ABSTRACT
Dissatisfied with a purely semiological approach to the cinema, which would attempt to understand filmic signification using linguistic categories, Cahiers du cinéma instead drew on the notion of écriture developed by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva as the theoretical touchstone for their response to films. This chapter highlights round-table discussions on elements of filmic writing—montage and film space (the latter unpublished until the 2010s)—before making a brief excursus looking at the criticism written by Jacques Rivette at the end of the 1960s. Finally, it broaches the relationship between Cahiers and the deconstructionist tradition of Tel Quel and Derrida, which sought to transcend the binaries of structuralist semiotics through a critical method that saw writing as an act not of creating meaning but of undoing signification itself.
