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Editor's note, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 765 – April 2020
The Art of Loving the Art of Loving
by Stéphane Delorme
This issue almost didn’t see the light of day, due to the confinement decided on in response to coronavirus, but we had announced one final issue with the current editorial staff, and we wanted to go through to the end of the job. Against all working rules of drafting and production (illustration, design), which ask to be together, the issue had to be made remotely from March 18 to 27, and, at the time these lines are written, we don’t know exactly how it will be distributed. This special issue, almost without cahier critique[1] because the films have been postponed, is the opportunity to ask ourselves about our action and to speak of what we facilitate, criticism.
We do it naturally from the place whence we speak. If there’s a Cahiers particularity, it’s that “the art of loving”, which for Jean Douchet denotes criticism, actually has two senses. Criticism is the art of loving because cinema is the art of loving. There’s a continuity between the two gestures. It’s the same thing. And when we hate it’s because we wish to love, it’s in the name of ideas we love, of principles we defend, of the cause we espouse. In the moving text that François Truffaut wrote in Arts on the death of André Bazin at 40 in November 1958, he described a type of saint, a good and generous person believing in the indestructible power of dialogue: for the teigne[2] Truffaut, who joined Cahiers at 20 in accordance with what has become the magnificent tradition of the magazine, the founder is like the St. Francis of Rossellini’s Flowers. We never say it so bluntly, but it’s upon love that Cahiers sprouted. Bazinian realism is another name for love. To film the real because one loves it. To film the actors because one loves them. To film the trees, the sea, the wind, because one loves them. The cinema is a love song to life. This is what Cahiers teaches. It’s why the criticism thought here doesn’t resemeble many other forms of criticism, which judge whether films are well made. It’s also why it is virulent and impertinent: to defend and protect what is cherished. When you love life, you go to the cinema,[3] and to love the cinema, is to defend it. Against the assaults of the industry, of the market; against the clichés, the complacencies; against everything that damages our sensitivity. Godard, always: it’s because he loves and knows how to love that he is so hard. As Philippe Katerine so beautifully sings it, “you are hard because you are sensitive, you are sensitive because you are hard.” All the directors defended by Cahiers know how to love. The fatal argument, is to say of a director that they don’t love their characters, their actors, that they don’t know how to love: that they just want to make themselves look good, that they want to show off, that they play the little clever one, or worse, the bastard. All the directors who want to humiliate (there have been many in recent years) are OUT. Bazin had said it once and for all: the cinema is a transitive art, it only makes sense if you forget yourelf to film the other.
Realism is paradoxically the greatest romanticism. It’s the great bridge operated by Bazin. Realism is not the naturalism of small real-life details, fact-checking and dirty little secrets. Realism is the romanticism of the cinema. Cahiers, it’s the resurrection of the Athenaeum of the Schlegel brothers founded in 1798.[4] In 1951 it’s the affirmation that cinema is an art because it films the real and it loves; and not because it tries to imitate the other arts to make amends for recording. But in “art of loving”, there is “art”: it’s the gesture that counts, and the critical mission is to judge the gestures: how does one film a body? How does one set up two planes, an image and a sound? The whole spectrum of cinema unfolds to animate life, to magnetize it and love it. Lynch goes into a rapture in front of whatever he films (“it’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful”) and shows us life as he sees it and as we can see it too. Of course, unceasing romanticism, the charogne[5] is beautiful. And a bouquet of flowers, and an herbarium, and a blue or dark sky. Beauty, ardent beauty. What is the extent of seeing? Can we see to the stars? To create beauty by cinema, not just to see it, because beauty inspires and calls upon us to be worthy (Renoir as much as Bresson). There is beauty seized on the fly, the opportune moment, but let it last too long and it will be burned, hold onto it poorly and it will be ruined. All the powers of cinema can and must unfold from this heart that is love. These are the successive circles of love that make you love a film. The feeling put into everything, the attention to everything, to every detail, to the dialectic of the whole, such a love of the work that some die on the job (Kubrick). The art of loving what one makes and whom one makes it with and whom one makes it for.
[1] The regular section in each month’s issue discussing newly released films.
[2] An informal French word denoting a mean, acrimonious, spiteful person.
[3] A riff on a famous French advertising slogan, “When you love life, you go to the movies.”
[4] The magazine considered to be the founding publication of German Romanticism.
[5] Informal and derogatory French word denoting a filthy or immoral individual.
Adieu, Cahiers du cinéma…
Has the time come for criticism to become purely a work of love? The recent sale of Cahiers du cinéma and the editorial team’s subsequent decision to abandon ship seems to suggest as much. Faced with a conflict of interests and the likelihood of the magazine veering towards commercialism and advertising, the editors took the brave and honorable step of keeping criticism in the realm of love. For love has nothing to do with making money; it is focused soley on the object of its love. In this case, cinema. That it has become all but impossible for print magazines of film criticism to retain this true love while staying economically viable is a sad sight ineeed; but it is not something to despair over—for love remains. Love doesn’t need a print magazine to keep being love; love doesn’t need economic viability to keep being love; love is love, and as long as cinema exists so will the love that loves it.
The near impossibility of making a career out of writing film criticism, while often bemoaned, is in one sense a very good thing: it forces criticism to be a labor of love, and it prevents it from being anything other than a labor of love. Let’s not pretend that some of the most damaging trends in the history of film haven’t come from critics who were paid to show off their personal styles more than to love cinema, or from critics who acted as cogs in the advertising machine more than they acted as lovers of cinema. And anyway, cinephilia was always an amateur sport to begin with—so why don’t we keep it that way? Let love guide the passionate amateur instead of letting market forces guide the indifferent professional. This is what originally made Cahiers so great: the people that were hired to write for it were the people who loved movies the most. So much the better if they were barely in their twenties, for this only meant that they weren’t hardened and cynical professionals, but exuberant and wild amateurs. And that passion had no trouble manifesting itself. They didn’t just like or admire movies—they loved them.
Since there’s no other place to begin than with love, there’s no other place to begin than with the criticism of early Cahiers. The love leaps off the page, and we are reminded that what we imagine as “film criticism” today is so far from what is possible.
- Godard on Godard
- Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave
- Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood
- 12 volumes of Cahiers du Cinéma in English
What we should be after is an all-consuming love that finds in cinema a source of endless edification—a kind of love that reaches for something more, in every way. A kind of love that watches a film and refuses to settle for anything less than maximum edification. A kind of love that searches every film for a glimpse of beauty or a shudder of thought. A kind of love that looks at a film and finds poetry even where there is said to be none. Because without this love, what’s the point? Why watch films? Why write criticism? As we hear in Gray’s The Lost City of Z, “To search for what is beautiful is its own reward.” So few have practiced this criticism of love, this “art of loving,” and so few have reaped it’s rewards. I aim to be one of them. And though Cahiers may never return, the love it practiced is not lost—it’s right here, in the hearts and minds of all who love cinema with the love that never dies.
Love never dies
Love will continue
Love keeps on beating
When you’re gone
Love never dies
Once it is in you
Love may be fleeting
Love lives on
Love is enduring
Love lives on
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