ABSTRACT
Soon after the publication of “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du Cinéma embarked on a concerted rapprochement with intellectuals aligned with the Parti communiste français, which would last until mid-1971. The timing was strange: in the eyes of much of the far left, the PCF had been thoroughly discredited by the role it played during the May ’68 protests. Looming large over the Cahiers critics, however, was the influence of Louis Althusser (who also advocated working within the nation’s only mass working-class party), and they found the critics writing for the party’s cultural journal La Nouvelle Critique to be promising interlocutors. This strategic orientation led to groundbreaking critical work on Soviet cinema, Jean Renoir’s La vie est à nous, Robert Kramer’s Ice and the fiction de gauche, while at the same time Pascal Kané, Jean-Pierre Oudart, Pascal Bonitzer and Pierre Baudry joined the fold at Cahiers. Soon, however, the contradictions of the journal’s attempted dialogue with the PCF would emerge.
