Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

In anticipation of a Sarkozy presidency, the grandiose French film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma, has embraced globalization by agreeing to appear in English as well as on this internet thing. The site is very well done, by the way. Felicitations! Don't know what the Maoist collective that ran the magazine during the early 1970s would have made of all this, but we're dealing with a new kind of dialectical materialism these days.

Cahiers du cinema! Ah, those Gaulloises-impregnated names: Jean Cocteau, Éric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut... Talking of Truffaut, in a famed 1954 Cahiers article, he attacked La qualité française and praised Hollywood directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann. This heralded the beginning of the auteur movement. Equally momentous was the 1975 review of Jaws: "A misplaced desire (the young people smoking by the beach that the fiction will promptly get rid off) will be replaced by a more social desire, the desire to end the horror, the desire to return to normality. This is the function of catastrophe-movies. It is not the only one though, for what is given to desire is the norm. And in this way, this cinema, at its limit, is fascist." Eh?

This review heralded the end of the Maoist experiment. Now, the magazine has turned over a new leaf, and the move to English and électronique may indicate that the febrile mood of France is in for a lift. With Sarkozy in the Élysée, les misérables might, finally, be able to shake off their fear of global failure.

BTW, if you find Cahiers du cinéma a teeny weeny bit too intellectual, there's always Cashiers du Cinemart.