ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the existence of a “Bazinian legacy” for Cahiers du cinéma in its post-1968 guise. Whereas many have considered the era of the journal under Jean-Louis Comolli/Jean Narboni’s editorship as one in which André Bazin’s ideas were rejected, I argue that their relationship with the journal’s founder is far more complex than that. While vocally distancing themselves from his ideas, the critical thinking of this period was profoundly indebted to Bazin’s notion of the cinema’s “ontological” realism at the same time as it was combined with other strands of thought from contemporary French critical theory and psychoanalysis. In charting Cahiers’ “impossible rejection” of Bazin (as Serge Daney dubbed it), their encounters with Éric Rohmer (who embodied a more traditional understanding of Bazin’s thinking) are also traced.
