year, provided it survives its latest change in ownership from Le Monde to the British publishing house Phaidon. It was founded in 1951 by a trio of writers, chief among them France's most respected critic and theorist, the 33-year-old Andre Bazin, a liberal Catholic of wide and generous sympathies. He attracted a group of young men of passionate views frequently expressed in extreme, sometimes mystical terms. They attacked respectable literary cinema ("la qualite francaise") and the tastes of an older generation ("le cinema du papa") and exalted the director as individual creator ("la politique des auteurs"), most especially old Hollywood masters like Hawks, Hitchcock, Preminger and Walsh. These young Turks, little interested in politics, were moral aesthetes...