Conclusion

Serge Daney once declared that there is one quality, above all, that defines Cahiers du cinéma: it resembles its time. ¹ This quality is embodied, perhaps more than any other generation of Cahiers critics, by Daney’s own cohort, whose formative moments came in the years surrounding May ’68. At that time, the journal was an avatar of the historical moment, a microcosm of the near-revolution’s dramas, tensions and contradictions. The Cahiers critics felt, with full force, both the highs and the lows of these years, the giddy moments of utopian dreaming, followed by the crushing return of the political real. Comolli undoubtedly speaks for all of his comrades when he confesses that these années terribles still haunt him today, a half-century later. ² For all of the Cahiers critics, this period left an indelible imprint on their lives, one that leaves them alternating between immense pride at their achievements in the arena of film criticism and theory and uneasy discomfort, even trauma, at the impasses they came up against, the infighting, dogmatism and cruel intransigence to which the journal’s Marxist orientation led them.