Subtitle of "Cinema": Creating a way of viewing and writing a cultural history 1944-1968 Author: [France] Antoine Deback

The former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema tells the history of love for cinema, reconstructing an era of "madly ambitious and madly sincere"

【Editor's recommendation】

◆ Written by the former editor-in-chief of "Cahiers du Cinema", it uses a large amount of first-hand documents, private archives, and conversations with the parties involved to build biographies of various figures in the history of French cinephilia and reconstruct the spiritual context and social background of a generation of cinephilia culture.

◆ A history of cinephilia with "Cahiers du cinéma" as its fulcrum and "film lovers" such as Bazin, Rohmer, Langlois, Truffaut, and Godard as its core.

◆ A must-read masterpiece in the field of French film culture research, it has been reprinted several times and tells a cultural history of how to discover, watch, screen, collect, protect, comment on and defend films.

◆ To retell a method of viewing for those who love movies, and to provide a cinephilic path on how to indulge, how to create, and even how to obtain some kind of lasting spiritual power from the past.

【Professional recommendation】

This book describes the most exciting era in the history of French film culture with delicate and subtle writing style, through amazing historical materials and a broad historical perspective. It is a model and masterpiece of film cultural history!

——Li Yang, Vice Dean of the School of Arts, Peking University

Professor Antoine Deback, like Bazin as he described him, continues to care for and restore this group of cinephiles who have influenced contemporary Paris, French and even world cinema at the "convergence" of film and history, which makes his book "Cinema" an indispensable "confluence", which reveals the relationship between film and general art, human actions, and especially reality. Therefore, Professor Cai Wensheng's in-depth, accurate and spiritual translation allows Chinese cinephiles in the past and present to trace history and its complexity, and to understand the profound meaning of the cinephilic movement precisely and only at its "confluence".

——Wang Fang, Professor of the School of Film and Television Media, Shanghai Normal University, Knight of Arts and Letters of France

De Backer's classic "Cinema" is like a pair of eyes that penetrate history, a pair of hands that provide poetic commentary, and a brain of film thought.

——Sun Songrong, Taiwanese film scholar, professor at Taipei National University of the Arts

I first met Cai Wensheng at Charles Tesson's (former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema and artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival's "Critics' Week") graduate reading group. He was always the student with the most questions and the fastest ideas. After obtaining his master's degree, he told me that he wanted to study for a doctorate with Antoine Deback (former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema and now professor of film studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris). When he was about to return from his studies, he once again came to the tomb of André Bazin and expressed his long-cherished wish to spread film culture. If "film-loving" is a belief, he may be a "chosen torchbearer".

——Li Qi, PhD in Film Studies from Paris III University, currently teaches at Shanghai Film Academy, Shanghai University

【Content Introduction】

"Cinematheque to me is a love for films, film directors, critics and people who watch them." - Antoine Deback

How did those fanatical moviegoers in the early 1960s watch movies?

Where would they sit in the theater? How would they sit? How would they conduct the film club?

How do their group activities specifically take place?

How do they share their film-watching diaries through conversation, letters, and private and public writing?

…

Cinema was once a passion that belonged to France. Cinema fans not only watched countless films, but also devoted their hearts and minds to it - exchanging eloquent opinions on the films they had seen, writing reviews, meeting directors, founding magazines and newspapers, and even hosting film clubs. It is said that it was this extremely special atmosphere that made the master directors of the 20th century famous in Paris between the liberation period and 1968. To a large extent, it was precisely the so-called cinephilia culture that "created" many film artists such as Hitchcock, Hawks, Rossellini, and Renoir. It was the fans who pushed them into the ranks of serious authors and intellectuals, and thus became creators of 20th century culture like Aragon, Picasso, John Cage and others.

Who are these movie fans? In this book, Antoine Debacker will write biographies and portraits of these "movie lovers" who later became critics, directors, writers, and journalists, especially Bazin, Rohmer, Langlois, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, Dardenne, etc. While he describes the life course, passionate ideals, and fighting deeds of these great figures in great detail, he also examines them from a perspective that transcends film and its history: after all, these movie fans who are deeply influenced by surrealism, existentialism, literary tradition, and structuralism can indeed observe the ideological trends, art forms, and major topics that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s from an alternative perspective.