Promotional Information

Unique account of cinema's most influential journal

About the Author

Emilie Bickerton is a journalist and critic based in Paris. She is also on the editorial board of New Left Review.

Reviews

Emilie Bickerton has done a valuable and highly informative job.
*Observer*

What I love is Bickerton's certainty and courage. She s stepping here into the viperous pit of French intellectual life like a mongoose with a mission.
*Sight & Sound*

The French New Wave directors all came from Cahiers du Cinéma, a magazine that turned film criticism upside down in the 1950s. The salvoes of its sagacity are finely charted by Bickerton, who also laments the recent slide into dumbed-down mediocrity.
*Financial Times, Books of the Year*

It was 'the last modernist project', Emilie Bickerton says in this deft account of the real life and virtual death of Cahiers du cinema. The cinema itself lived and died in its pages, and it would be hard to imagine a better brief guide to the magazine's positions and polemics than this intelligent and sharply focused book.
*Michael Wood*

Tantalisingly concise ... A reminder that contemporary film criticism could do with being more unapologetically clever-more ingenious, more argumentative, more French.
*London Review of Books*