ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Cahiers du Cinéma’s collective text “Young Mr. Lincoln de John Ford,” a critical re-reading of a canonical film from the classical era of Hollywood cinema, and places it in the context of the journal’s long relationship with Ford’s œuvre. Highlighting the article’s status as a truly communal theoretical undertaking and its indebtedness to the structuralist reading method espoused by Roland Barthes in S/Z, this chapter closely scrutinizes the text on Young Mr. Lincoln. While later critics for Screen noted flaws in the political analysis offered by Cahiers, I show that the value of the Cahiers critics’ reading lies in their emphasis on the American director’s formal language, the play of visibility and invisibility that produces symptomatic discrepancies with the conscious ideological goals of the original project.
