ABSTRACT
The six installments of “Technique and Ideology” which conclude this book were published by Cahiers du cinéma between the spring of 1971 and, 15 months later, the autumn of 1972 – that is, amidst the highs and lows of a crucial period for the team behind the magazine. Coming out of the struggle to keep Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque française (in April 1968) – a battle led from the front line by Cahiers, which was victorious, in the sense that Langlois and Mary Meerson returned to their posts at the Chaillot cinema, taking back their offices and their wondrous machines on the Rue de Messine – we entered the events of May with the same spirit, participating in the proceedings of the “États généraux du cinéma” in the École Louis Lumière, on the Rue de Vaugirard. i After May came June. The “return to order” provoked a more aggressive, more fervent form of political engagement. The magazine swung to the left. Soon, the “editor in chief” was abolished – I mean the title and not the function – and in our opposition to the spectacle we even went as far as banishing photographs and frame enlargements from our pages. This occurred just before the appearance of the sixth installment of “Technique and Ideology,” and today it is not absurd to see this circumstance as being linked to the fact that a “to be continued” does not cease to leave this final section unclosed, incapable of being spared from our new iconoclasm.
