Machine Translated by Google

Machine Translated by Google

To Paul
Machine Translated by Google

Thanks

I would like to express my gratitude to:

Serge Bromberg, Emmanuel Burdeau, Pascal Manuel Heu, Benjamin Illos,

Nicolas Pariser, Rebecca Prime and Bertrand Tavernier who, at one time or
another during the development of this book, helped me with my research,
Serge Bozon, Patrick Brion, Michel Ciment, Alfred Eibel, Jacques Lourcelles,
Michel Marmin, Luc Moullet and Louis Skorecki who gave me time to answer
my questions, Laure Gaudenzi, head of the Cinémathèque universitaire,
thanks to whose diligence I was able to see an extremely rare short film,
Justine Alleron who was kind enough to send me her thesis on the journal
Présence du cinéma before its publication.

Finally, I must address special thanks to:

Bruno Andrade, for his friendly enthusiasm, his wonderful invitation and
his scholarly and invigorating conversation, Michel Mourlet, for his initial
encouragement, the sharing of his documentation and his prompt responses
to the hundreds of emails I sent him over five years, Claire, of course, for her
constant support and her judicious remarks as a first reader.
Machine Translated by Google

Table of Contents
Thanks

A story still in progress

Foreword
1. The post-war cinephile context
2. The Mac-Mahon

3. “On an ignored art”

4. The Mac-Mahonians at the Cahiers du cinéma

5. The Parisian release of Time Without Pity

6. The Mac-Mahon exclusive room and the Mac-Mahon Circle

7. The break with Cahiers du cinéma

8. Presence of cinema

9. The Mac-Mahonians, the Hussars and French cinema in the early 60s

10. Loyalty to the square of aces...and its transformation into three of a kind

11. The annexes of the Pantheon and Mac-Mahon Distribution

12. Lourcelles at the head of Présence : a neo-Mac-Mahonism?

13. The agony of Presence of Cinema

14. Farewell to MacMahonism
15. Assessment of MacMahonism

16. Reminiscences

Appendix: summary of issues of Présence du cinéma

Bibliography
Video and audio recordings
Machine Translated by Google

Onomastic index
Endnotes
Machine Translated by Google

A story still in progress

by Michel Mourlet

Much has been said and written about what is called "MacMahonism", for or against with
passion, or without preconceptions, with the serenity that befits historians. Without claiming
to be exhaustive, the audio-video bibliography that closes this volume reflects fairly faithfully
the composition of the MacMahonian critical corpus. In particular, it highlights the fact that
until now there was no complete history of what some called our "sect", although as early as
1992 it featured prominently in the World Dictionary of Contemporary Literary and Artistic
Movements, published by Éditions du Rocher. The first virtue of the History of MacMahonism
is therefore, in my eyes, to fill a gap, and to fill it in due time, that is to say when all the
witnesses have not disappeared.

A constant of historical research, in fact, or at least of many of them, is to preferably be

carried out after the death of the participants. Certainly, if the research concerns the empire
of Alexander, one can understand the difficulty of proceeding otherwise. But this is also the
case, too often, with contemporary events that it would have been judicious to study in vivo
rather than waiting for the butterfly behind the glass to dry up.

Several recent anomalies have drawn my attention to this troubling deficiency in

reconstructions of the past. I will mention only one, which is related to the subject treated in
this book. A few years ago, while surfing the Web, I came across a site devoted to cinema
magazines. I naturally went to check that Présence du cinéma was listed there and came
across an incredible collection of inaccuracies and second- or third-hand approximations,
correctable in five minutes if the author of the notice had had the good idea to question the
main parties concerned: Jacques Lourcelles or me. Fortunately, one can consult a perfectly
reliable page devoted to our magazine on Wikipedia. But this tiny example gives food for
thought on historical work, as it is too often practiced.
Machine Translated by Google

This is why we must be grateful to Christophe Fouchet for having accomplished

in the best possible way the task he had set himself: to tell the story of
MacMahonism, relying mainly on the testimonies of its leaders and witnesses
still in this world, an approach that spared him any adventurous temptation of
hypothesis or interpretation. This in no way prevents him from adding here and
there, as he says, his "grain of salt".
But this flavor enhancer never conceals or inflects the reality of the facts, as we
see, alas! among historians for whom the story of the past is worth above all as
a vehicle for the passions of the present. No ideology in his book, nor even
strictly speaking an aesthetic orientation: preferences or principles. Example: at
the origin of a large volume of inventory-rehabilitation of French films of the silent
era1 he exposes without batting an eyelid my provocative sentence according to
,

which "cinema begins with the talkies".

Such rare equanimity, as I said, does not exclude commentary or even

judgment. It allows for discussion. Thus, when Christophe Fouchet asserts twice
that anointing Guitry's cinema contradicts MacMahonism, if by chance he meant:
because of the theatrical importance given to speech, I would answer: no more
than Rohmer's cinema. I explained myself about Rohmer, with a play on words:
MacMahonism is the language of staging: Rohmer is the staging of language.

I would gladly add Pagnol, Eugène Green, even Mankiewicz. When the verb
ceases to be only the bearer of the plot and an extension of behavior to become
the central element, more central, even, than the actor-character, it is clear that
the editing, the work of the camera, the organization of space, the maieutics of
the actors are organized around an axis shifted from an action film; but also that
as far as their functioning, their reason for being, their reception are concerned,
nothing changes. On the other hand, if, as appears to be the case in his
commentary on Guitry, Christophe Fouchet focuses on ironic or malicious
distance, I readily admit the contradiction he points out, but I then invoke the
status of the entire comic genre, which is based on an incessant back-and-forth
of withdrawal and magnification of "real life", placing, according to the masterful
explanation of Laughter, "the mechanical on the living" and thereby excluding
the empathy of the spectator. Should we therefore push the comic genre out of
the MacMahonian field? This type of question makes Christophe Fouchet's work
not only indispensable to the history
Machine Translated by Google

cinematic ideas, but an actor himself in this ongoing story where he raises
new questions.
As for some of Cassandra's "prophecies" (the future of Visconti, Fellini,
Resnais, Welles and others), which Christophe Fouchet notes have been
denied in the face of the positive contributions, I would like to put the remark
into perspective. On the one hand, they were made when the filmmakers in
question, except for Welles, were far from having completed their work. I
have not subsequently concealed my very keen taste for Welles' Prova
d'orchestra, for Amarcord, for Une Histoire immortelle , and the pleasant
surprise I found in Resnais's evolution - like certain painters lightening their
palette - towards a "lightness of being" that broke with the paralyzing
heaviness of his early experiments. On the other hand, the regressive
sclerosis, mentioned later, which affects institutional, theoretical and critical
reflection, especially in France, is no more conducive now to heartbreaking
revisions of the "cinematographically correct" than it was sixty years ago. To
assess what exactly the reception of an Antonioni is around 2022, for
example, it is rather towards Brazilian, Spanish, Italian cinephiles that we
should turn, because from what I know it is among them today that ideas are
stirred and established values are questioned. I already pointed this out in a
conference reproduced in the paperback edition of Sur un art inconnu, and
in the preface to this same edition: cinephilia, the real one, in the pioneering
and passionate sense of the term, cinephilia also as a social phenomenon,
small, certainly, but identifiable, born in Paris, disappeared from France
around May 68; but it has spread throughout the world as if by the
phenomenon of communicating vessels.

In fact, this History of MacMahonism, once closed, leaves an imprint in the

mind in the form of an observation. Malraux, for his part, had formulated it in
a rather funny way about Gaullism. Everyone has been, is or will be a
MacMahonian. Even the heirs of our adversaries, today concede that the
love of cinema had more to gain from us than from what became immediately
after us ÿ let's not call it film criticism ÿ the discourse on films.

This, it seems to me, can be explained quite logically. The understanding of

cinema has gone through four phases: the pictorial phase of the pure image,
a consequence of muteness; the literary phase of the theme and the subject,
born of the talkies (1930s to 1950s); the taking of
Machine Translated by Google

awareness of the staging, illustrated for the most part by the Cahiers du
cinéma, Positif, the Nickelodéon and especially by the Mac-Mahonian
dissidence; finally, after this sort of acme of cinephile criticism dancing
on its toes, its decline: the laborious return to the theme, linked to the
extreme politicization of reflection towards the end of the 60s.
I readily speak here of regression, because if the substance of the
reflection is very different, kneaded with what the "human sciences"
have thrown into it pell-mell, the result is a step backwards: the re-
consideration, in order to discuss a film and award it a mark, of everything
that is external to the filmed material: what, in "On an Ignored Art", I
designated as "the age of the captain" for The Raft of the Medusa. No
more than the value of Géricault's work is based on the biography of
Duroy de Chaumareys, commander of the shipwrecked frigate, the quality
and interest of a moving continuum of action-bearing sound-images are
measured by nothing other than the dramatic, lyrical or comic force of the
roaring river that bursts from the screen, rolls us, carries us away in its
eddies, ÿ or leaves us dry, dejected, on the bank. The rest, including the
semiological dissection once in vogue in certain corners of our Sorbonnes,
the rest evaporates into pure ratiocinations, at the slightest contact with
the emotional force of a film. This without any more benefit for its
audience than for its artisans. Now, tell me, what other reason is there to
launch on the luminous river, with great effort, a boat loaded with words,
if not to invite a few spectators to travel and bring a few filmmakers a little
ammunition and food?
It would remain, in the history of art, to specify the exact place of this
crossing of a threshold: the taking into account of the real matter of a
film, outside of any script intention, political, philosophical, aesthetic
presupposition, connoted implication, conjecture of hidden meaning,
finally free of any "metatext" likely to blur the direct relationship established
by the projection between the spectator and the spectacle. A relationship
which alone, in its brutality, stripped of cultural filter as much as possible,
allows the spectator a true lived knowledge of the characters, a true
immersion in the action, an intuitive, immediate perception ÿ shall I say
Bergsonian? ÿ of the portion of the universe represented.
I have already raised the issue on several occasions, but in texts less
well-known than my "manifesto", in any case less commented on. In
2
1987, in the foreword to Mise en Scène comme langage , I sketched
Machine Translated by Google

for the first time a parallel between MacMahonism and the "Copernican revolution"
accomplished a century earlier in painting and poetry. In 1990, in the collective collection
edited by Francis Bordat, L'Amour du cinéma américain3 , I hammered home the point: the
awareness of the primacy of filmic matter constituted the decisive theoretical contribution of
MacMahonism. "We could," I wrote, "compare it to what happened in the 19th century for
poetry, for example, under the impetus of Poe, relayed by Mallarmé and Valéry, or for
painting, according to Malraux, with Manet's Olympia ."

4
Finally, I developed this idea in a fairly long passage from
5
Television or the Myth of Argus which contains my course in the theory of audiovisual
communication at Paris I in the 1980s. This time, it was a question of showing it as
anticipating (by about ten years) the contribution to the "global village" of the Canadian
thinker Marshall McLuhan, one of whose most famous apophthegms remains " The medium
is the message. "

Historical study implies almost by definition the temporal end of its object, whose
existence, according to the famous formula, has been transformed into destiny. Once the
journey is completed, we can then tell its story. Today, Christophe Fouchet is the first to
consider the MacMahonian movement not only as a finished object of historical study, but
as a factor of agitation of ideas in permanent activity. He verifies this in the confrontation he
sets up between the Bazino-MacMahonian demand for realism resulting from the mechanical
recording of reality and the new digital techniques of image manipulation. He confirms this
in the Brecht-Aristotle confrontation, always virulent, that some of us have thought it
appropriate to forget, although the incompatibility between the playful but total involvement
of the spectator, recognized by Aristotle as necessary for catharsis, and the distancing (the
"V effect") of Brecht, who always proclaimed himself loud and clear as Aristotle's public
enemy number 1, was notorious.

Another proof of the vitality of MacMahonism: the interest it arouses beyond borders, which
has grown over the years. Translations and commentaries in English, Spanish, and
Portuguese, fuel academic and film-loving curiosity around the world, particularly in the two
Americas.
To those who know how to listen, Christophe Fouchet lets it be known: the true great
lovers of the Seventh Art (there are still some), the "madmen" as he says, the movie nuts,
who are also the least docile, the least tossed about by the dominant currents of thought,
are beginning to
Machine Translated by Google

to question the paths taken by both cinema itself and the glosses it feeds.
When we reach the point where we no longer perceive in a fiction film, to
describe it, anything other than: either the entertainment of helots denounced
by Georges Duhamel in the 1930s, or a kind of sociological document to be
deciphered, to which moral or intellectual "authorities" ten times more
powerful and castrating than the Hays Code issue or not a certificate of
conformity, there is reason to fear, in fact, that the future of cinema will take
refuge in its past.
Another evil, according to our author, affects today's cinema. An evil that I
have often deplored in other sectors of creative activity, particularly in the
plastic arts: the refusal to hierarchize works, the abolition of discernment, the
"everything is worth everything" of egalitarian, sickly and benevolent
eclecticism; a direct consequence of the universal Anglo-Saxon mercantilism
that irrigates the moral Order of "globalism". If every inhabitant of the planet
is a consumer in act or in potential, all cultural products are merchandise to
be offered to him, without distinction of beauty, pleasure, relevance,
singularity, with no other difference between them than that of the sale price,
if possible in dollars, the only value to remain officially in force in Western
civilization. Let us never forget that the notion of "cultural exception" ("cultural
products are not a commodity like any other"), obtained at the last minute
from the World Trade Organization, was fought tooth and nail by the United
States. The golden rule of commodification applies no less to the products in
question: all are consumable, therefore all are equally acceptable.
Reactionary, backward-looking, discredited are those who try to place Jeff
Koons on a scale other than the stock market price. And, it goes without
saying, all the media accredited by the system in place obey this rule. Hence,
for example, in a weekly television listings magazine, the same number of
stars are given to a Walsh masterpiece and to an American police series that
has already been copied a hundred times over the past thirty years.

However, the very existence of this book, the discussions it initiates in the
specialized debate, provide proof that all may not be lost forever. A glimmer
that has just been intensified in Critical Inquiry, the prestigious journal of the
University of Chicago, by the conclusion of Tom Gunning, professor emeritus
of cinema and art history, who presents the first complete translation into
English of my 1959 manifesto. Although
Machine Translated by Google

that I am loath to quote a laudatory statement about myself, his peroration answers
so literally to my secret desire that I cannot pass it over in silence. Here it is in
French. After crediting me with proposing " with audacity the exploration of a
pleasure full of both dangers and promises ", Professor Gunning specifies: "Few
critics have described with such sympathy the absorption of the spectator in the
world of the screen. This seems particularly pertinent today, when cinema is
dispersing into multiple supports and platforms, which nevertheless seem to open
up new experiences of immersion to the spectator. Whether we are suspicious or
fanatic (or, as I think we should be, both together) with regard to this mode of
participation, Mourlet offers us the testimony of one who has at the same time lived
and understood the immersive power of cinema. The unexpected richness of his
analysis encourages us to speculate on the future technical and aesthetic evolution
of our art.

6»

I don't think I'm mistaken: the love of cinema - this cinema that some of us
considered to be the major art of our time - is not extinguished. Besides, not all of
today's films are formatted supports of noisy imagery, intended for a child audience.
In the history of MacMahonism, a hope can be read in filigree.

1 Zoom Arrière n°4 “French silent cinema”, 2020.

2nd Ed. Henri Veyrier, 1987. Expanded reissue of On an Ignored Art published by the Table Ronde in 1965.

3 File of the quarterly review CinémAction directed by Guy Hennebelle and co-published by Corlet-Télérama (CinémAction
ceased publication in 2019).
4
“The Principles of MacMahon”, p. 156-157.

5 Ed. France Univers, 2001, p. 103 to 107.

6 Critical Inquiry, Spring 2022, Volume 48, Number 3. The English version of the manifesto is by Gila Walker, translator of
Maeterlinck and Derrida, among others. The University of Chicago, 202 Wieboldt Hall, 1050 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois60637.
Email: [email protected]
Machine Translated by Google

Foreword
In his fascinating history of Cahiers du cinéma published in 1991, Antoine
de Baecque noted, with regard to MacMahonism: " a literature surely too
poor in relation to the influence of the group ."
Over the past thirty years, this deficiency has been partially filled by several
autobiographies, but no book on the movement in its entirety has been
published. This is all the more strange given that MacMahonism continues
to infuse debate, criticism and thought on cinema. Trafic, Senses of Cinema,
Foco, La Furia Umana, Apaches and Lumière are some of the magazines
that have discussed MacMahonism in the last ten years.
Whether they are of French, American, Spanish, Italian or Brazilian origin, the nationality of their
contributors is very varied. All have a position that can be described as "pointed", preferring
theory and analysis to the reporting of releases in theaters. On a broader level, one of the most
striking signs of the posterity of Mac-Mahonism is the abundance of preconceived ideas, more
or less founded in reality, which continue to circulate on its account: purist intransigence,
reactionary snobbery, fascist tendencies... In film criticism, no movement will have had such a
lasting sulphurous aura; for good and bad reasons.

But what is MacMahonism? The intensive attendance at the MacMahon

theater located near the Champs-Elysées? A theory of the seventh art that
advocates the primacy of staging? The cult of a handful of directors headed
by the "four aces" formed by Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and
Joseph Losey?
The first challenge posed by writing this book is to find the unity of a
singularly protean movement. To tell the story of Mac-Mahonism is to tell in
particular: the tribulations of a group of cinephile friends, the programming
of a unique theater, a school of thought studied today at the university, the
wars of critical chapels at the turn of the 60s, the still embryonic "New New
Wave", the history of a magazine from its ninth issue... What do the activism
led by
Machine Translated by Google

Pierre Rissient, the theory formulated by Michel Mourlet and the periodical directed by
Jacques Lourcelles? This is what I tried to determine.

Then, writing a story raises the question of temporal boundaries.

When does MacMahonism begin? When does it end? A vast debate that can only be
resolved by assuming a dose of arbitrariness. It is quite natural to start the movement with
the formation of the gang: it is the school year when Pierre Rissient and Michel Mourlet are
in second year at the Lycée Carnot that the core is formed; around 1951 therefore.

More debatable is the determination of an end date. I chose to end my story with the end of
the Présence du cinéma magazine while devoting a chapter to what I call "reminiscences"
of the movement. After 1967, there was no longer one Mac-Mahonism, there were Mac-
Mahonians who, each on their own, followed their own paths; which does not exclude
occasional reunions (the Matulu adventure, is it still Mac-Mahonism?). Of course, purists
could retort that the gang began to disperse in 1962 and that Pierre Rissient's Mac-Mahon
Distribution company already had little to do with Présence du cinéma which, by the
mid-1960s, had practically become the place of expression of Jacques Lourcelles alone. It
would have been a shame not to tell the end of the MacMahonian review, especially since
the last text to appear there serves as a magnificent conclusion to the adventure.

Finally, why did I embark on this enterprise when my job is not to write about cinema?
Apart from the fact that I was encouraged to do so by a writer whom I hold in high esteem, it
is because the texts of Michel Mourlet and Jacques Lourcelles, discovered in the 2000s,
were revelations for the young film buff that I was then. The clarity of a style, the coherence
of a thought, the loftiness of a tone seduced me. However, with the exception of those taken
up by Mourlet in his own collections, the great MacMahonian writings have never been
republished since their initial publication, in low-circulation magazines. This is why I first
wanted to establish an anthology, possibly presented by myself. Mourlet and Lourcelles, but
also Jean Curtelin, Pierre Rissient, Jacques Serguine or Marc Bernard, as well as detractors
of the movement, such as Luc Moullet, could have appeared there. Produce the evidence
so that everyone can judge,
Machine Translated by Google

while feeding on a still invigorating prose: such was my initial objective. But very quickly,
obtaining the agreement of each of the rights holders proved excessively complicated for
the perfect novice in the matter that I was. Moreover, reading periodicals and interviews
with various Mac-Mahonians (central or peripheral) showed me that there was material to
write a book that was not limited to a rehash of the memoirs published in recent years.
Several untruths - some peddled for decades in all good faith - could also be dispelled. By
trying to show maximum balance without depriving myself, aware of arriving after the
battles, of the cinephile pleasure of sometimes putting in my two cents, I therefore launched
myself.

On quotes: generally, quotes are referenced with notes that refer to the end of the work.
If a quote is not referenced, one of two things will happen:

either it is next to a comment on the article from which it is extracted and its source is
then so obvious that I did not consider it necessary to add the reference

either it is something that was said to me verbally

Machine Translated by Google

The post-war cinephile context

On May 28, 1946, Léon Blum, mandated by the French government, and James Byrnes,
American Secretary of State, signed the agreements to renegotiate the credit granted by the
United States to France during the Second World War. In exchange for the liquidation of part of
the debt and a new loan, the Americans obtained the end of quotas on the distribution of their
films in France. Although limited by a system of exclusivity that ensured four weeks of exploitation
out of thirteen to national films, this measure had two notable consequences. First, it raised an
outcry among filmmakers who had been unaccustomed to Hollywood competition by the German
Occupation and who were now being manipulated by a powerful communist party. Tribunes and
demonstrations followed one another and resulted in several revisions that have lastingly shaped
the legal and economic framework of French cinema.

Second, the Hollywood studios, finally having access to the French market, released in Paris
films that had been waiting in their drawers for several years. Among them, many masterpieces
by Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Borzage, John Ford, Howard Hawks,
William Wyler, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturges, Raoul Walsh, Otto Preminger, Orson Welles…

With these films, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Clark
Gable made their return to French screens. With the injustice that was his when he spoke about
the cinema of his country, Serge Daney said very well how much a young boy wanted to identify
with these American stars more than with a Michel Simon, as brilliant an actor as he was, or a
Gérard Philipe: " I heard the noise of the boards, the voice of the fop, and I knew absolutely that,
in terms of Franco-American arm wrestling, it was starting badly and that there was almost
shame in being from the country of Fanfan la Tulipe as soon as we had seen Scaramouche On
the female side, the French public discovered thanks to actresses such as

1» .
Machine Translated by Google

Gene Tierney, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr and Ava Gardner a sex appeal
of a completely different power than the gentle charm exuded by Gisèle
Pascal, Micheline Presle and Madeleine Sologne, darlings of French cinema
in the second half of the 1940s. The erotomaniac tendency of French
cinephilia, very broad and very ecumenical since it brought together critics
as opposed as Ado Kyrou and François Truffaut, was sensitive to it. We
sometimes forget it but, in the 1950s, the most serious film magazines
published impassioned odes to the divas of the screen. Hollywood stars were
an integral part of the power of fascination of American cinema. Soon, Marilyn
Monroe, Marlon Brando and James Dean would impose their myths...

The ten years following the Liberation also consecrated Hollywood genres.
The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Laura and Gilda
introduced the French to film noir; this discovery took place at the same time
as its literary equivalent, the famous "Série noire" collection founded in 1945
by Marcel Duhamel. The western was renewed by old masters (John Ford,
Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh) and by newcomers (Anthony Mann, Delmer
Daves, Jacques Tourneur, Samuel Fuller). By filming the infantry, aviation
and navy more realistically than ever before, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh,
Howard Hawks and John Ford told the story of the Second World War in the
heat of the moment and invented the modern war film. Finally, after having
enchanted spectators around the world during the 1930s with the monumental
choreographies of Busby Berkeley and the pas de deux of Ginger and Fred,
the Hollywood musical film found a new lease of life under the leadership of
Arthur Freed, the MGM producer who launched Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse,
Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen. The aura of these emblematic products
of the dream factory was multiplied by the brilliance of Technicolor (it must
be remembered that the French color films released in the 1940s can be
counted on the fingers of one hand). Only comedy, despite the important
revelation that was Preston Sturges, was not quite as flourishing as before
the war because of the death of Ernst Lubitsch in 1946 and the distancing of
Frank Capra and Leo McCarey from the studios. It would take until the
mid-1950s for Billy Wilder, Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis and Richard Quine to
give it a new, cartoonish and wild impetus.
Machine Translated by Google

To use Serge Daney's words, American cinema of this

era was " at its maximum capacity for happiness, for grace "2 .

Coupled with the revelation of Italian neorealism, this proliferation stimulated cinephilic
passion and theoretical fever. In 1947, 424 million tickets were sold in France. For 42
million inhabitants. An absolute record. Theaters multiplied at the same rate as specialized
magazines. Film clubs, which allowed people to discover classics that had left the exhibition
circuit, were experiencing their golden age.

Since 1943, the Cinémathèque française had been showing the old films that it had begun
to collect in 1936 at 7 avenue de Messine thanks to the good relations between Henri
Langlois and Georges Franju and the president of the FIAF (International Federation of Film
Archives) Frank Hansel who, in his capacity as SS Obersturmbannführer, had seized part of
this Jewish property.3 In 1955, after the building was recovered by its rightful owner (Pierre
Barbin recounts that Langlois' delaying tactics and mystifying genius in mobilizing Parisian
critics in his favor had delayed the eviction for ten years), the Cinémathèque would move to
rue d'Ulm.

Continuing the work begun by the pioneer Roger Leenhardt in the 1930s, major texts
by Maurice Schérer (future Eric Rohmer) and Alexandre Astruc revolutionized the approach
to the seventh art. Film criticism was finally getting rid of the nostalgia for silent films and
the obsession with the visual that resulted from it. Following a path opened by Henri Colpi
in 1949 in Ciné-digest, magazines began to publish analyses of film editing that radically
contrasted with the criticism that preceded the Liberation. The manic study of a director's
work allowed him to be elevated to the rank of major artist, even if he was a simple
employee of the Hollywood industry. The way he directed the actors in the frame or used
depth of field, in other words his staging, could define his style in the same way that the
rhythm of the editing and the variations of the lighting had characterized the giants of the
silent film. Directors of westerns and musicals thus found themselves ennobled. Thanks to
exegeses as erudite as they were delirious, the thriller maker Alfred Hitchcock was put on
the same level as Sergei Eisenstein, the author of the legendary Battleship Potemkin.
Which did not please the established critics where the communists were
Machine Translated by Google

very powerful. In L'écran français, the main weekly cinema magazine that came under the
control of the PCF in June 1948, Louis Daquin bluntly accused the "formalist" critics who
dared to defend American films of abusing the freedom of expression for which their elders
in the Resistance had fought.

The most important thinker on cinema of this period was undoubtedly André Bazin. A
Catholic activist in various popular education associations, his penetrating articles were
received by a wide variety of publications, from the popular Parisien libéré to the intellectual
review Esprit. In 1951, he founded Les Cahiers du cinéma with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and
Joseph-Marie Lo Duca . The starting point of his theory was the following: cinema is
distinguished from other arts because it records reality and therefore does not need to resort
to symbolizing third parties to represent the world: " Cinema appears as the completion in
time of photographic objectivity ."

4
. For
example, one of the qualities of cinema compared to theatre is that a forest can be a forest and
not a painting representing a forest. As a result, the film critic defended realism and its corollary:
continuity in editing. Let us note, however, that this conviction did not prevent Bazin from praising
such falsifying filmmakers as Orson Welles and Vittorio de Sica. There was not always a match
between his theory and his tastes.

It was in this effervescent context that a second-year student at the Lycée Carnot, in the
17th arrondissement of Paris, began to develop a passion for the seventh art. Pierre Rissient,
born in 1936, had been introduced to it thanks to the school film club where he had
discovered classics such as Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Eisenstein, Rome, Open City by
Roberto Rossellini and Summer Light by Jean Grémillon. Soviet cinema before Zhdanovism,
Italian neorealism and poetic realism then constituted, along with German silent films, the
pillars of the cinematographic culture of the "honest man". But it was when he discovered a
Hollywood thriller, Les forbans de la nuit by Jules Dassin, that the teenager received the
founding shock of his cinephilia. He was dazzled by the feverish presence of Richard
Widmark and noted a secret kinship between this film noir and Georg Büchner's play
Woyzeck . The young man then became aware of the futility of the Aristarchus who had
passed over in silence
Machine Translated by Google

such a masterpiece at the time of its French release in 1950. " It was then that I better
understood the difference with films that bored me, that I respected but which were perhaps not
5
so good " Pierre Rissient would later admit.

In this seminal awareness, we can distinguish two essential characteristics of the future Mac-
Mahonians. First, a disposition of mind: an immense curiosity, which is not limited to cinema.

Knowledge of theatre and literature irrigates the love of the seventh art while helping to
circumscribe its nature. Then, ethics: one must always be wary of established values and judge
on the piece. The experience of the projection takes precedence, outside of any cultural filter.

Shortly after Les forbans de la nuit, Rissient discovered other masterpieces that had gone unnoticed: Gentleman Jim and

The Valley of Fear by Raoul Walsh. Already a proselytizer, the teenager shared his enthusiasm with several classmates: his two

best friends Michel Fabre and Georges Richard as well as Michel Mourlet, recently expelled from the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly for

indiscipline but welcomed with open arms by Carnot for his brilliant results in literature. The latter, for whom until then Abel

Gance's Napoléon represented the pinnacle of the seventh art, recounted in his memoirs the eye-opening that it was: " [This]

voluble boy, with his sharp and cutting opinions, burst into my life like Baron 6 of Münchhausen on his cannonball ."

.
He devotes a long paragraph
to demonstrating why Pierre Rissient, thanks to the sureness of his eye, deserves the description
of " genius ". With these films by Walsh and Dassin and then by Cecil B. DeMille, Anthony
Mann, Samuel Fuller, Otto Preminger and Allan Dwan, high school students discovered a
striking and dazzling art that made an impression on their young minds that was all the more
vivid because they felt like they were exploring a territory unknown to critics.
Machine Translated by Google

The Mac-Mahon

The group of friends began to regularly frequent the Cinémathèque, the Studio
Parnasse, the Cardinet and... the Mac-Mahon. Located at 5 on the eponymous
avenue, the Mac-Mahon is a small cinema that opened in 1938 and which, at the
Liberation, specialized in Hollywood films. Capitalizing on the NATO clientele
based nearby, its owner, Emile Villion, did not hesitate to pay the tax imposed
on exhibitors who did not show their French quota. By dedicating his establishment
to American cinema in the original version, he also attracted young film buffs.

In 1953, Pierre Rissient, Georges Richard and Michel Fabre asked Villion to
screen Les amants de la nuit because, four years after its first showing, Nicholas
Ray's first film had become invisible in Paris.
The screening having gone well, Rissient and his friends were entrusted with the
programming of the theater. After using the stars as arguments, the high school
students encouraged Emile Villion to place the director's name on the pediment
of the theater. This original practice, inaugurated with Les désemparés by Max
Ophuls, drew attention to the Mac-Mahon. The director of the cinema was
captivated by the aplomb of the young Rissient. He is said to have said of him: "
7
he would have taken off General de Gaulle's pants ." For Rissient and his
.

friends, it was an opportunity to see and show unreleased or long-lost feature films that they
dreamed of discovering. Luc Moullet remembers that Rissient and Fabre, the linchpins of the
programming, were nicknamed "Mac & Mahon", a nickname coined by Jacques Rivette, and
that their programming lasted until 1962-63. At the beginning of the 1950s, in the vast majority
of cases, the opportunities for a spectator to see a film missed upon its release were non-
existent. This lack of availability of works, which contrasts so much with our era of abundance
created by the conjunction of theatrical reruns, video, television and the Internet, was
fundamental in the birth of the movement that interests us.

John Berry's Threats in the Night , Otto's Mysterious Doctor Korvo

Machine Translated by Google

Preminger, The Prowler, Haines and M by Joseph Losey were screened at the Mac-Mahon
around 1955.
Before being a current of thought, MacMahonism was therefore an active militancy.
Exploitation, and, as we will see later, distribution, were the means favored by these young
people to assert their predilections.

Spotting unreleased titles in interviews with filmmakers, approaching studio press

officers, and narrowly retrieving copies before they were sent to overseas territories,
Rissient developed a program designed to attract American film fans. Little by little, a taste
emerged, a chapel formed, a reputation was born.

Their peers began to call them “Mac-Mahonians.”

Contrary to what Michel Mourlet himself believed and wrote, it was not Philippe Bouvard who first gave a name to the group

because the word "mac-mahoniste" did not appear under the pen of the journalist from Le Figaro until April 10, 1962. That is, 22

months after Luc Moullet had used it in the Cahiers du cinéma8 and 21 months after Fereydoun Hoveyda had used9 the now

common "mac-mahonien"

In his column in Le Figaro, Bouvard

.

gave an amusing overview of the "Mac-Mahonists": " They constitute a breed apart,
identifiable at first glance, extremely different from the species already found on Saturday
evenings in local cinemas. The "Mac-Mahonist" is first recognized by the fact that he
arrives an hour before the screening (so as not to miss the preliminary discussions in the
lobby). As soon as he is seated, he places a pad of paper on his knees, takes a light pen
out of his pocket and hangs two stopwatches around his neck that will allow him to set the
duration of the "shock sequences".

[...] The average “MacMahonist” comes in the afternoon, watches the film a second time and, after a hasty dinner, takes

advantage of the understanding of the director Mr. Villon [sic], who does not feel like making him pay a third time. ” The journalist

ended his article by quoting Emile Villion: “Do you know that we can successfully release certain films that would be disasters

elsewhere? And this for two reasons: firstly because we have a small core of enlightened connoisseurs, and secondly because

the others never dare to contradict them for fear of being seen as idiots .”

. The outrageous intransigence of the MacMahonians made them stand

out. Rissient did not hesitate to approach a critic on a café terrace to yell at him: " But how
can you defend Visconti? This
Machine Translated by Google

is not a filmmaker, he is only a decorator! ". In retrospect, Mourlet does not hesitate to
equate their attitude with " intellectual terrorism "; which corroborates the memories of
several witnesses of the time such as Patrick Brion. To impose new values, the Mac-
Mahonians spoke loud and clear.

The friends from the Lycée Carnot were soon joined by Marc C. Bernard, alias Mark
Edalo, whom he had met at the Sorbonne, and a friend of Michel Mourlet at the Lycée
Pasteur: Jacques Gouzerh, who would soon become known under the pen name of Jacques
Serguine. Their shared passion took them to London or Brussels to discover B movies that
had never been seen before in France. This taste for rarity bordering on snobbery is
emblematic of French cinephilia, a counterculture where people love nothing more than to
question established hierarchies and praise invisible masterpieces. The Mac-Mahonians
thus extended the gesture of Louis Delluc praising the cowboy William S. Hart in the early
1920s, that of Ado Kyrou raving about the half-disappeared Femme au corbeau and that of
the participants in the Biarritz Festival du film maudit where, in 1949, several critics from the
future Cahiers du cinéma had met.

During the 1957-58 school year, a future great name in French criticism joined the Mac-
Mahonians: Raymond Ravanbaz, now known under the pseudonym Jacques Lourcelles.
Half a dozen years earlier, aged 11, he had launched his first film "magazine" which he
distributed in the schoolyard with his friend Alain Ferrari. It already included a eulogy for
Captain Without Fear , whose director Raoul Walsh the child was still unaware of. It was
from the moment he began to frequent the Cinémathèque that Lourcelles dates his "entry
into film buffs": 1955. Frequenting the morning screenings at the Mac-Mahon, semi-private
screenings around which a certain economic and legal vagueness reigned, he received a
letter one day from Pierre Rissient asking him for a donation. With his high school friends
Daniel Palas, Simon Mizrahi and Pierre Guinle, Raymond Ravanbaz then took an active
part in the Mac-Mahonian enterprises. This meant, for example, transporting film reels in
potato sacks from the Fox headquarters on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Mac-
Mahon. For Lourcelles, what united the Mac-Mahonians was the unity of taste; there were
not so many people who liked the same films as him, he felt
Machine Translated by Google

minority, so it was first and foremost the pleasure of finding people who shared his tastes
that characterized Mac-Mahonism. Moreover, the golden age of film production that was the
1950s explains, according to Lourcelles, the " hyper-elitist " exclusivism of Mac-Mahonians.

Around 1958, they showed their colours by posting photos of their favourite directors at
the entrance to the Villion cinema: Otto Preminger, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang and Joseph
Losey formed the "four aces". Between the fluid objectivity of the first, the vitalism of the
second, the tragic purity of the third and the brutal entomology of the fourth, one thing in
common: a clear and frank look, the enemy of flourishes and posturing, at the upheavals of
the world.
Machine Translated by Google

"On an ignored art"

This conception of the seventh art was explained in 1959 by Michel

Mourlet. Then aged 24, the young man had never leafed through the slightest
treatise on aesthetics. This conceptual virginity helped him to put his intuitions
in order with absolute freedom. Let us add that it takes all the aplomb of
youth to dare to define what an art should be - and especially what it should
not be... And that from this point of view, Michel Mourlet is eternally young.
Since 1957, however, he had begun to write in various magazines. Let us
mention L'écran, the interesting magazine by André S.
Labarthe, which stopped after three issues, Etudes cinématographiques
edited by Michel Minard, the Revue des lettres modernes and even the
prestigious NRF by Jean Paulhan. In the latter, Mourlet had delivered his
scathing critique of the second part of Ivan the Terrible. Sergei Eisenstein's
last film was then released in Paris, fourteen years after the first part, and
was, as was right, receiving rave reviews. Reproduced in Michel Mourlet's
anthology Sur un art inconnu - La mise en scène comme langage, the
controversy that opposed him to Marcel Arland, co-director of the magazine,
can give a fair overview of the struggle of young film buffs to impose the
novelty of their gaze in the face of those who, when faced with a
cinematographic work, loved nothing more than to rediscover their pictorial
references.
This is because, following Leenhardt, Astruc, Bazin and Rohmer, Michel
Mourlet had an obsession: to define the specificity of cinema. From the
American films discovered thanks to Pierre Rissient and from reading the
Cahiers du cinéma, he began to engage, from 1954-55, in what he calls
today " an intense aesthetic introspection ". Also versed in literary theory, the
young man wrote "Against Roland Barthes" in 1956 and "An impasse for the
future novel" in 1957 to oppose the movement of the New Novel which
wanted to do away with intrigues, psychology, characters. In the summer of
1958, Michel
Machine Translated by Google

Mourlet had published a text entitled "Cinema against novel" in a special issue of the Revue des
lettres modernes on the relationship between literature and the seventh art. Thanks to its cutting
modernism, the article by the young Mourlet was the most noted, despite the prestige of contributors
named François Truffaut, André Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alain Robbe-Grillet. According to the
review in La Croix, it was " the study

11
most constructive of the whole issue " .
In summary, Mourlet asserted that the camera
had made all literature of description and action obsolete.
This theoretical study was in line with the apology for the adventure film that the critic had published
six months previously in the magazine Ecran , where he had asked the following question: " Why is
a literary work of adventure that sticks strictly to the anecdote often of mediocre quality, while an
adventure film, even if it limits itself to following without deviation the actions described by the
screenplay, can reach the most eminent rank?"

12
He answered his own question : "It is in and through the
material of the film, that is to say the staging, that the faculty of adventure will be fulfilled. " in " the
12
analysis, the dissection, or simply . Now the only salvation for the novel was
the description of life
13
psychological and moral [and in] the specific resources of language ”
.
"The novel, if it wants to survive in the cinema, will have to become more and more internalized,
13
subjectivized." .
Hence the inanity of the flatly descriptive writing of
an Alain Robbe-Grillet, pope of the New Novel with whom Mourlet liked to argue in the offices of the
Minuit publishing house: " the optical, descriptive adjective, as he advocates it in “A Way for the
Future Novel” is only a substitute for the clairvoyant and infallible camera Against Robbe-Grillet,
Mourlet played... Marguerite Duras whose language, in 1958, was according to him " the exemplary
13 » .
manifestation of a liturgy of the word joyfully assumed "

13
.
Another characteristic of cinema in relation to literature
is its restitution of time: " this flow of duration, which perhaps reaches its maximum density of
concrete presence in certain scenes of Stromboli, to the point of being able to be heard as the
breathing of the world, what writing could restore it with such force? "13 After having been more or
less developed by Mourlet in various articles during the year 1958, these ideas on cinema - realistic
.

specificity, importance of action, cosmic beauty, primacy of the mise en

Machine Translated by Google

scene- were matured for the development of his manifesto whose title, provocative and
haughty, announces the tone: "On an ignored art". This centerpiece of their strategy of
conquest, the Mac-Mahonians intended to publish it in the Cahiers du cinéma which, for
various reasons, was the major reference for film buffs of the time. First, it was the only film
magazine to have published nearly 100 issues. In fact, it was even the only film magazine to
have passed the thirtieth issue mark... Then, the impact of this monthly was as dazzling as
the yellow of its cover since André Bazin had welcomed, around 1953, young radical film
buffs who passionately defended certain Hollywood directors, scorned by the doxa, thanks
to what they called "the politics of auteurs". Such a director was distinguished as a film
author so his new films were systematically praised. Led by François Truffaut and Jacques
Rivette, they were sometimes nicknamed "Hitchcocko-Hawksians" because, to the great
skepticism of their elders, they proclaimed the genius of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard
Hawks, sometimes "Young Turks" because they were very virulent. Truffaut's attacks on
"French quality" caused a stir well beyond the cinephile circles because they were relayed
by Jacques Laurent's cultural press (Arts, La Parisienne) since the hussar publisher had
opened his columns to the young agitator and his friends.

Without writing there, Rissient and his friends had been frequenting the Cahiers du
cinéma editorial office for about a year , then located on the Champs-Elysées, very close to
the Mac-Mahon. For their part, several editors, including Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut,
Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, were regulars at Villion's cinema, whose programming
full of American rarities delighted them. There were of course affinities between these two
groups of film buffs.

After Bazin's premature death in November 1958 and the shift of some of the critics to
practice, the theoretical foundations of the journal were uncertain. Editor-in-chief Eric Rohmer
was a proponent of classical cinema and marble criticism. For the author of Celluloid and
Marble, Hollywood was a new Florence and films had to be evaluated in the light of the
masterpieces of Western art history. This orthodoxy united cinephiles such as Claude Beylie,
Jean Douchet and Jean Domarchi around the "great Momo". Facing them, someone
Machine Translated by Google

as André Labarthe also loved American cinema but wanted to open the magazine to a less self-
confident modernity embodied by the great European authors: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar
Bergman, Luis Bunuel and others like Alain Resnais.

Among the editors of the Cahiers at the time, Jean Douchet was probably the closest to the
MacMahonians. With the exception of his loyalty to Hitchcock, the predilections of this great
hedonist more or less overlapped with those of Mourlet. Even if his taste for deciphering
bordering on the esoteric preserved this great critic from the MacMahonian temptation, it was he
who, on the lookout for new writers to compensate for the departures of the directors of the New
Wave, suggested to Rohmer that he welcome the friends of Pierre Rissient.

Michel Mourlet had first proposed to the editor-in-chief an article on the filming of Losey's
Gipsy , which he had attended for a few days in England. This article was refused. " I expect
something else from you ," Rohmer had stammered to him, having already had the opportunity
to appreciate a film club presentation written by the young man about Roberto Rossellini's The
Eleven Flowers of Francis of Assisi . He was not disappointed by the ambitious manifesto that
was proposed to him shortly afterwards. According to Mourlet, Eric Rohmer was " delighted " by
his profession of faith, which came at just the right time to strengthen the camp of classic film
buffs and accentuate the fracture within the editorial staff.

However, let us be clear: Eric Rohmer, who wrote his first important articles in the 1940s,
was never a MacMahonian.
When he decided to publish "On an Ignored Art" in issue 98 of August 1959, it was - a unique
event in the history of Cahiers du cinéma - in italics and preceded by the following warning: "
Although the line of conduct of the Cahiers is less rigorous than one might sometimes believe,
this text obviously only overlaps with it in a few points. However, since any extreme opinion is
respectable, we wish to submit this one to the reader, without further comment. "

However, as radical as they may have seemed, these fifteen pages were first and foremost
the (paroxysmal) culmination of Bazin's realist postulate and of the current of thought which,
from Rohmer to Rivette, had flowed from it.
Indeed, after a general and polemical introduction as Michel Mourlet likes them (" There is a
misunderstanding about cinema [...] at the very heart of the elite who profess to develop or
understand art
Machine Translated by Google

» 14), « On an Ignored Art » presents itself as an apology for the

discretion of the camera in the service of realistic illusion: « If cinema
places man in front of an objective reality, any rupture of his impassivity
for expressive ends betrays precisely these ends. The art of editing,
which then merges with cutting, therefore consists in making the cuts
14 Any visible
made in the formless mass of reality as invisible as possible. »
artifice likely to make the viewer aware of the simulated nature of what is happening before
his eyes must be avoided: " Unusual angles, bizarre framing, gratuitous camera movements,
all the revealing arsenal of impotence rejected in the domain of bad literature, we obtain this
frankness "14 This Bazinian postulate induces for Mourlet a singular view of the history of
cinema: " cinema begins with the talking picture " because " the .

heresy that has most harmed the development of cinema has been to consider it as a
simple play of images susceptible to all possible combinations (example: superimpositions),
forgetting the starting point of these images: a look at the sensible world. "Conclusions of a
stunning modernism: " The awareness of its own nature, added to its capacity for technical
perfection in frankness and adequacy to reality, leads to an irritating consequence: as
cinema progresses, its old 14 The theorist of MacMahonism arrives at

works are devalued in favor of the new ones. "14

Relentlessly unfolding his logic, the young polemicist roundly attacks

several revered totems even in the pages of the magazine that hosts
him: " As with Welles, whose aggressive modernism and gratuitous
originality cover an expressionism a quarter of a century old, [Eisenstein's
staging] unfolds a tormented and frozen bas-relief, a gallery of
picturesque monsters, baroque if baroque is defined by
14
an ornamental profusion of the sign stifling the meaning .
Yet, so far, the substance is in line with what Jacques Rivette could
write nine years earlier in La gazette du cinéma, the short-lived magazine
created by Eric Rohmer in 1950: " Any rare form in which reality appears
to us risks capturing our attention alone and diverting it from the truth;
any appearance of research proves premeditation, which shows itself
instead of trying to hide itself [...] The misdeeds of virtuosity thus spoiled
Macbeth in the past
Machine Translated by Google

Welles, formerly Eisenstein's October . [...] The camera is a "recording device"; its whims do
not interest us, but only the reality that it captures "15 In a footnote, Mourlet acknowledges this
" debt to Hitchcocko- .

Hawksian criticism, which especially with Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Philippe
Demonsablon was the first to clean up the place, although it seems hesitant to draw the
consequences of its premises "
14
.
And for
good reason: " drawing the consequences of the premises ", for Mourlet, also means attacking
the number one darling of the Cahiers : Alfred Hitchcock. We can understand Rohmer's
introductory precautions by reading the following sentences, which must have frightened more
than one reader: " it is enough to refer to Hitchcock's recent Vertigo or to certain shots of The
Wrong Man as examples of what not to do. The maelstrom of the camera around Henry Fonda's
face to express his anguish, or the successive colorings of James Stewart in the grip of the
nightmare of vertigo, proceed from the same impotence before the actor, by making up for an
inability to reveal his passionate potentialities - from within - by a tensing of everything that is
not the actor, of everything that is outside, just as mediocre writers force the style and brutalize
the words to try to give a feeling for what they do not feel."

14
This is because
for Mourlet, " loyalty to the actor's body [...] is the only secret of directing. "14

For Pierre Rissient, Hitchcock, compared to Fritz Lang, was " only a showman who uses his
5
camera to emphasize " while in the author of The Improbable Truth, " the location of the camera
elaborates the space. If it were placed slightly differently, with another lens, everything would
take on another weight "5
.

If Michel Mourlet goes further than his predecessors Bazin and Rivette, it is because he
assigns an objective to the filmmaker: to plunge the audience into a state of fascination. "
The absorption of consciousness by the spectacle is called fascination: the impossibility of
tearing oneself away from the images, the imperceptible movement towards the screen of
the whole tense being, the abolition of oneself in the wonders of a universe where dying
itself is situated at the extreme of desire.
Provoking this tension towards the screen appears as the fundamental project . For André
14
of the filmmaker. » Bazin, realism was an end, for Mourlet, it is a means. Defending a cinema
of pure immanence, Bazin had gone
Machine Translated by Google

to the point of denying the author in his review of a montage film in which Nicole Védrès had been content
to compile - albeit with a certain brilliance - archives of the Belle Epoque: " I appreciate this evening the
happiness of not being a director because I would not dare touch a camera again after having seen Paris
1900. That is pure cinema. "
16
.
On the other hand, for the
MacMahonians, the filmmaker imposes his mark: he must respect the data of reality but also organize
them in such a way as to arouse fascination. Hence the capital importance of the staging: " Everything is
in the staging [...] The positioning of the actors and objects, their movements within the frame must
express everything, as we see in the supreme perfection of Fritz Lang's last two films ."

14
. This
search for fascination also implies the rejection of neorealism theorized by Cesare Zavattini, the
screenwriter of Vittorio de Sica's most prestigious films, who had synthesized his ideal as follows:
" to tell 90 minutes of life " . Mac-Mahonism is then revealed
17
of a man to whom nothing happens " a sort of .

"cinephilia squared". The analysis of recurring themes in the work of a filmmaker, which served the
Cahiers to raise Hitchcock and Hawks to the rank of auteurs, is consigned to oblivion. All that counts now
is the staging and the effect it produces on the spectator. The publication of the following sally in his own
journal shows how broad the open-mindedness of the co-author of the first Hitchcock monograph (with
Chabrol in 1957) was: " the search for and synthesis of the equivalents of screenplays in Hitchcock (the
transfers of guilt for example) are of no interest to what we see on the screen and that alone counts. »14
From this promotion of fascination on a realistic basis arise the predilections usually attached to the
MacMahonians: the capital importance of the actors' bodies (" Preeminence of the actor " 14), the
displayed erotomania (" Hymn to the glory of bodies, cinema recognizes
eroticism as its supreme motivation " 14), the height of tone and the quest for the sublime moment: "
the point of accomplishment of cinema, reached in rare moments by the greats of the great: Losey, Lang,
Preminger and Cottafavi, consists in stripping the spectator of all conscious distance to precipitate him
into a state of hypnosis supported by an incantation of gestures, glances, tiny movements of the face and
body, vocal inflections, within a universe of sparkling objects, hurtful or beneficial, where one loses oneself
to find oneself expanded, lucid and appeased. »14
Machine Translated by Google

The demands of the MacMahonians cannot tolerate the slightest concession: " Passion
excludes indulgence. Access to this staging of vertigo and scintillations, which opens up to a
liturgy where the contemplation of a cosmic order is rediscovered, can explain why 95% of
cinematographic production appears to us miserable, non-existent and unrelated to cinema."

14
This aesthetic (but not formalist) intransigence has
led many film buffs of various persuasions to recognize the MacMahonians' sure taste. The
Hitchcocko-Hawksian pope Jean Douchet recognized this: it was thanks to them that he
became aware of the splendor of Fritz Lang's German-Indian diptych: The Bengal Tiger and The
Hindu Tomb. 18 And it was because this diptych was later put on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma
that a teenager named Serge Daney began to read them... .

On a theoretical level, "On an Ignored Art", in addition to providing a framework of formidable coherence to a journal that

struggled to reconcile opposing sensibilities, crystallized a breakthrough. In his work Le cinéma et la mise en scène, Jacques

Aumont, professor emeritus at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University, devotes several dozen pages to Mourlet who is said to

have signed " one of the most direct artistic manifestos ever written 19 on cinema ".

.
For the academic, "On an Ignored Art" has contributed to freeing the
notion of staging from its theatrical heritage by exalting
19
a “ specific virtue of cinema ”, a virtue which would
, no longer be found in the image or in the
editing but in the transfiguration of appearances.
Aumont sums up Mourlet's proposal as follows: " To direct is to strive to achieve an authentic
agreement between the action and the world [...] lifting a corner of the veil thrown over the world,
[cinema] offers us, in flashes and intermittences, as many glimpses of what reality truly is. "19
.

Aumont places Mourlet at the antipodes of another major theoretic film theorist: the very
didactic Sergei Eisenstein. The latter's infinitely analytical conception, which advocates breaking
down each scene, then each shot, then each gesture in the service of a pre-envisioned general
structure, obviously goes against the immediacy sought by the MacMahonians. It is not by
chance that the "Mourletian" lineage of cinephilia - the one that, without being strictly
MacMahonian, would go from Rivette in 1950 to Serge Bozon via Jean-Claude Biette - was the
most resistant to the generally revered art of Eisenstein.
Machine Translated by Google

Even fascist criticism, as evidenced by Bardèche and Brasillach's History of Cinema ,

counted the author of Battleship Potemkin among the major creators of the seventh art. But
his "biomechanical" conception of working with actors, inherited from Lev Kuleshov and
Vsevolod Pudovkin, could only irritate the supporters of " loyalty to the actor's body ."

Let us note that, commenting on his text fifty years after its publication, Michel Mourlet
refuted the term "theory": " it is not strictly speaking a theory; it is the simple analysis of
experience. I only believe in the dazzling or tearing apart of the obvious, even if it means
assuming certain contradictions. The successive and sometimes antagonistic illuminations
of Nietzsche have always seemed to me closer to the truth than the learned constructions of
Marx or the Fathers of the Church. A system, whether critical, philosophical, religious, even
economic or other, appears to me first of all as an effort to artificially eliminate antinomies.
"20

"Theory", as a coherent set of knowledge induced by observations (the vision of films)

and deduced according to a postulate (the "ontological realism" of the camera), is
nevertheless a term that I will assume to use here with regard to Mourlet's conception of the
seventh art. A theory is not necessarily a system, nor a dogma even if the Mac-Mahonians
have sometimes been able to behave as crusaders of thought. In his excellent preface to
L'écran éblouissant, the philosopher Marc Cerisuelo notes that, " in reading Michel Mourlet,
one realizes that the lessons of the Poetics have been miraculously preserved for twenty-
five centuries and that, decidedly, first of the Mac-Mahonians, Aristotle is the best of film
critics ."

20
.
This is in accordance with Mourlet's conception of fiction, where " the force of the

action will always prevail over the artifices of diction " , a " naturally Aristotelian " conception, teaches Cerisuelo.
20
, We

To get an idea of the impact of Mourlet's manifesto on the generation of critics that
immediately followed it, one can also read the interview between Jean Narboni, Serge
Toubiana and Jean-Claude Biette in the introduction to Jean-Claude Biette's collection of
texts Poétique des auteurs published in 1988. The critic and filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette
considered himself " a bad student of Mac-Mahonism ".
21
.
He considered the
manifesto to be " well written " and that " what it contained that was innovative and
Machine Translated by Google

21
"What was essential at the time [still] seemed valid today ." . According to

Jean Narboni, co-editor-in-chief of the Cahiers during their shift to the extreme left between 1968 and 1973, Michel Mourlet had

defined with this text " an in-itself of the staging " even if " we did not agree with everything "

But who can claim to agree with everything in "On an Ignored

.

Art"? Even a Mac-Mahonian of Jacques Lourcelles' ilk diverges on an important point of

the manifesto since he has always loved Alfred Hitchcock.

Because the text must be placed in its context. In retrospect, the small number of distinguished directors can only be surprising:

"Losey, Preminger, Cottafavi, Don Weis, Lang, Walsh, Fuller, Ludwig, Mizoguchi alone knew, to varying degrees, the secret of this

hold on the actor and the decor that Murnau or Griffith could not bring to fruition, and that Hawks, Hitchcock, Renoir, Rossellini only

glimpsed without controlling it. As for Bresson, it seems that he wanted to control it without 14 glimpsing it. "

And, in a footnote: " It would probably be appropriate to also cite Ida

Lupino and Edgar Ulmer, although very little known, the Goddess of the Incas by Frantz
Eichtorm [Franz Eichorn], without forgetting Allan Dwan and some flashes in Douglas Sirk
14
and Richard Fleischer. " The elitist
posture is not enough to explain the brevity of the list. Even if we limit ourselves to
Hollywood, why snub John Ford and King Vidor if it is to include minor masters such as
Don Weis or Edward Ludwig? Why is Richard Fleischer mentioned instead of Anthony
Mann, a very comparable and superior director? Why not Cecil B. DeMille, cited favorably
elsewhere in the same article? Why not Jacques Tourneur, adored by Rissient and
Lourcelles? Why not André De Toth or Joseph H. Lewis rather than Edgar G. Ulmer? Why
Douglas Sirk but not Vincente Minnelli whose sublime (even if aestheticizing at times)

As a torrent had just flowed out of Paris? Why not Jules Dassin since it was through Les
forbans de la nuit that everything happened? Why not Nicholas Ray whose, we remember,
Les amants de la nuit began the programming of Fabre and Rissient at the Mac-Mahon?

When I asked him these questions openly, Mourlet acknowledged their relevance and
answered me in two points: "1) the need to
surprise and strike quickly and hard, linked to our "terrorist" tactics of the time. The
notion of fairness, of balance, found little place there.
Machine Translated by Google

2) The films that I had just discovered and whose resonance invaded my head, to the
detriment of older or more established discoveries: subjective explanation.

It must therefore be remembered that, as definitive as it appears, "On an Ignored Art" is

also a pamphlet that is part of the quarrels of its time, with the exaggerations specific to the
exercise. The Hawks/Hitchcock/Rossellini/Renoir quartet that supposedly " knew how to
glimpse the secret of [the staging] without taking it to its conclusion " was also and above all
14
the favorite quartet of Cahiers du cinéma. Mourlet's way of saluting the editorial staff that
welcomed him while appearing more clairvoyant than it.

If the polemicist adopted a peremptory tone, it was less to define the ultimate pantheon
of the History of the seventh art than to impose new values. Hence this story of the four
aces, which Mourlet admits today to be essentially an advertising find by Rissient, this master
of communication. Lourcelles, himself, confided to me that the square would have been
more perfect in his eyes with Jacques Tourneur in place of Joseph Losey. If Otto Preminger
and the American period of Fritz Lang were already defended by the avant-garde of the
Cahiers du cinéma led by Truffaut and Rivette, we can affirm that Raoul Walsh and Joseph
Losey were imposed there by the Mac-Mahonians. Until then, the former was respected for
his age and his productivity more than for his possible genius. Some of his films were
positively reviewed by Philippe Demonsablon and Claude Chabrol (who liked Le cri de la
victoire because it had girls and fighting) but in November 1957, Luc Moullet reflected the
general opinion when he stated that there would be no point in interviewing Allan Dwan and
Raoul Walsh because they were incapable of thinking about their art. Jacques Lourcelles,
who can boast of having written, in February 1959, the first general text on Walsh's work22,
was considered a maverick. In 1964, the Cahiers devoted a dossier to Walsh with an
interview... A sign that the active minority had been effective. If, in the 1950s, the Dionysian
Walsh was much less highly regarded than the Apollonian Hawks, it was perhaps also
because Rivette, Rohmer, Godard and Truffaut were more puritanical film buffs than the
MacMahonians, the advocates of the vital impulse.

As for Joseph Losey, his main occurrence before the arrival of the MacMahonians
concerns the negative criticism of his M by André Bazin who did not understand why Fritz
Lang's classic was being remade. There was also the
Machine Translated by Google

Dictionary of American Film Directors in the 1955 Christmas Special issue where his
Prowler was considered " admirable and shamefully unappreciated ."
According to Luc Moullet's testimony, it was he who introduced Losey to the Mac-
Mahonians. Indeed, he recounts that, shortly before December 1955, Pierre Rissient had
invited him for a drink to get the scoop on the content of the special issue of Cahiers.
Moullet then told him about Joseph Losey, recommended Le rôdeur and his interlocutor
was doubtful.
However, Rissient gave another version of the story: it was thanks to Jules Dassin that he
became interested in Losey because the blacklisted filmmaker spoke about his colleague
and friend in an interview for Cahiers du cinéma, an interview also published in 1955 but
six months earlier, in May23 . Now that Rissient has died, it is impossible to reconcile the
two versions. At most we can recall that in the 1950s, Rissient was passionate about Jules
Dassin since it was Les forbans de la nuit that had made him a film buff: that he read the
interview seems probable, and that he spotted the names of new filmmakers in it entirely
plausible. Let us note, however, that in this interview, Dassin does not spontaneously
mention Losey but rather responds to François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol who wanted
to know more about this " young American director who is little known in France " whose "
Le rôdeur " they " really like . "

This question of the first discovery, which may seem pure vanity, is not to be disdained
because what is the use of a film critic if not to make people discover good films and great
filmmakers? In any case, this is how Michel Mourlet sees his role: "I have always considered
that there were two types of criticism: the criticism of discovery and the criticism of
digestion. I have never been on the side of the criticism of digestion, I have always wanted
to be on the side of discovery. If there is any interest in criticism, it is this one, it is not to
explain, or rather to repeat to people how to like what is good form to like. What I wanted
was to make people discover filmmakers "24

On a more anecdotal level, however, it should be remembered that several films by

some of the most confidential filmmakers of MacMahonism had already been the subject
of laudatory notes from François Truffaut. This is the case of Edgar G. Ulmer's Bandit25
and Vittorio Cottafavi's Fille d'amour26
.

In "On an Ignored Art", Mourlet is brief but clear on the place he gives to Kenji Mizoguchi,
whose sharp and crystalline realism is in keeping
Machine Translated by Google

perfectly with the principles of the manifesto. Several allusions in their articles show that
Marc Bernard and Pierre Rissient thought no less. If the portrait of the Japanese filmmaker
who could have transformed the square into a pentagon was not displayed at the entrance
to the Mac-Mahon, it was mainly because, having died in 1956, he could not be associated
with interviews, meetings with the public or " operations entering into [the] strategy [of

27
mac-mahoniens] » .
It is also the case that, in August 1959, Mourlet had only been
able to see - and intensely admire - Tales of the Vague Moon After the Rain.
Finally, from Henri Agel to Jean-Luc Godard, via Pierre Marcabru and Eric Rohmer, "the
Jean-Sébastien Bach of cinema" (dixit Douchet) was almost unanimous. But fighting for
established values was of little interest to the Mac-Mahonians. We come back to the
distinction " criticism of discovery/ criticism of digestion ".

Quite logically, this treatise on wonder at the world is not exempt from pagan exaltation:
" The obsessed quest for an equation that brings together the balanced terms of a flesh
and a world results in this shot from Tales of the Vague Moon, where the lover stretches
out on the meadow, bathed in sunlight, in the peaceful rapture of pleasure, exclaiming "Ah!
it's divine"" or again: "Since cinema is a gaze that replaces ours to give us a world in tune
with our desires, it will rest on faces, bodies that are radiant or bruised but always beautiful,
of this glory or this heartbreak that bear witness to the same original nobility, to a chosen
race that we recognize with intoxication as ours, the ultimate advance of life towards the
god. Not as in Rossellini the groping approach of the creature towards a creator, a theme
external to the staging, but man become god in the staging "14

This last extract from the MacMahonian manifesto is undoubtedly the one that lends
itself most to political recuperation. Indeed, from pagan elitism to fascism, there is a step
that many have been quick to take when it came to assigning Mourlet to ideology. And
MacMahonism with him, while we're at it. The sequel will show that, rather than removing
these ambiguities, the pamphleteer amused himself by exacerbating them while taking care
to remain irreproachable in the eyes of readers of good faith: in his critiques, Mourlet,
unlike, for example, Truffaut and Rohmer, never praised the throne, the altar, the white
man or the ideas of Robert Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle.
Machine Translated by Google

At the time of the publication of "Sur un art inconnu" - the end of the summer of 1959 -
Jean-Luc Godard, assisted by Pierre Rissient, was filming Michel Mourlet, Jacques Serguine,
Michel Fabre, Emile Villion, Jacques Lourcelles and Mac-Mahon himself in A bout de souffle.
This piquant irony reveals the strange proximity at the time between the Mac-Mahonians
and the future icon of cinematic deconstruction. After seeing the finished film, Jacques
Lourcelles promised himself: " You will never appear in a film again ". A promise kept, until
now. But the fact is that, at the beginning of the 60s, the Mac-Mahonians preferred to
concentrate their attacks on the Left Bank avant-garde of Alain Resnais (in truth heir to Rose-
France 's Marcel L'Herbier , 1918) and spared Godard quite a bit.

Obviously, they did not go so far as to defend his films where the distancing induced by the
coquetries of editing prevented any fascination but the nonchalance of the Swiss aroused
Mourlet's anger less than the pompous spirit of seriousness of the collaborator of Duras and
Robbe-Grillet.
In 1963, "On an Ignored Art" would be cited as an epigraph to Le Mépris. At the cost of a
beautiful aporia, the phrase would be fallaciously attributed to André Bazin.
" Cinema is a gaze that replaces ours to give us a world that matches our desires " was
transformed by Godard into "Cinema replaces our gaze with a world that matches our
desires ." The reason for this falsification remains a mystery, but we have not sufficiently
noted the coherence of quoting Mourlet's manifesto at the beginning of what is, among other
things, a sumptuous requiem to the glory of Western classicism.

If "On an Ignored Art" has lost none of its brilliance today, it owes it to the logic of its
argument as much as to the quality of a prose where the superb lyricism of the formulas
never yields to the rigor of the expression.
A jack-of-all-trades, Michel Mourlet is first and foremost a great French writer and his
language is that of clarity and precision. This quality distinguishes him from many colleagues
for whom the greatest chic, as Luc Moullet notes with amusement (in the preface to Piges
choisis), was to write unreadable texts. A brilliant polemicist, Mourlet also handled derision
with a Dionysian joy that did nothing to lessen the divisions within the Cahiers du cinéma.
Machine Translated by Google

The Mac-Mahonians at the Cahiers du Cinéma

In fact, the tone had been set from Mourlet's first note, published the previous
month: a eulogy to Cecil B.'s Samson and Delilah.
DeMille, whose length was inversely proportional to virulence.
28
Castigating " the blindness and ignorance of intellectuals " he had put himself
,

against a good part of his new colleagues... The divergence of tastes turned
into civil war. The names of birds flew openly in the pages of the magazine.

However, upon discovering issue 99, which immediately followed the

publication of "On an Ignored Man", readers of Cahiers du cinéma were able to
believe that MacMahonism had become established: on the occasion of the
release of The Hindu Tomb, the cover showed Fritz Lang on the set of The
Bengal Tiger. After twenty-five years of American exile, the master of
expressionism had returned to Germany. His choice to put into images an
exotic adventure scenario written in the 1910s with his wife Thea Von Harbou
had disconcerted the critics. The Bengal Tiger and The Hindu Tomb were
accused of infantilism. The Hindu characters speaking in the language of
Goethe made people snigger. Even at Cahiers du cinéma, traditionally attached
to the defense of Lang's last films, the rating of Luc Moullet and Jacques Doniol-
Valcroze in the table of stars showed that the Indian diptych engendered a lot
of circumspection.

For Jacques Lourcelles, it was the Parisian release of The Bengal Tiger in
January 1959 that aesthetically founded MacMahonism since it revealed a
divide. He remembers being approached by Jacques Rivette as he left a
cinema: " Are you one of those who like The Bengal Tiger?" It is interesting to
note that Michel Mourlet did not like the film when he discovered it. The first
screening had given him an impression of coldness, of stiffness, which did not
correspond to what he had felt in front of The Incredible Truth, Fritz Lang's
previous film .
Machine Translated by Google

which he considered to be the pinnacle of the filmmaker. On this subject, Mourlet

wrote to me: " I think today that I had been bothered by the irruption of color into
this implacable and tragic universe, on the edge of abstraction. There was for me
- there still is now - a kind of contradiction between this joy and this enjoyment of
the eyes that are the colors of the world and the black ink purification of tragedy.
So I came out of it in uncertainty ." The unreserved enthusiasm of Jacques
Lourcelles, and, he thinks he remembers, of Marc Bernard struck him. So he saw
the film again, which " clarified things in his mind ." He formulated this clarification
with a famous plea in this issue 99 of Cahiers du Cinéma.

The MacMahonians saw in these "cast iron masses" (to use an expression of
Lang himself) high examples of their conception of the seventh art. To defend
Fritz Lang's "Indian" films despite the convention of their subjects was to highlight
a specifically cinematographic beauty because it owed nothing to a literary,
cultural or ideological alibi. If, in their quasi-totality, film critics depreciated them,
it was because they judged according to criteria external to the staging. Which
was as absurd as if music lovers had rejected Puccini's Turandot because of the
chinoiserie of its libretto. Beyond the anecdote, what fascinates in The Bengal
Tiger and The Hindu Tomb is the inevitability of the sequence of shots that
translates Fritz Lang's tragic philosophy. It is therefore a staging that has reached
its point of perfection.

It is important to clarify here that, for the MacMahonians, the notion of "staging" is not
opposed to that of "scenario" and that it includes "the dramatic structure" (Alfred Eibel). Moreover,
staging has nothing to do with what Mourlet called "spectacular and puerile deployment ". It is
his strict
29
of a plastic that is powerless to reach the essential" .

necessity that makes the beauty of a connection or a camera movement. This

contempt for the visual ostentation characteristic of Fritz Lang's last films led
many admirers of Metropolis and M le maudit to distance themselves from the
Viennese master as he refined his style. This evolution of the artist was brilliantly
analyzed by Michel Mourlet in his article "Trajectoire de Fritz Lang". His
conclusion, in line with the intuitions formulated by Jacques Rivette two years
earlier in his critique of L'invraisemblable vérité (Cahiers du cinéma, n°76), was
as follows: "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt [L'invraisemblable vérité] and more
Machine Translated by Google

again Le Tigre and Le Tombeau mark the limit beyond which the staging, by an approach
comparable to that of Mallarmé, would tip over into the absence of staging. A greater
domination of matter would lead to its suppression and would exceed the mediating role of
art"29 Let us note that Lang's next film, The 1000 Eyes of Doctor Mabuse, would verify the
critic's hypothesis: the even greater erasure of the filmmaker infuses what remained his
.

swan song with the unfortunate airs of a television drama.

In this issue 99 of Cahiers du cinéma, Fritz Lang was also celebrated by sympathisers
of MacMahonism not attached to the hard core: Fereydoun Hoveyda and Philippe
Demonsablon.
The first was the son of a dignitary of the Shah of Iran who wrote in Positif as well as in
Cahiers du cinéma and defended Roberto Rossellini with as much enthusiasm as science
fiction Z series. He took charge of the critique of The Hindu Tomb. Less radical than
Mourlet, he had nevertheless detected what made the beauty of this exotic adventure film:
" we find in The Bengal Tiger and especially in The Hindu Tomb this purity of refinement,
this clean and concise cutting, this linear construction which make the interest of the last
American works of the director. "30 Eleven months later, in a long and long article entitled
"The spots of the sun", this "likeable boy and diplomat to the tips of his nails" (dixit Mourlet)
would disapprove of " the
monster of abstraction that is the res cinematographica [of the Mac-Mahonians] " in the
name of a refusal of the "

9
general ideas » .
This while acknowledging that " [his] opinions [were] sometimes
close to those of Mourlet and his friends "9 .

For his part, Philippe Demonsablon was one of the critics in whom Michel Mourlet had
recognized a precursor of MacMahonism. The few articles that, in parallel with his career
as an engineer, this polytechnician provided to Cahiers du cinéma testify to an adventurous
but coherent cinephilia: he was the first to praise a film by Allan Dwan (La reine de la
prairie) and ardently defended Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi and even Raoul Walsh. The title
31
of his review of Les Amants crucifiés in the May 1959 issue, "Splendeur du vrai", can be
considered a perfect summary in anticipation of Mourlet's theory. Two years earlier,
Demonsablon had reported on the
Machine Translated by Google

private screening of Losey's Time Without Pity at the Mac-Mahon in very "Mourletian"
terms: " The staging restores unity to a very mobile action by relentlessly increasing the
dramatic tension: the film begins very strongly and continues according to a crescendo
where one is surprised to find no trace of frenzy. There is here a process of broadening so
characteristic of Murnau's work: an action initially confined gradually extends its orbit, like
a shock that communicates itself

32
inevitably to the whole universe by a kind of immobile fascination."
For Jacques Lourcelles, " Philippe Demonsablon was the most interesting critic of the Cahiers"

These affinities would perhaps have made him a pure

.

MacMahonian if film criticism had not remained a hobby for this father of a family. His text,
"The Haughty Dialectic of Fritz Lang", in which Heraclitus was quoted without pedantry,
began with a classically auteurist inventory of thematic recurrences before highlighting
salient details of the staging; all in the service of a eulogy to the schematic greatness of the
filmmaker, a eulogy that the MacMahonians would not have denied: "Perfection and
completion respond to a strict necessity; nothing other than what was called for must enter
here".

That today, after having been considered as vulgar exotic films, The Bengal Tiger and
The Hindu Tomb are ranked among Fritz Lang's masterpieces, that they have been
reissued several times on video in prestigious collections, that they have been the subject
of numerous theatrical reruns and that they remain the only German films of the 1950s
regularly broadcast on television (the Sissi being Austrian), all this is a notable consequence
of MacMahonian activism. It is no coincidence that Pierre Rissient is interviewed in the
bonuses of the latest DVD of The Hindu Tomb (Wild Side, 2008).

However, if the Mac-Mahonians had drawn the Cahiers du cinéma into their fight for the
last two Fritz Lang films, they were far from having conquered the magazine. For a year,
the only one of the gang who wrote there was Michel Mourlet (with the exception of two
informative notes in the Petit Journal: one by Simon Mizrahi in issue 105 of March 1960 on
the transformation of the Mac-Mahon into an exclusive cinema and one by Marc Bernard in
issue 109 of July 1960 on the filming of The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse).
Machine Translated by Google

A connoisseur of the Grand Siècle and a disciple of Paul Valéry, he was nicknamed by
Rohmer "the Boileau of Mac-Mahon". Mourlet's presence in the yellow review was noted
for general texts rather than film reviews (in this case, he only signed "notes").

After publishing his complete theory of the seventh art and analyzing the evolution of Fritz
Lang, Mourlet successively delivered his considerations on criticism and on violence.

"The Myth of Aristarchus", published in No. 103, has the value of a manifesto. It first
showed the vanity of any demonstration of the beauty of a work: "I can line up twenty
arguments, analyze the most subtle of my thoughts and my feelings: how, from these
emaciated words that exhaust themselves in retaining genius in their meshes, will you pass
to the evidence of genius, if you have not first recognized it? The absurdity of the enterprise
is obvious."
34 .
We suspect that this relativization of their
importance was not to the taste of his colleagues, especially since Mourlet subsequently
revealed the secret springs of this activity: the valorization of the ego, which Mourlet went
so far as to assimilate to the "struggle for life" of the Anglo-Saxons: "If I ask myself about
the motives that push me to write about a film, or rather a production, the first that I
distinguish is the simple, primitive desire to make an idea, or a group of ideas, triumph, in
short a form of the world that I believe to be true, perhaps because the passion for the
truth is only the passion for oneself, and that imposing the existence of my point of view
on others is, to the extent that I am deeply committed to it, imposing my

34
existence. " Beyond The young man was then keen on Nietzsche...Au- propre
the refreshing provocation, Mourlet recalled, in perfect coherence with Rissient's work,
that there is no good criticism other than activist criticism: "Criticism offers titles, names,
points of reference, which the reader will verify and before which he will be obliged to take
a position "34 In this issue 103 of Cahiers du cinéma, "The myth of Aristarchus" was
followed by a .

text by Luc Moullet on a related theme: "The film writer in search of his paradox". After
a rating of each of the film books published in France since 1951, Moullet reformulated
Mourlet's observation of failure: "it is fascinating for the mind to seek to express in terms
understandable to all certain characteristics of the cinematographic fact, obvious, but
unspeakable " and went even further in the provocation, with the humor that is
characteristic of him: " there is a good
35
Machine Translated by Google

thirty books published that are totally or partially incomprehensible.

I tried to understand what Edgar Morin wrote. I failed. [...] Direct contact with ancient art
forms is quite difficult, even painful. [...] I admit that I often have trouble understanding how
a church or a monument can have artistic value. I hope that it will come one day. [...] The
best way to write that would do full justice to cinema would be to no longer conjugate
anything but the verb to be, the most beautiful, the truest in the world, because it is cinema
that has taught us that evidence and repetition were the only values. "

35
This search for evidence in cinema is
entirely consistent with MacMahonism. Moullet ended with a sentence in line with the thesis
defended in "Cinema against novel" by Mourlet in 1958: " [cinema] can force literature to
purify itself of everything that does not belong to it, faithful description, the story. "35

These different speeches, formulated in a more or less provocative way, materialized the
belief in the Cahiers in a cinema in itself, an art so singular and detached from literature that
even to describe its beauty, words would be of no use. Hence the mystical posture of these
cinephiles and their taste for peremptory judgments: there are those who see and those who
are incapable of it. The paradox being that obviously, the Cahiers jaunes were the crucible
of some of the finest pens of French criticism in the 20th century; Moullet and Mourlet not
being the least.

Although their impact faded more quickly than that of "On an Ignored Art", these articles
were the subject of responses in various journals. Many critics were all the less able to
accept what they perceived as absolute relativism because they were ideologically committed.
The critic and literature professor Henri Agel, the one who introduced Serge Daney to
cinema, saw " in these iconoclasts prolonged adolescents: the desire to promote a personal
truth against all odds, the refusal to open up to another subjectivity, the complacency for
insults and even rudeness, all this is excusable and in a sense quite moving in boys of fifteen
to sixteen. Beyond twenty-five, we find ourselves faced with "cases" ". He nevertheless
saluted " Mourlet's great courage in recognizing that all reaction is precisely passionate and
that the reader should not expect anything else " while looking for reasons to hope.

36
Machine Translated by Google

against this relativism which, for the Christian humanist that he was, could only lead to
nihilism. The longest response to Mourlet and Moullet was written in the magazine Cinéma
60 by Raymond Barkan who, in the 1940s, had been one of the critics of L'écran français
most open to American cinema. Very resistant to Luc Moullet, " haughty and contemptuous
like a sort of little laughing Montherlant of criticism " despite his possible " overflows of
intelligence ", Barkan found himself " more on friendly terms " with Mourlet whose " dialectic
of thought is remarkably clear, the terminology appropriate and the passion of the tone
measured " but was nonetheless " in a state of unease " before " the bitter delight that Michel
Mourlet feels in thickening the walls of his prison "; his prison being his solipsism which could
only engender an absolute relativism or even nihilism "To this " closed criticism which proudly
refuses to let itself be penetrated by the judgment of others " , Raymond Barkan wanted to
oppose " an open criticism which will draw its very effectiveness and fertility from its aptitude
37
invigorating .
for discussion and acceptance " because in effect, " what is more
for a critic than to confront judgments which contest his own [...] to draw from others reasons
to contradict himself if loyalty demands it? "

37 .
In writing, he reduced art to a purely intellectual concept, omitting that
any work must make one feel before making one think. If there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the critic confessing

his " remorse for a rather short-sighted judgment [that he made] thirteen years ago on Citizen Kane, a judgment whose

ignorance and stupidity an article by André Bazin would have quickly proven [to him] ", certainly a new vision, therefore

a new experience of the work, was necessary to correct his judgment. Contrary to Mourlet, Barkan also recalled that "
37
the relative is first in myself " because " I am becoming someone else every second "37
,

"Apology for Violence", published in issue 107, attracted the wrath of the ill-named do-gooders on Mourlet. The

abusive fascist reputation of MacMahonism owes in particular to this article. However, if his detractors had not stopped
at the red rag embroidered for them by the polemicist with a provocative title and a few tendentious expressions (" [a type

of hero] representing the perfection of a lordly race " 38), they would have realized that his text was never anything more

than a taste for the

Machine Translated by Google

day of the old catharsis of Aristotle nourished by reflections on the style of various directors.

Making an action movie actor a more convincing incarnation of the seventh art than the
unanimously revered paragons of visual and intellectual sophistication, the most enormous
provocation of this article was of an aesthetic and not political nature: " Charlton Heston is
an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, and his presence in a film, whatever it may
be, is enough to provoke beauty. The contained violence shown by the dark phosphorescence
of the eyes, the eagle profile, the proud arch of the eyebrows, the prominence of the
cheekbones, the bitter and hard curve of the mouth, the fabulous power of the torso, this is
what is given, and which the worst director cannot debase. It is in this sense that one can
say that Charlton Heston, by his existence alone outside of any film, gives cinema a more
accurate definition than films like Hiroshima or Citizen Kane whose aesthetics ignore or
reject Charlton Heston. "38

This sentence, a journalist from Sight and Sound analyzing French cinephilia saw as the
culmination of its oddity: " Obviously no one can go further in the development of a system
based on personal taste and there is reason to be happy to see such an extremist point of
view condemned by the majority of the editorial staff of the Cahiers"
39
. And
in fact, in their 650 following issues, did Cahiers du cinéma ever publish a more definitive
sentence than this last one? Not to my knowledge.
Between the sublime and the ridiculous, these sallies are part of what makes Mourlet's prose
so invigorating.
Alongside these great one-off texts, Mourlet honoured the Mac-Mahonians' reputation as
pioneers by reporting on films seen in London in an article in issue 102. In addition to the
four-a-side, Mourlet spoke in rather complimentary terms of Allan Dwan, Edward Ludwig and
Ida Lupino.
In all, the "Boileau du Mac-Mahon" published barely more than half a dozen articles in
the Cahiers du cinéma. But, thanks to his opponents, people talked about the Mac-Mahonians
even in their absence.
The most notable attacks were launched by critics who liked the same films as the
MacMahonians but who made a point of liking them for different, more subtle reasons. Thus,
in his text on Autopsy of a Murder, Luc Moullet proclaims the Rossellian modernity of Otto
Preminger. As the demonstration is based solely on a highlighting of realism in the Austrian
filmmaker,
Machine Translated by Google

Hungarian and that realism is essential in Mourlet's theory, the demonstration is not very
convincing. " The obvious but unspeakable art of Preminger requires a direct contact with the
order of reason, a grounding, a subject, a very precise framework " is a sentence that Moullet
40
writes but that Mourlet could have signed. The play on words " the bitter Michel " may be
amusing, but it then appears as a gratuitous dig. This example shows that it was not easy for
film buffs who also subscribed to Bazin's postulate to stand out from the Mac-Mahonians even if
their desire to do so was great, so irritating could Mourlet's haughty tone be.

Luc Moullet remembers that at the Cahiers, several editors, including himself, found the
MacMahonians " ridiculous ".

It was not for the Cahiers but for a Catholic review recently created by the Dominicans, Signes des temps, that Luc Moullet

wrote the most structured critique of MacMahonism. In November 1959, in an article entitled "Is pure cinema just a myth?", he

began by hailing a theory " at least as important as those of an Arnheim or 41 of a Belasz ."

.
According to him, Michel Mourlet, like the " Alexandrians,
41
of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Parnassians " attempted to define a " pure art " .

In "On an Ignored Art", this notion was " finally defined with clarity and accuracy, without any of
the hazy metaphors which were the only value of Jean Epstein's treatises "
41
.
Because, for Mourlet, " the only definitive truth
41
is that of the staging " , Moullet likened his colleague
to a champion of " art for art's sake ", an epigone of Rosetti and Mallarmé. He then had an
easy time retorting that cinema being, unlike literature and painting, " an indirect creation,
the fruit of a necessary dialogue between man and the world ", it is an art "

41
necessarily impure " .
Luc Moullet thus placed himself in the direct line of Bazin, a position
all the more coherent since he wrote in a Catholic review. But Mourlet is also a Bazinian for
whom cinema is first and foremost a look at the world... When Moullet wrote " the theme of
transference in Hitchcock has no value in itself, but helps us to understand the formal meaning
of the work " did he not realize that Mourlet had said exactly the same thing when he wrote: " the
41
theme of transference gives rise to situations which, themselves, engender
,
Machine Translated by Google

a staging whose own constants hold our attention ”14 ?

Moullet also pertinently recalled that " all filmmakers have had recourse to formal
artifices " and that " Preminger himself is a
41
virtuoso of the movements of the apparatus condemned by Mourlet » .

However, to say that Mourlet condemned camera movements was excessive since the
author of "On an Ignored Art" reserved his sarcasm for " what somewhat backward film
buffs call 'fantastic camera movements' " and only rejected " camera movements Rather
than a method, Mourlet defined a canon. In the sentence " The art of editing, which is then
14
mass of .
confused with editing, therefore consists in making the cuts made in the
reality as invisible as possible " the " as possible " is very important because it shows that
Mourlet is, of course, not fooled by the realistic illusion that he advocates. "On an Ignored
14
Art" is both a theory, which aims
, for a certain objectivity, and a critique, which assumes
the subjectivity of an experience and the aesthetic ideal that results from this experience:
between two spectators of the same film, the "gratuitousness" of a camera movement can
always be subject to debate. The argument that classical transparency cannot do without
artifice, recurrent under the pen of the theoreticians of the Cahiers (in April 1964, Jean-
Louis Comolli in his critique of Walsh's Adventures in Burma would take up similar
arguments: " the height of reality [...] is of course only the height of art " 42), is both
irrefutable and irrelevant if it is a question of attacking Mourlet because it is a materialist
argument opposed to an idealist conception. Noting that Mourlet may have proclaimed "
everything is in the staging ", he did not dwell on a practical definition of it, Jacques Aumont
(also a former member of Cahiers ) puts forward the following thesis: for the Mac-
Mahonians, staging " is no longer an art, no longer a technique, but a mystery "

19 .
There is
certainly something mystical, and therefore irreducibly subjective, in MacMahonism. The
theory serves to promote a taste.
To return to Preminger, a supremely classical filmmaker if ever there was one, it seems
that his camera movements are not " gratuitous " but bearers of continuity and that they
instill a fluidity that contributes to the immersion of the spectator. This was not contested
by Luc Moullet. As Jacques Aumont writes, " Preminger is
Machine Translated by Google

Certainly, of all the Hollywood filmmakers of the classical era, the one who best
knew how to marry these two contradictory constraints: to make sense and not to
show it. "19 This article,
which is quite fascinating, if only historically speaking (several MacMahonians
are named in it), sometimes seems specious in its argumentation which, in order
to contradict MacMahonism, seems to want to take him onto a terrain that was
never his own, that of a so-called " pure cinema ". Now Mourlet would most
certainly have signed Moullet's conclusion with both hands: " Behind the barriers
of gratuitous aestheticism, no filmmaker worthy of the name is free to indulge in
esoteric delusions. "
41
It was therefore at the cost of dubious extrapolations that Moullet
distinguished himself from the annoying Mourlet, with whom he ultimately shared
many ideas on cinema. However, Mourlet's famous formula " Everything is in the
staging " had been able to fuel the misunderstanding. This misunderstanding, the
"Boileau of Mac-Mahon" would endeavor to dispel it three years later with a set of
texts on the relationship between screenplay and staging. We will come back to
this.
This disconnection from the world was one of the criticisms regularly levelled
at the MacMahonians, who were nevertheless advocates of realism. At Cahiers,
the quarrel even extended to the Courrier des lecteurs. In May 1960, Jacques
Goimard, the future science fiction editor, sent a long missive in which, after
expressing his reservations about the New Wave and affirming his attachment to
an " objectivist and optimistic " cinema close to that defended by the MacMahonians,
he mocked the latter's theory in the following terms: " fascination is all well and
good, but overall, a good film is not just a magic ceremony ."43
.

However, it should be noted that at that time, the most intense cinephile
quarrels could accommodate humor as a pressure relief valve. The healthy
distance of derision materialized in any note. Thus, about Jacques Séverac's Le
Pain des Jules : " Filmed theater, but alas! very bad theater very badly filmed.
Objectivity makes it our duty, however, to quote the opinion of our friend Mourlet:
"the best film of the year, since Bella Darvi, although badly coiffed and scandalously
dressed, plays in it. "
44
Although, 58
years later, he no longer remembered it, "friend Mourlet" confirmed to me that it
could only have been a joke, a joke that he himself had been able to make.
Machine Translated by Google

be the instigator. She was responding to a specific passage from her

manifesto: " a lousy film completely devoid of ambition, if it includes an
essential actor (example: The Egyptian where Bella Darvi is sublime) is more
14
endearing than an ambitious film whose actors are poorly chosen. " Luc
Moullet also remembers going to Mac-Mahon with an eye patch, due to the Rissient gang's
fondness for one-eyed directors (Walsh and Lang).

Finally, beyond these petty wars, let us note that the thinking developed by
Mourlet in his flagship text was sufficiently stimulating to infuse articles far
removed from MacMahonism: good comrade, the communist sympathizer
Louis Marcorelles quoted "On an Ignored Art" in his review of A Hole in the
Head by Frank Capra45 .

Five years later, in 1965, Michel Mourlet's texts would be widely commented
on when they were published in the form of a collection by the éditions de la
Table Ronde. From La cinématographie française to the Brussels weekly Le
phare dimanche, the review of Sur un art inconnu - la mise en scène comme
langage was broad, reflecting an era when debates between film buffs were
echoed in the most general media. In particular, the penetrating report by
Patrice Howald, citing Klee and Klossowski, in L'Alsace is enough to leave
the reader familiar with contemporary "PQR" stunned... Notably absent from
the press review: Cahiers du cinéma. Let us summarize with this sentence
from Pierre Ajame: " It is a book that brings joy and anger, in short it is a book
that lives. "46
Machine Translated by Google

The Parisian release of Time Without Pity

The release in Paris in May 1960 of Time Without Pity, made in Great Britain in 1957,
marked a high point in the MacMahonian quarrel.

Three years earlier, Joseph Losey himself had presented his latest film at the Mac-Mahon
in the presence, of course, of the Mac-Mahonians, but also of his colleagues exiled by
Senator Joseph McCarthy for their communist sympathies: John Berry, Jules Dassin, Paul
Jarrico, Lee Gold… Pierre Rissient had then worked to convince a French distributor to
release Time Without Pity in Paris while Losey's previous film, The Intimate Stranger, was
still unreleased in France. Twenty years later, the César-winning director of Monsieur Klein
would acknowledge his debt to the Mac-Mahonians for the decisive turning point that this
event represented for his career.47 For Rissient, the Parisian release of Time Without Pity
was their " battle". It was an opportunity for all film enthusiasts to judge the reputation of
Joseph Losey, a pure creation of
the Mac-Mahonians.
5 of Hernani » .

When the latter loudly proclaimed that The Boy with Green Hair was one of the most
beautiful masterpieces in the history of the seventh art, they were all the less likely to risk
being contradicted since this film had never been released in France... At Cahiers du cinéma,
the review of Temps sans pitié was entrusted to Luc Moullet rather than, for example, to
Philippe Demonsablon. This was indicative of the liveliness of opposition to MacMahonism
within a divided editorial staff. According to Moullet, it was because he made Rohmer laugh
that he was his favorite and that the editor-in-chief refused him nothing. Paradoxically, the
beginning of his text, mischievously entitled "Splendor of the False", accumulates the most
hackneyed clichés of the cultural right: Americans should remain anchored in their national
culture rather than dabbling in psychoanalysis or Marxism, while a director wanting to convey
progressive messages cannot
Machine Translated by Google

to be " a pure director ". Let us recall that Michel Mourlet, later assigned to the extreme
right by his detractors, never attacked artists for their political commitments... However,
Moullet hits the nail on the head when he notes that the visual baroque of Temps sans
pitié clashes with the realism praised by the Mac-Mahonians.8 In the special Losey issue
to which we will return, Pierre Rissient and Michel Fabre corrected several factual errors
by Moullet, but when Mourlet responded to his aesthetic criticism by stating that, in the
staging of Temps sans pitié, "what is essential is essential in itself, without external
valorization,

48
thanks to the sole rectitude of the gesture which designates" he did , not support this
assertion with any example unlike his adversary, very precise in his argumentation.

Watching Time Without Pity today in light of its MacMahonian reputation leaves one
circumspect: it is a rickety machine from which emerges the moving performance of
Michael Redgrave and a brilliant ending. As Moullet wrote, it is " a beautiful film but not
one of the five or six greatest films of all time " as its thurifers did not hesitate to proclaim.
8

In 1960, it was difficult to grasp, and perhaps to admit, for the MacMahonians, but
Time Without Pity marked a milestone in the work of Joseph Losey who, as the new
decade progressed, would move away from the simplicity of his early films and their
beauty " like the ardor of a morning swimmer " according to the pretty phrase of Marc
Bernard49 .

An article like that of Bernard de Fallois in the weekly Arts - the Proustian editor was a
talented journalistic critic at the turn of the 60s - shows well that the fact that the film with
which all of Paris discovered Losey was Time Without Pity (rather than, say, Haines or The
Prowler) did little to improve the image of the "young terrorist cinephilia" in the eyes of the
established critics. Yet Rissient's objective was achieved because, as Andy Warhol said: "
there's no such thing as bad publicity ".

Losey's career was revived. Shortly thereafter, Jeanne Moreau, then the leading female
star of French cinema, would ask to work with him on the adaptation of James Hardley
Chase's Eva . By the 1960s, McCarthy's outcast would become a star of international
arthouse cinema, winning favor with those who had disdained him as he drifted away from
his early admirers, even going so far as to win the Cannes Film Festival's top award.
Machine Translated by Google

Whatever one may think today of Time Without Pity, the dispute over
it reveals the liveliness of cinephile debates and the purely aesthetic
passion that could animate the critics of the time.
Machine Translated by Google

The Mac-Mahon exclusive room and the

Mac-Mahon Circle

In issue 105 of Cahiers du cinéma, a friendly note from Simon Mizrahi

announced that the Mac-Mahon would become an exclusive theater. In fact,
it was on March 16, 1960 that the cinema unveiled a masterpiece that had
been awaited for five years: The Moonfleet Smugglers , which MGM had
deemed relevant to release only in the provinces, considering this
masterpiece, now recognized as one of Fritz Lang's finest, to be a banal
adventure film. Once again, Rissient's activism had borne fruit.
Then, other films were screened at the Mac-Mahon, some dating back
several years, which had not had the good fortune to be distributed in the
capital or even elsewhere in France: Frontier Ranger by Jacques Tourneur,
Kismet by Vincente Minnelli, The Beast Awakens by Joseph Losey...

In December 1960, a film club was founded with Pierre Rissient, Marc
Bernard, Alain Archambault, Michel Mourlet, Jacques Serguine, Michel Fabre
and Claude Makovski, future producer and husband of Nelly Kaplan: the
"Cercle du Mac-Mahon". Joseph Losey was named honorary president.
His new film was the first to be screened: Blind Date. The next one was Fritz
Lang's last: The Diabolical Doctor Mabuse (Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse).
Thanks to the audience's contributions, the two filmmakers had made the trip
to the Mac-Mahon.
The goal of the Cercle du Mac-Mahon was different from that of traditional
film clubs, which aimed to transmit a cinematographic culture to the people.
Rissient organized previews intended primarily for journalists. This film club
was both elitist and popularizing. It was elitist because the membership fee
dissuaded young people who were regulars at the Cinémathèque, the Latin
Quarter theaters, and the Mac-Mahon. Patrick Brion told me that when they
wanted to attend the Sunday morning screenings, he and Bernard Eisenschitz
had to do secretarial work.
Machine Translated by Google

for Rissient. However, cinephiles as sharp as the future founder of the Cinéma
de minuit were only rarely interested in previews of films that would be released
a few weeks later throughout Paris. Rissient's target was the socialite and media
caste, as unaware of the greatness of Raoul Walsh as they were broad in
influence. After the Cahiers du cinéma, the Mac-Mahonians targeted Paris Match
where their film club was entitled to a few short articles. A method then
unprecedented according to him, Rissient encouraged journalists to interview his
protégés. We see once again that, to assert their tastes, the Mac-Mahonians did
not just write but acted on several fronts. The film club was an instrument of their
film activism. According to an article by Michel Mardore, admission to the circle
required the guarantee of two sponsors50 .

Mardore saw in the Mac-Mahon the cinema-loving chapel " the most
severely closed, the one whose terror has most easily struck the public's
50
imagination " Banning entry to the follicular people guilty of
.

having attacked films that he liked or even of having defended filmmakers that he
did not like (!), Pierre Rissient began his very singular career as a press attaché
where intransigence counted as much as connections.

Let us digress here to recall that the film buffs of the 1950s were among the inventors of
the press attaché profession. The Parisian branches of Hollywood studios quickly understood
the advantage they could take from these young American cinema enthusiasts who were as
enthusiastic as they were penniless. To the great displeasure of their desperate parents,
seeing three or four films a day could not be accommodated by office hours. The screen
was preferred to life. But, as in Leo, grace sometimes fell. Alfred Eibel told me that, while he
was passionately discussing cinema with Marc Bernard in a bar on the Champs-Elysées, a
Fox executive approached them and offered Marc a job as a press attaché. When the young
man reticently pointed out his lack of professional experience, he replied: " It doesn't matter,
we'll train you ." The Mac-Mahonian thus succeeded Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol,
one of whose greatest feats at Fox was finding the French title for Robert D. Webb's The
Proud Ones . Chabrol's astonishing find to title this beautiful western where Robert Ryan
plays a sheriff alone against all: The Sheriff. No one had thought of it before him.
Machine Translated by Google

This is how, on Sunday morning, Pierre Rissient presented to hand-

picked journalists: Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis (Vittorio
Cottafavi), Hatari (Howard Hawks), Doctor Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick),
Esther and the King (Raoul Walsh), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(John Ford), The Ballad of the Hopeless (John Cassavetes), Seven
Days in May (John Frankenheimer), A Crime in the Head (John Frankenheimer) …
In addition to the expected old masters, this list includes several films
by young filmmakers: Kubrick, Frankenheimer and even Cassavetes.
Machine Translated by Google

The break with Cahiers du cinéma

Throughout history, artistic reputations have been built through war, and often classics only
became classics after the action of a minority fighting to impose them.

The fierce exclusivism of the MacMahonians in favour of Losey was irritating in exactly the same
way that it was irritating, in 1806, the friends of Ludwig Van Beethoven, whom an anonymous
Berlin journalist attacked in the following terms: " deifying such productions, [they] impose their
opinion with a bang, pursue with their hateful envy any other talent, and would like to raise an
altar to Beethoven alone, on the ruins of all the other composers "51

Thus, if the Mac-Mahon's programming continued to unite Parisian film buffs across the
board, the same was not true of Mourlet's articles in the Cahiers du cinéma. In September 1960,
a "special Joseph Losey" issue was produced almost exclusively by Mac-Mahonians, who were
particularly excited by their recent discovery of The Boy with Green Hair in London. Michel
Mourlet, but also Jacques Serguine, Marc Bernard, Michel Fabre and Pierre Rissient took part
in it.

The emphasis on the notion of "knowledge" in Rissient and Mourlet's articles showed that the
MacMahonians do not confuse "fascination" with "bewitchment". For these lovers of transparency,
beauty in cinema is a revelation of the beauty of the world. There is no catharsis that is worth
anything if it is cut off from reality. Mourlet therefore wrote: "That an artist has a "universe" is an
admission of impotence, limitation and, more seriously, artifice. Stendhal, Racine, Bach or Vinci
do not have a universe. [...] There is an absolute knowledge, an unveiling of being [...] Losey
gives the most faithful and brutal reflection of this knowledge. It is not a universe, but the
universe."

48
In this,
perfectly in agreement with the spirit of Cahiers du cinéma, Mourlet does not
Machine Translated by Google

could separate aesthetics from morality: "If beauty and lucidity go hand in hand, there is not, as
is often believed, "aesthetics" and "morality", two separate activities that are each studied in their
own chapter in the Sorbonne manuals, but a single movement of which beauty, morality,
intelligence are the different names. The clearest gaze chooses the noblest form, and the hand
shapes it faithfully. We know of no other definition of art ."

48
. Beauty confused with truth and
justice: the disciple of Aristotle here tends towards Plato and responds to the critics who have
made and will make MacMahonism an enemy of reason. When I told him about the comments of
Jacques Aumont who defines the " presence " sought by the MacMahonians as being a "
paralysis of reason by exacerbation of sensible certainty "
19
,

Michel Mourlet replied to me that he had always refuted the " illusory dichotomy between the
essence of the rational and the essence of the emotional ", that he had never been able to enter
into this way of thinking "knowing that all thought starts from obvious and undemonstrable axioms
[...] and that it is always linked to a "state of mind"". In this way he joins the "visual thought" of
Rudolf Arnheim, the German art theorist who, after being chased away by the Nazis, taught
cinema to the young Brian de Palma.

Always opposed to a conception of beauty that is deadly or stupefying, Pierre Rissient went
so far in his article as to consider that the clarity with which he sets out the relationships between
man and the world in Haines shows that Joseph Losey "has the will to [reform the world] and the
confidence that this reform will give the world universal happiness, in the sense that the great
revolutionaries understood it, and in the sense that Roger Vailland understands it: 'Every
shepherdess will be a queen.'"
52
.

The Marxist connotation of these sentences was accentuated by a quote from the communist
playwright Bertolt Brecht at the beginning of the paragraph. Joseph Losey having been trained by
Brecht, Rissient assumed the emphasis on the Unlike Aristotle, this theorist of "theatrical
and realism in favor of a step back that should allow the distancing." theory rejects identification
spectator to reflect on " the place of the theatrical act in society ." We are therefore at the antipodes
of the search for fascination praised in "On an Ignored Art." In 1989, far from cinema but closer to
theater, Michel Mourlet would also write a short but incisive essay against the German:
Thaumaturgy of Theater or the Anti-Brecht
Machine Translated by Google

where, in the direct line of MacMahonian theory, Aristotle is considered the model.

The paradoxical influence of Brecht on the favorite filmmaker of the Mac-Mahonians

cannot, however, be reduced to a biographical anecdote. In the interview conducted by
Rissient and Fabre, Losey, after expressing his distrust of all theory, affirms his agreement
with a fundamental principle of Brecht: " at the moment when, in the public, emotion stops the
flow of thought, the director has failed ". A Marxist, the filmmaker devoted a significant part of
his work to highlighting the structures of social or sexual domination. This induces in him an
analytical distance that, at times, veers into demonstrative falsehood. Among those made
before the publication of this issue 111 of Cahiers du cinéma, his first feature film, The Boy
with Green Hair is undoubtedly the most marked by the influence of Brecht. The somewhat
basic symbolism of the plot accuses the artifice of the anti-racist fable. However, the simple
emotion of the scenes with the mistress and the painful poetry of the shots with the orphans
in the ruins go against the distancing. The staging adorns the demonstrative mechanisms
with a simple and direct beauty, such as sought by the MacMahonians. In his next film,
Haines, the educational aim remains present but it is cast even more harmoniously in the
natural unfolding of the facts. Hence Pierre Rissient was able to praise " the innocence of the
gaze " and Michel Mourlet " the mirror of such pure water at work in this film in honor of which
Marc Bernard wrote a poem beginning with the following verse: " If Lawless [Haines] is the
most beautiful of films, it is because there is none that alerts us to a more just feeling for
nature."
52

48 »

49
.

At the editorial office, this "special Joseph Losey" issue was the straw that broke the camel's back. Not only were the historical

totems of the Cahiers such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock or Roberto Rossellini unceremoniously denigrated, but in addition,

the issue had been composed by the Mac-Mahonians away from the other editors. Their opponents therefore made their discontent

known to Rohmer and Mourlet. The latter slammed the door. He had never felt comfortable in a magazine where " his pen was 24
watched as if one were writing in Pravda"

. This trend in Cahiers du

cinéma was confirmed by several editors in the 1960s (after Rivette took over the magazine
against Rohmer): Patrick
Machine Translated by Google

Brion who tells me that " Rivette and his friends rewrote all the articles " or Paul Vecchiali
to whom " Rivette refused an article [But 85% of the article came out under another
53
signature]. Entire sentences were identical " .

On the other hand, Luc Moullet told me that he had never been confronted with these
untimely interventions even if Rivette was able to " help him finish a note
».

The conflict over the Losey issue was the climax of a split that had lasted a little over a
year. Unless it became completely MacMahonian, the yellow magazine could no longer
contain the MacMahonians.

Later, some would like to give a political motive to this rupture.

For example, in her Brief History of Cahiers du Cinéma, the American historian Emily
Bickerton states that the text that aroused Jacques Rivette's ire and served as a pretext
for him to monopolize the direction of the magazine - a critique of John Ford's The Two
Horsemen in which the seriousness of racism was relativized - was signed by a
MacMahonian (whose name she does not even cite). This is a very gross anachronism.
This critique appeared in issue 127 of January 1962, more than a year after the rupture of
the fall of 1960. Its author, Philippe d'Hugues, was in no way a MacMahonian.

When he met Eric Rohmer, he even scolded him for daring to publish "a young terrorist
who demolishes Eisenstein, Orson Welles and Hitchcock at the same time ". A film critic
for the royalist magazine La Nation Française , Philippe d'Hugues showed remarkable
open-mindedness in these times of factional warfare. A fan of Antonioni and Godard as
much as Walsh and Ford, his eclectic but clearly argued tastes had nothing to do with
MacMahonian intransigence. In 1965, reviewing Sur un art inconnu, Philippe d'Hugues
wrote that, although " full of just and penetrating ideas " and expressed with " clarity and
talent ", " such a rigid conception greatly impoverishes cinema ".54 A great casuist who
could demonstrate that, in 1960, the MacMahonians were more right-wing than the
Hitchcocko-Hawksians. Whether it was to defend American cinema in the midst of the .

Cold War, to elevate the Christian films of Dreyer and Rossellini or to castigate the
anticlericalism of Bost and Aurenche, the future directors of the New Wave openly
assumed the ideological conflict with the left-wing press. Rohmer's considerations on " the
revenge of the West " and the white blood flowing in the veins of the Polynesians in
Taboo55 , the apology
Machine Translated by Google

of the monarchy by Truffaut in his critique of If Versailles Were Told to Me56 and Rivette's
Catholic panegyric, the subject of his virulent "Letter on Rossellini", do not exactly reflect a
progressive position
57
and do not find an equivalent in Mourlet's texts, where the angle of
attack remains aesthetic. In the columns of Positif, the eternal rival of the Cahiers , then
positioned to their left, Louis Seguin overwhelmed Charles Bitsch with his contempt because
he had raved about the " frantic camera movements " of The Man with the Cross without
saying a single word about the ideology conveyed by this Mussolini propaganda film made
by Rossellini in 1943. Finally, let us not forget that the first films of Chabrol and Godard had
been accused of "fascism" both by Positif, who was indignant about it, and by Jean
Parvulesco, who rejoiced 58in the following terms in a Falangist magazine: " The cinema of
Jean-Luc Godard is the historical revenge of Drieu la Rochelle "59 Finally, let us recall, quite
simply, that the issue that caused the schism was devoted to a man hunted by Senator
McCarthy for having been a member of the Communist Party. A praiser of Joseph Losey but
also of Jules Dassin and John Berry, Pierre Rissient was the most .

ardent defender of the filmmakers on the black list.

However, this did not prevent him from being friends with a writer affiliated with the
literary right: Michel Déon. In high school, Rissient had been passionate about Les
trompeuses espérances and then, as was his habit, had shared his enthusiasm for a still
little-known novelist with his classmates, among whom, of course, was Michel Mourlet.
According to Rissient, his appetite for French writers in whom he liked " a certain
reasoned way of apprehending things and making them sensitive " complemented his
5
love of direct and brutal American cinema. However, we can note that these two
apparently distant tendencies have something in common: a clarity of expression that is
as opposed to Michelangelo Antonioni as to Alain Robbe-Grillet. In the same vein as
Déon, Rissient cherished Cecil Saint-Laurent (more than Jacques Laurent) and Roger
Vailland, the "left-wing hussar".

It was only after his departure from Cahiers that Michel Mourlet contributed some
texts to Défense de l'Occident, the very nationalist and very poor review of Maurice
Bardèche at a time (1960-62) when, under the patronage of Michel Déon, it was moving
away from the strictly ideological fight for
Machine Translated by Google

give a large place to culture. Unless I am mistaken in summarizing, these texts

can be counted on the fingers of one hand and cinema is approached from an
aesthetic and not a political angle:
“Views of Vittorio Cottafavi” (April 1961, New Series No. 12)
"On Hollywood" (January 1962, New Series No. 19)
“ Messalina by Vittorio Cottafavi” (February 1962, New Series No. 20)
where Mourlet defended the costume drama
"A revival of The Naked and the Dead " (March-April 1962, New Series
No. 21) where the cathartic thesis of "Apology for Violence" was taken up
through a brief study of the American war film
"What is a screenplay" (June 1962, New series No. 23) a
review by Eva de Losey (November 1962, New series No. 28)
reprinted in March-April 1964 in Présence du cinéma

A dozen years later, well after MacMahonism, a final text by Mourlet, unrelated
to cinema, would be published in Défense de l'Occident : "the nonsense of History"
(December 1975, No. 133).

To conclude the file, whose importance has been excessively inflated by the enemies of
the Mac-Mahonians, of Michel Mourlet's collaborations in the 1960s with far-right newspapers,
it is appropriate to be rigorous and to specify that, in 1963-64, Mourlet also provided a short
story and, like Jean Cocteau, a eulogy of Roger Nimier to Accent Grave, a literary, cultural
and political review clearly right-wing but no less clearly distant from Mac-Mahonism if we
are to believe its film critic, Georges Allary, whose references were called Ingmar Bergman,
Orson Welles and Federico Fellini.

Finally, it should be recalled that, at the beginning of the 1960s, a left-wing

intellectual as emblematic as Jean-Louis Bory could say that he was " extremely
happy to be here " when he was welcomed by Bardèche's review to debate
fascism . 60 Since that time, sectarianism and insularity have undoubtedly gained
ground in French intellectual life.

Above all, the divergence between the Cahiers du cinéma and the Mac-
Mahonians was of an aesthetic nature. The Mac-Mahonians cultivated an ideal
Machine Translated by Google

while the Cahiers du cinéma focused on detecting the significant forces of contemporary cinema, always mixing journalism with

criticism. This is the crucial difference between Jacques Rivette and Michel Mourlet. If their theoretical positions could overlap,

one defined a canon of beauty to which he remained faithful throughout his life while the other made a point of playing the role of

a revolutionary avant-garde, never hesitating to burn his idols of the day in order to stay in touch with new trends in cinema. In

the documentary devoted to him by Serge Daney and Claire Denis, Rivette recalls that he was considered the 61 Saint-Just of

the Cahiers gang.

In 1963, three years after the departure of Mourlet and his friends, Rivette would specify
the evolution of his thinking, clearly divergent from MacMahonism: " Is there an in-itself of
cinema from which rules and exceptions would flow? The more it goes on, the less I can
believe it; cinema is, in the end, nothing other than what filmmakers make of it, and the
exception, if it has the name Eisenstein, or Bunuel, or Chaplin, well, an exception perhaps,
but that of conquest, and which has little to worry about specificity since it founds it, just as
Bach or Schoenberg are less concerned with instituting a universal writing than with
exploring their own language "62
.

If there was a coincidence - momentary and stormy - between MacMahonism and the
Cahiers, it is because, at the end of the 50s, classical cinema was at its peak. In 1959 alone,
the following films were released in Paris: Tales of the Vague Moon After the Rain, The
Bengal Tiger, The Hindu Tomb, Rio Bravo, Autopsy of a Murder, The Naked and the Dead,
The Burning Brunette, The Time to Love and the Time to Die, The Mirage of Life, Like a
Torrent, The Judgment of Arrows... In other words, a string of limpid or flamboyant
masterpieces capable of arousing the enthusiasm of spectators of all persuasions via the
"fascination" that Michel Mourlet had described with such verve.

But on the other hand, the same year, The 400 Blows, Wild Strawberries and Hiroshima
Mon Amour embodied the emergence of a different, more self-conscious cinema, from
which the yellow magazine did not want to cut itself off, even if it would not be until December
1962 that, at the express request of François Truffaut, who considered his former comrades
a little lukewarm towards his own films, it would openly take sides with the New Wave. Luc
Moullet remembers that Eric Rohmer was reluctant to appear as " judge and jury " unlike
Rivette who, with Truffaut's complicity,
Machine Translated by Google

took his place in 1963. The alleged political infamy of the MacMahonians
welcomed three years earlier was then part of the pretexts to oust the
editor-in-chief and take over the magazine.
Machine Translated by Google

Presence of cinema

If the Mac-Mahonians abandoned the Cahiers du cinéma to their internal quarrels, it was
also because they seized the opportunity to have their own magazine. Présence du cinéma
had been founded in 1959 by Jean Curtelin with his friend Michel Parsy. Jean Curtelin was
a philosophy professor from Lyon who had moved to Paris and had saved up money earned
by selling waffles in Saint-Malo: although he titillated the reader in iconoclastic articles, he
was also, like so many young people of the time, a film buff who had faith. A film magazine
among forty others, their periodical was struggling to survive. In two years, despite the
monthly frequency displayed, only five issues - including three doubles - had come out. The
editors were very varied. The sample extended from Luc Moullet to Robert Benayoun via
Edgar Morin and Jacques Siclier.

The following picturesque lines, written by Jean Curtelin in issue 8, were

particularly revealing of the difficulty the journal had in positioning itself: "It is not
usual for the editor-in-chief of a journal to contradict, shortly after publishing them,
the opinions expressed in his own journal.

Yet this is what I decided to do, sincerely regretting having missed, in our previous
issue, the critical article that Yves Boisset had devoted to Tirez sur le pianiste.

This severe analysis that he had given me did not worry me in the least because,
exasperated by the conformist spirit of the 400 Blows, I did not expect anything good
from this Shoot the Pianist. Even if it may seem to some that it is a little late to do
so, I would like to point out that our magazine is in no way in solidarity with the
opinions of Yves Boisset.
There followed two eulogies of François Truffaut's film, one by Jean Wagner
and the other by Fereydoun Hoveyda.
After a year, the title was sold to Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Sade's sulphurous
publisher had changed the very vague editorial line in
Machine Translated by Google

a naughty sense ("Sadism and libertinism", "The new actresses of French cinema") before
throwing in the towel himself. Its founder then took over the periodical.

Aware of the futility of maintaining yet another film magazine and also aware that
something new was at stake with MacMahonism, Jean Curtelin telephoned Michel Mourlet
to ask him to head up the editorial staff of Présence. In the first editorial of the new formula,
he explained his choice by comparing the impact of the MacMahonians to that of Rivette and
Truffaut five years earlier. Mourlet was quick to accept Curtelin's proposal. In order to kick
together against the traces of cultural conformism, these two certified provocateurs quickly
got along. Through Curtelin, the MacMahonians also met the man who would become one
of their most faithful companions: the editorial secretary Alfred Eibel, son of a wealthy
Viennese family exiled after the Anschluss who had to change nationality six times. He had
been introduced to cinema by Michel Parsy and it was thanks to his financial help that
Curtelin was able to buy his magazine.

The change of editorial staff at Présence du cinéma was accompanied by a change of

layout. As a former student of the Arts Déco, Michel Mourlet took a particular interest in
concocting the new cover, visibly inspired by the NRF with its red letters on a white
background.
The austerity of the new presentation contrasted with the previous one, which tended more
towards a magazine. The paper was no longer glossy. The graphics and visual organization
of the magazine contributed to a project that placed it in the French cinephile tradition:
ennobling popular artists chosen by taste.

Michel Mourlet did not disappoint his new employer by devoting the entire first issue of
this new formula to Vittorio Cottafavi. Although following "Le Boileau du Mac-Mahon", Michel
Delahaye and Luc Moullet had written positive reviews of his films in Cahiers du cinéma, this
director of peplums was generally considered... a director of peplums; the most despised
genre of the time. He himself had only devoted himself to films in togas and sandals after
seeing his debut, in what should be called "auteur cinema", panned by an Italian critics then
subject to neo-realist canons as well as to this communist dogma refusing to consider that
Machine Translated by Google

employees of the fascist state were able to resist during the Second World War. La fiamma
che non si spegne, a liturgical exaltation of the sacrifice of the carabiniere Salvo d'Acquisto
against the Germans, had logically attracted the wrath of these apparatchiks when it was
presented at the Venice Festival in 1949. Cottafavi had then devoted himself to popular
and therefore commercial genres (melodramas and swashbuckling films first, then peplums
and mythological films) while maintaining a haughty distance in his staging that
distinguished him from his colleagues working in the same vein.

It was thanks to a correspondent in Italy for Agence France-Presse that Mourlet and his
friends became interested in the cinema of Vittorio Cottafavi.
Paul Gilles, alias Paul Agde, had, at the end of the 1950s, approached the Mac-Mahonians
as they were leaving a Parisian cinema, proclaiming his dual " surrealist and Christian "
63
affiliation. . This made Marc »63 Bernard say « that's what
you
call being doubly wrong but that didn't stop this poet-cinephile from sympathizing with Michel Mourlet.

According to the latter, who tried to promote his friend's writings until the 2000s, Agde
wasted an undeniable literary talent because of an arrogant and self-destructive alcoholism
that estranged him from the publishers who were most well-intentioned towards him. The
curious can still verify Mourlet's judgment by reading the poem Décret sur les arômes64
and the short stories L'encombrant65 and Dora et la femme nue66 The few texts that Paul
Agde gave to Présence du cinéma, notably his critique of Fuller's Les Maraudeurs .

attaquent in issue 14, were not the least fiery in the magazine.

It was naturally through Paul Agde that Mourlet met Vittorio Cottafavi, in Rome, in the
RAI studios. Born at the same time as the portable tape recorder, the Cahiers du cinéma
had launched the vogue of major interviews with beloved filmmakers.

By giving priority to the words of artists over the gloss of commentators, Présence du
cinéma would go even further in this direction since they would collect not only the words
of directors but also those of their various collaborators: scriptwriters, technicians, actors.
Michel Mourlet formulates this choice thus: "We put the expression of professionals at the
center of the debate. It seemed to us all the same more important than the opinion of kids
with noses still pimply from juvenile acne. "24
Machine Translated by Google

Reading the thirty pages of discussion between Agde, Mourlet and Cottafavi, many
readers were surprised to discover that the director of La vengeance d'Hercule was a
cultured and intelligent artist, a keen reader of Kafka and Calderon, capable of discussing
in depth the direction of actors, the decor, the editing, geometry, the history of cinema… All
in impeccable French. Louis Marcorelles went so far as to suspect the Mac-Mahonians of
having invented the remarks of their darling. The most embarrassed by this sudden and
resounding glorification was Cottafavi himself who, Mourlet recounts, tried to buy back all
the copies of issue no. 9 of Présence intended for his country. It must be said that the
interview was accompanied by two eulogies, one of which in which Mourlet demonstrated
the tragic genius of the author of Femmes libres with a precision in the examples quite rare
for him. This admirable “On Racine’s Side” took up important fragments of Mourlet’s first
article for Défense de l’Occident : “Regards sur Vittorio Cottafavi”.

The indispensable filmography, a collection of comments from collaborators translated

by Alain Archambault and an important paper by Paul Agde on the television works of the
master who, in 1961, had already begun to devote most of his work to the small screen
completed the delivery. This last article also shows that cultivating an aesthetic ideal did not
prevent the Mac-Mahonians from taking an interest in the most contemporary forms of
audiovisual creation (later, Mourlet would publish a book, from his course in communication
theory at the University of Paris I, on television and television artists: Television or the Myth
of Argus). Thus, Vittorio Cottafavi was the subject of an issue as exceptional as those that
the Cahiers du cinéma had dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir, an issue without
any reference to current events.

While most of the following issues of Présence devoted some space to reviews of the
latest films and some news from the world of cinema, all were structured around one or two
dossiers, whether or not they were devoted to a filmmaker. This was the wish of the new
editor-in-chief: "I have always been a supporter of dossiers [...] I find it very interesting in
many ways: it allows you to explore an issue, to have a certain number of personalities who
do not necessarily say the same thing collaborate, so it is a wealth. And then from a
documentary point of view, a dossier is more instructive than a mosaic
Machine Translated by Google

24
short texts on one hundred and six different subjects. » .
We note the praise of the
pluralism.
On December 17, 1961, at the same time as this issue 9 was released, Présence du
cinéma organized a "Cottafavi day" in Paris in the presence of the Roman filmmaker and the
lead actress of Fille d'amour, Barbara Laage. It began with the preview screening at the
Cercle du Mac-Mahon of Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis ; it continued with a press
conference that dispelled Louis Marcorelles' doubts; it ended with the screening of The
Executioner of Venice (which Gian Paolo Callegari actually directed and which Cottafavi
only supervised) and Fille d'amour.

Once again, we see the perfect continuity between the various facets of MacMahonian
activism.

The same evening, the Nickelodeon took over from the Mac-Mahon by screening The
Prince in the Red Mask. The Nickelodeon was a film club founded in 1961 by Bertrand
Tavernier, Bernard Martinand and Yves Martin whose tastes were quite close to those of
the Mac-Mahonians, with an added appetite for classic French cinema. Not very keen on
dogma, the "Nickel" did not brandish a "four aces" but if we had to give a quick idea of its
positioning, the following quartet would probably do the trick: Delmer Daves (honorary
president), André De Toth, Budd Boetticher and Edmond T. Gréville. According to Michel
Mardore, " the Nickelodeonian praises the little ideas of staging, these discoveries of detail
in the acting or the decoration of the decor which are enough to tip a conventional scene
into originality, and which the general public does not notice "

50
.

Apart from the Mac-Mahon Distribution company, which we will return to, there were points
of connection between the two groups. When Temps sans pitié came out, Bertrand Tavernier
had behaved as a faithful ally since he had written two eulogies of Losey's film: one in Positif
and one in Cinéma 60.
Libertarian convictions and an interest in blacklisted filmmakers brought him closer to Pierre
Rissient, whose short films he screened. The members of the Nickelodéon frequented the
Mac-Mahon cinema and Tavernier, one of the few admitted to the Cercle, wrote a few
articles in Présence du cinéma from 1963 when Lourcelles took over the direction of the
magazine. However, the Mac-Mahonians hardly frequented the Nickelodéon where it
sometimes happened - heresy - that the films were screened in dubbed versions.
Machine Translated by Google

The Mac-Mahonians, the Hussars and

French Cinema in the Early 60s

The next issue of Présence du cinéma was more traditional. It was devoted to "the
future of French cinema" - a chestnut of the cinematographic press if ever there was
one - and featured Adorable menteuse on the cover.
Indeed, against the New Wave, the Mac-Mahonian review first bet on Michel Deville.

In the early 1960s, the MacMahonians were no more fond of the films of the old
guard than François Truffaut was. In his review of Clouzot's Spies in 1958, Michel
Mourlet wrote: " Fictitious, such is the adjective that comes spontaneously to the pen
to describe this work in which a few symbolic puppets are agitated [...] The spectator
remains as distant from the characters as Clouzot is from his actors. Because this is
undoubtedly the deepest vice of the work (which is moreover honest and
conscientious) of Clouzot and of French directors in general [...] Clouzot's direction,
like that of Autant-Lara, like that of René Clair, is cold, mechanical, exercised only
from the outside. They direct their actors like old Englishwomen paint with
watercolors, with the very thin and very anecdotal tip of a very, very long brush. "67
However, this lack of love for the old ones did not imply a love of the New Wave. In
Breathless, the most basic rules of transparency were broken with too much
enthusiasm to .

excite Présence du cinéma , even if Mourlet admitted much later, speaking to

Michel Ciment on France Culture in 2011, that he had been " seduced " by the film,
that he had " fallen into it like everyone else ." It should be noted, however, that this
pout in the face of the New Wave was more a matter of Cartesian skepticism than of
principle: no less logically than Breathless had been contested, the first feature-length
film
Machine Translated by Google

Eric Rohmer's film, The Sign of the Lion , in which Mourlet appears, would be entitled to a positive
review, signed by Alfred Eibel68 .

In an article for Défense de l'Occident, Michel Mourlet was quite indulgent: "That so many
people have endured ninety minutes of Emmanuelle Riva and atomic obscenities with the feeling
of living a date in the history of art, fills [him] with stupor" but " Godard's approach has elegance
and he has a sense of gesture ". In conclusion: " If Alexandra Stewart is the New Wave, it has not
betrayed Hollywood. If it is Resnais or Kast, I think it was not even worth asking the question ."

69
.
We see once again that the so-called "left bank"
filmmakers attracted more of the wrath of the MacMahonians than the old Hitchcock-Hawksian
critics, who were generally viewed with haughty benevolence.

Moreover, the Mac-Mahonians had a certain esteem for a precursor of the New Wave:
Alexandre Astruc. Like all the important critics of his generation, Michel Mourlet had been marked
by "Naissance d'une nouvelle avant-garde", a text published in 1948 in L'écran français where
Astruc defined a concept that flourished: the "camera-pen". Marc Bernard and Michel Mourlet
spoke with him on the occasion of the release in 1958 of his adaptation of Maupassant, Une vie,
where the precision of the placement of the actors in the frame - large and splendidly colored -
stood out in French cinema of the time and fully justified Marc Bernard's praise: " one of the rare
French directors to give fundamental importance to the direction This interview, rich in penetrating
considerations on several American filmmakers and which sometimes has an inquisitorial air ("
you can admit Kazan and Fritz Lang at the same time, does that not bother you? " asks the young
Mourlet to an already experienced director), was initially to appear in L'écran, Labarthe's
70 » .
magazine, but as it stopped prematurely, it was finally published in n°3-4 (summer 1960)
of Michel Minard's magazine: Études cinématographiques.

For Présence du cinéma, Michel Deville had the double merit of filming the young girls with an
unprecedented freshness and of cutting in a concerted and orderly way, the opposite of the
muddled technique of a Godard.
Let us recall this sentence from Mourlet which concluded one of his first articles: " after all, far
from vamps and theses, perhaps all cinema tends towards this unique and marvelous end: to
show us a girl who
Machine Translated by Google

71
walk by the sea » .
Ce soir ou jamais may be vilified for its dramatic
weakness, but Anna Karina and Françoise Dorléac are undoubtedly resplendent in it. It is
also in the name of a French elegance in line with their literary tastes that the Mac-
Mahonians defended Deville's first films. In addition to an interview with the director, issue
10 of Présence du cinéma included a review of Ce soir ou jamais written directly by Michel
Déon.

The collusion between MacMahonian film buffs and "hussar" writers was at its highest
since Michel Mourlet had published his first novel - the romantic and adamantine D'exil et
de mort - in September 1961 at the Table Ronde thanks to Déon's intervention. During a
cocktail party at the publisher's, he took advantage of the joint presence of Antoine
Blondin, Michel Déon, André Fraigneau, Paul Guimard, Roger Nimier and Dominique
Rollin to organize, with Michel Fabre, a round table at the Table Ronde on the subject of
French cinema. It must be said from the outset: despite the prestige of the poster, this
informal discussion did not revolutionize thinking about the seventh art. In no particular
order and without reaching a synthetic conclusion, the following were discussed: the New
Wave (not only in a negative sense), the eternal problem of film adaptation, which
concerned these novelists first and foremost, and the "New New Wave", that is to say,
short films made by MacMahonians.

A few months later, in the double issue 15/16, Présence du cinéma would welcome
one of Rissient's greatest admirers: Roger Vailland. A reprint of the writer's early writings,
"Choses vues au cinéma en 1930" remains one of the most original articles in a magazine
that is not short of them. The enlightened amateur can note that, forty years before Pierre
Rissient brought back to prominence the sublime Mensonge de Nina Petrovna, another
film by the little-known genius Hans Schwarz was discussed in the Mac-Mahonians'
magazine: La mélodie du cœur, the first German talking film whose melodramatic plot
Vailland looks down on but whose quality of editing he recognizes. That the Mizoguchian
grandeur of this tale of female decadence escaped the libertine communist is hardly
surprising.

At the beginning of 1962, Présence du cinéma firmly believed in the "New New Wave"
although only three short films
Machine Translated by Google

materialized. Thanks to his experience as first assistant, Pierre Rissient was able to
complete his military service, between November 1959 and February 1962, in the army's
cinematographic service. During a leave, in 1961, he filmed La passe de trois, with dialogue
by Michel Déon.
Shortly after, he made Les genous d'Ariane, produced by Michel Deville. This last film, in
which the camera follows a young man and a young girl who are talking while walking in
Paris, reflects more the literary tastes than the cinematographic predilections of the first Mac-
Mahonian. Dialogues chiseled in collaboration with Alain Archambault and an important
shot where the man places his hand on the woman's knee prefigure the cinema of Eric
Rohmer. Certainly, the simple editing and the service of the actors differentiates Rissient
from Godard and Truffaut but, to detect reminiscences of The Tiger of Bengal and Haines
as Marc Bernard did in this n°10 of Présence du cinéma, one certainly had to know the
director personally.

Ariane's knees are illuminated by Vega Vinci, discovered in Cottafavi's The Revolt of the
Gladiators . This mysterious actress, with whom, according to very diverse testimonies,
several Mac-Mahonians were more or less in love, is the link between the three films of the
"New New Wave". In addition to Rissient's two short films, she is also the main actress in
Elia s'en va directed the same year by Alexis Klémentieff. This son of White Russians exiled
in Paris had sympathized with the Mac-Mahonians and wrote a few articles in their magazine.

Ironically, his first short film was produced by a company founded by the Hait-Hin sisters
who embodied the red side of Russian immigration in France; the eldest, Judith, known as
Catherine Winter, had even commanded the 35th FTP-MOI brigade in Toulouse in 1943-44.
Their Société Franco-africaine de Cinéma (SOCRACIMA), founded in Abidjan during the
last months of French colonization, produced several films with a left-wing slant, such as La
guerre est finie by Alain Resnais and Le joli mai by Chris Marker, but also, later, the only
adaptation of a Michel Déon novel for the cinema: Un taxi mauve by Yves Boisset in 1977.
Under the pseudonym Pierre Fontaine, Rissient devoted a page to Klémentieff's film, in
whom he saw a humble disciple of Joseph Losey and Kenji Mizoguchi who had " been able
to rid himself of all Wellesian and Rossellini prejudices ." He took care to conclude his
eulogy thus: " Let no one believe in a bias of friendship although Elia's departure confirms,
strengthens
Machine Translated by Google

a friendship that was born from conversations about Time Without Pity, The
Street of Shame, Exodus." Klémentieff and Rissient fell out a few years later
during the writing of a film with Jean-Patrick Manchette. In 1966, it would be
Alfred Eibel's turn to move on to directing with Un corps étranger, a short
detective film that was never released in theaters.

The file on French cinema also included Michel Mourlet's famous text
against Last Year at Marienbad. While Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's film was
re-released in Paris in September 2018, it is clear that Mourlet's shots were
still accurate, for whom it was an opportunity to resume the joust with the
pope of the New Novel. More than ever, at this turning point in 1962, there
was porosity between the literary affinities and the cinematographic
convictions of the Mac-Mahonians.
More anecdotal, an article questions the reader who delves back into
issue 10 of the Mac-Mahonian review. These are the six pages that Jean
Curtelin devotes to... Jean-Roger Caussimon. Supposed to inaugurate a
series on actors, the text certainly begins with general considerations in the
direct line of Mourlet. "To love cinema, you have to love actors" or again "
The theorists (Delluc or Bresson for example) who, under the pretext of a
staging strengthened in its independence, have neglected collaboration with
the actor, have ended up, in fact, with an unjustifiable notion of said staging.
They have devitalized it and reduced it to its imaginary expression. "

However, to illustrate this thesis, the choice to portray an artist better

known for his work in cabaret and on the radio than for a handful of third
roles in the cinema leaves one circumspect. Faced with this mixture - typical
of Jean Curtelin - of cold absurdity and aesthetic relevance, there is reason
to suspect a hoax unless it was a failed bet on posterity: " Caussimon's
future in cinema lies at one of two possible antipodes. Either he will take
over from the greats and will then have the place he deserves. Or he will
remain where he is today: outside of his true possibilities. "

Two months later, Jean Curtelin put another French film on the cover of
the magazine: Classes tous risques by Claude Sautet. It was the second
feature film by the filmmaker who had disowned Bonjour sourire made in 1955.
When it was released in 1960, this thriller with Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul
Machine Translated by Google

Belmondo had enjoyed critical and public success (nearly 2 million

admissions) but Présence du cinéma was the first magazine to give such
importance to its author, having him talk about his conception of directing
for about fifteen pages and collecting various testimonies about him,
including those of Lino Ventura and Jean-Pierre Melville. The Mac-
Mahonians saw in Sautet a French equivalent of their American heroes:
the author of a classic, mastered and virile cinema who knew how to use
the methods popularized by the New Wave by integrating them into his
overall project. Thus the shot in a large Milanese avenue which redoubles
the dramatic realism of the initial hold-up.
Three years later, seduced by the enthusiasm of the Mac-Mahonians,
Claude Sautet had his next film, L'arme à gauche, distributed by Rissient.
To finish with the young French filmmakers defended by the Mac-
Mahonian review, we must also mention, in the background, Pierre Etaix
and Philippe de Broca. The critics pointed out the limits of their films but
encouraged them in their paths that were both singular and popular.
Présence du cinéma made no secret of its conception of a seventh art that
should appeal to the greatest number of people. This was reflected both
in Curtelin's provocative editorials and in critics who placed in the forefront
intelligibility and dramatic intensity while mocking the "snobs " and "
intellectuals " who pretended to be ecstatic about the hermeticism of a
deceptive avant-garde because it was treading the sterile paths already
taken by Marcel L'Herbier and his ilk forty years earlier.
Machine Translated by Google

10

Loyalty to the square of aces...and its transformation into

three of a kind

Of course, the Mac-Mahonians also took advantage of their own magazine to write at
length about their favorite authors. Issue 11 of Présence du cinéma was devoted to Otto
Preminger and issue 13 to Raoul Walsh. Because, in 1962, Raoul Walsh was still far from
being recognized as the great filmmaker that he was, this last issue made a strong
impression. Its cover, where the director wearing his eyepatch reads a book sitting next to a
lion, is the most memorable in the magazine. Walsh is the only filmmaker in the four of aces
who was not interviewed at length by the Mac-Mahonians. His comments printed in this issue
are made up of excerpts from interviews given to various American newspapers. For the first
time in the French press, these sentences were transcribed, said to the Los Angeles Daily
News during the filming of The World Belongs to Us and since then quoted in every second
text where the famous one-eyed man is mentioned: "Action, action, action. This was the
theme of the first films and it is the theme of those that are successful today. That the screen
is constantly filled with events. Logical things in a logical sequence. This has always been
my rule." Among the comments of the collaborators, it is necessary to note the long article
by Edmond T.

Gréville, who was asked by his number 1 fan - Bertrand Tavernier - to tell his story as an
assistant on the set of Captain Without Fear in 1951.
Michel Mourlet, Jacques Saada (a lawyer by profession and future exalted singer of
Sharon Stone in Jean Tulard's Dictionnaire des films ), Claude-Jean Philippe, Jean Curtelin
and Jacques Lourcelles celebrated in this issue 13 the classicism but also the breadth,
humanism and vitality of Raoul Walsh's work, drawing parallels with Shakespeare and Victor
Hugo. A characteristic that distinguished them from the followers of the politics of auteurs
who made a point of demonstrating that the nadirs of their elected representatives remained
exciting films72 , the Mac-Mahonians recognized the qualitative inequality of the voluminous
filmography of their favorite. For
Machine Translated by Google

them, evaluating a filmmaker was evaluating his peaks. According to Rissient, "we must judge them according
to their greatest films, after which, no doubt, we must take another perspective to know why they are not all at
the same level, why they have, at a given moment, produced a work. On the occasion of a review "A year of
more or less ambitious" American cinema" published in issue 2 of Etudes cinématographiques, Michel Mourlet
5
Otto Preminger. Four years later, Jacques .
did not hesitate to mock the vacuity of Autopsy of a Murder by
Lourcelles, after having recognized the splendor of La fièvre dans le sang , directed by Elia Kazan, would not
hesitate to write that to love Lang, Walsh and Losey was to "recognize that Lang for 22 years is almost nothing
except five films, that one Walsh in four and that throughout his career is indifferent, that King & country [For
example], although by the author of The lawless [Haines] (other times other morals), is an unspeakable film"

73
. Even
more severe, Eibel told me in October 2018 that "only fifteen Raoul Walsh films count ". We
can see that the bad faith camouflaged by casuistic circumlocutions, dear to Hitchcocko-
Hawksian criticism, is foreign to MacMahonism. Which does not prevent Jacques Lourcelles
from recalling that " the main interest of a film (even if it is not the only one), especially when
it is at a very high level, is to reflect the personality of the director "33

For Mourlet, always more theoretician than critic, talking about Raoul Walsh was an opportunity to clarify his
conception of the seventh art: "His respect for reality, the filmmaker defined it by establishing the principle that
there is only one way to stage a given character in a given situation. This amounts to saying that the ideal
organization of visible and sound material according to the freely established premises of the scenario, would
possess a character of insurmountable necessity analogous to the boiling of water at a hundred degrees. We
understand that the recognition, the discovery of this solidity of phenomena within one's own creation, requires
from the artist the most total freedom and clarity of mind: the chances of error, in regard to the only truth, are
infinite. Pride is in the search for this truth, but it is humility that finds it. To make oneself completely transparent,
a pure gaze, porous to phenomena, is the wisdom of classicism and the secret of an unaltered youth. »74 In
the first sentence, Mourlet was referring to a famous statement by Walsh collected by Variety on February 28,
1961: "There is only one way
Machine Translated by Google

to show a man entering a room. You don't have to film him in five different ways ."
According to Mourlet, this is what all MacMahonians agreed on. Beauty is an absolute, a
reflection of the secret order of the world (the adjective "cosmic" is recurrent in the writings
of enthusiastic MacMahonians), which the director must seek out and reveal. At the
beginning of the 1960s, this translated into the defense of Hollywood veterans, masters of
a classical language that had reached perfection, against a more relativist criticism on the
lookout for a so-called "formal novelty" in the films of the French and New York New
Waves. " Formal novelty, which is today a criterion of appreciation, is of no interest; I
expect novelty instead in the unveiling of the world. "24 One article caused a lot of ink to
flow. Fifty years later, Pierre Rissient still held a grudge against his author for his
contribution to the fascist reputation of MacMahonism. This is Jean Curtelin's "Sergeant
Croft, little brother". Sergeant
Croft is a character from The Naked and the Dead, a war film adapted from Norman
Mailer's first novel that can be considered Raoul Walsh's ultimate masterpiece. Croft is a
brute who lives only by and for war. In the context of the last months of the Algerian War,
such a title could certainly shock sensitive souls. The same was true of the revolutionary
generalities in the first part of Curtelin's article, always fond of provocative digressions (he
had not waited for the MacMahonians for that, as his article on sadism in cinema in issue
6/7 of Présence du cinéma attests). Moreover, when he celebrated the health of the
American in the face of the decadence of the New Wave, he displayed a vitalism in which
a delicate nose would have quickly detected fascist overtones. The fact remained that, if a
univocal meaning had to be extracted from his text, it would have resided not in an apology
for the character of Croft but in a demonstration of Walsh's genius as an artist capable of
finding humanity within the monster, as a filmmaker capable of making the spectator feel
what he may have in common with the worst of bastards. This is an emblematic quality of
the great humanist directors that touches the heart of the functioning of cinema, this
machine for showing the world via the projection of consciences. Curtelin concluded thus:
" He is a dangerous and admirable character. Contemptible and endearing. Criminal and
charitable. A force. A weakness. A hero. A wreck. A form
Machine Translated by Google

explosive life. A moron. No man can be resolved in a formula. Raoul Walsh's great merit is
to have penetrated to the heart of his hero, with the same detachment as for all his previous
characters. Without any intention of demonstration. There is in every man a greatness that
one only has to go and find. " In 2001, in his monograph on Raoul Walsh, Positif 's
collaborator Michael Henry Wilson would say essentially the same thing in conclusion of
his analysis of the sequence in Hell Is His in which the psychopathic gangster Cody Jarett
learns of his mother's death: " Cagney's fury suggests not only the paroxysm of his pain,
but also the weight of heredity, the Oedipal attachment to the mother, the indifference of
the penitentiary system, the solitude of the tested individual, and perhaps the Shakespearean
aura of a suddenly vulnerable madman. Even such a monster deserves our compassion
when he is put to the test. This captive beast is a brother. "75 Generally speaking, the
defense of Raoul Walsh's heroic cinema was not for nothing in the right-wing reputation of
the MacMahonians. For example, Contre-champ, the short-lived Marxist-inspired film review
of Gérard
Guégan and Albert Servoni, expressed the " disgust " that inspired it " the fascist writings
" of Présence du cinéma , whose issue devoted to Walsh made " an apology for the soldier
" and " regretted the sweet smell of war ."

76
It must be said that, following a fairly general law, the
.

confidentiality of this review was only matched by its radicalism and that in the same
editorial, Positif, which dared to " be anti-communist by claiming Marx ", and the Cahiers
du cinéma, with their " reactionary ideas ", were also castigated. More disturbingly, these
angry young people found themselves in agreement with the left-wing Catholics of Esprit
on the subject of the MacMahonian periodical: in an overview of film reviews which
denounced " the terror in criticism ", Présence was summed up as follows: " quite simply
the Cahiers overflowing to their right ".

His " parachutist obsession with violence " and his " insulting fury " were singled out as the
consequence of his " rootless aestheticism ."
77 .
Such excessive remarks leave the reader of 2020
speechless. They were probably based more on militant passion and connotations (Guégan
makes a subtle allusion to Défense de l'Occident in his editorial) than on a balanced
analysis of the content of issues where the considerations of professionals and information
take up more space than the personal expression of the editors and where this expression
Machine Translated by Google

Personal is almost never tinged with politics and is no more virulent than the general tone of
the magazines of the time; Curtelin's provocations are the exception, not the rule. As for
Michel Mourlet, it was in the Cahiers du cinéma that he published his most polemical texts.

Anyone who, discovering Présence du cinéma today, would expect to read a collection of
scathing articles would be disappointed. In the Feuille d'Avis de Neuchâtel, the Swiss film
buff Freddy Landry, hardly suspected of right-wing drift, gave a balanced opinion on the new
format of Présence and explained the political trial as follows: " refusal to approach cinema
through 'politics', hence 'right-wing' say the 'left-wing' ."78 Thus, to return to the issue on
Walsh, Claude-Jean Philippe demonstrated, in his article entitled .

after Fénelon "Un sublime si familier", that filming war was not necessarily exalting it. The
future founder of the Antenne 2 film club also relied on a quote from Roger Vailland taken
from an interview with the writer in France-Observateur in 1960: "The artist's particular
commitment is to 'descend to the entrails of things' and to render exactly what he has
discovered there. If we absolutely want him to be useful, it will be precisely by laying bare
reality in all its depths, which, by definition, can only serve the right things." This is how,
according to Claude-Jean Philippe, Walsh's realism preserved him from any warmongering:
"Walsh is neither militarist nor colonialist. He is first and foremost honest and exact. [...] In
Adventures in Burma, the war is presented in its clearest light.

The raid by the American patrol destroys all life in the Japanese fort, a strictly equivalent
framework will subsequently present us with the opposite situation. What better condemnation
of war in its simplicity?

A book accentuated the misunderstanding. It was the monograph written by Michel

Marmin. In 1962, the latter was still a student at IDHEC (Institut Des Hautes Etudes
Cinématographiques, ancestor of FEMIS). Issue 13 of Présence du cinéma introduced him
to Mac-Mahonism and gave him the idea of dedicating his final year dissertation to Raoul
Walsh. In 1970, he would transform this dissertation into a book for Pierre Lherminier's
excellent Seghers collection. A late surgeon of the movement, published three years after
the end of Présence du cinéma and eight years after the dispersion of the original tape, it is
a work very committed to the right. Its author himself describes it as a " firebrand ". With an
erudite and galvanizing pen, he exalts the
Machine Translated by Google

genius of Raoul Walsh, product of the young America heir to the Indo-European peoples. In
doing so, this successor of the Mac-Mahonians explains and exacerbates, in a sense that is
entirely personal to him, possible political implications of the essentially aesthetic positions
of the founders of the movement, notably the pagan connotations of Mourlet's articles. It is
certainly no coincidence that this monograph triggered the friendship between Michel
Marmin and Alain de Benoist, founder of GRECE (Groupement d'Etude et de Recherche
pour la Civilisation Européenne) which incubated the New Right in the 70s.

What tends to show that Marmin's vision is moving away from the original MacMahonians
is that when he speaks of The Naked and the Dead, he does not praise Walsh's humanism
but the character of Croft against that of Hearn, the freshly minted lieutenant laden with
good intentions. Michel Marmin goes so far as to lend "contempt and derision" to the author
in the happy ending showing Hearn's victory. Which is - a rewatch of the film allows us to
realize - perfectly abusive. As for Adventures in Burma, Marmin compares it to Lands of Sun
and Sleep, a beautiful book written by Lieutenant Ernest Psichari in 1908 between two
colonial expeditions. No less than the respect for the natives, the mystique of force is evident
there, as evidenced by the following extract: "There comes a time when violence is no longer
injustice, but the natural play of a soul strong and tempered like steel. There comes a time
when even goodness ceases to be fruitful and becomes softening and cowardly. Then war
is nothing more than an unspeakable poem of blood and beauty." We are very far from the
prosaic realism of Adventures in Burma but, to return to Vailland's theory, no doubt " the
right thing " according to Michel Marmin is not the same as according to Claude-Jean
Philippe; which would explain why he did not see in Adventures in Burma the same thing as
the critic of Présence du cinéma. After all, is it not the greatness of a classical art to allow,
by showing the most naked reality, the most varied interpretations? Moreover, it must be
specified that these hermeneutic divergences did not prevent Marmin from transcribing long
extracts from the articles of Jean Curtelin and Claude-Jean Philippe in the "critical panorama"
section of his book.

We could conclude this debate by quoting an extract from the great central text of issue
13 of Présence where Jacques Lourcelles brilliantly and jointly analyses Aventures en
Burmanie and Les déchaînés : “We would never finish
Machine Translated by Google

not to list what Walsh did not want his film to be: a lyrical or cruel victory song, a plea for
peace or war, a symbolic conflict of characters... Objective Burma is none of these things;
but perhaps it is all of these things together, in a weave so tight that the virtualities destroy
each other."

Although a little more prestigious than Raoul Walsh, Otto Preminger was then the
subject of lively disputes. The first concerned the rights holders of Georges Bizet who, to
the great displeasure of film buffs, prevented the release of Carmen Jones in France in the
name of the moral rights of their ancestor (unlike the descendants of the librettists Meilhac
and Halévy who saw no objection). For the occasion, the Mac-Mahonian review, not as
fundamentalist as one might have believed, opened its columns to an adversary: Roger
Ferdinand, president of the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (SACD). Patelin,
the author of the immortal Chotard et Cie, defended his point of view on the problem for
four pages: a rentier's point of view ignoring the very many masterpieces based on already
used canvases, a point of view entirely representative of the ignorance of the so-called
French cultural elites of the time in matters of cinema.

To counter him, Mourlet simply reminded him of a few well-known facts from the history of
art and took the opportunity to add another layer to his basic principle: the essential thing
in cinema is the staging. As for Preminger's film, whose cold lyricism is the opposite of the
picturesque warmth of Bizet's opera, it would not be released in France before 1981.

Moreover, Otto Preminger's cinema was at the centre of the eternal quarrel between
"old" and "modern", which became increasingly noisy as the various new waves emerged.

Since Exodus in 1960, his clear desire to grasp an ever broader reality, his assumed
spectacular didacticism, his taste for "big subjects" and his unaltered faith in good old
romantic tricks to restore the complexity of the world incited more and more critics,
according to whom the future of the seventh art lay in the distorted films of Godard or
Antonioni, to accuse Preminger of academicism. For people concerned with fashion, this
director, ten years after having personified the art of directing in cinema79 , was beginning
to go out of fashion. In 1963, The Cardinal, the peak of this last great period of the Austro-
American filmmaker, aroused severe reservations even in Cahiers du cinéma,
Machine Translated by Google

historically attached to Preminger but more than ever torn between their two factions. For
the first time, two texts with opposing opinions were devoted to the same film in the yellow
magazine. This context of course sharpened the polemical spirit of Michel Mourlet who
had a field day mocking his colleagues in issue 20 of Présence du cinéma.

More than Fritz Lang, who did not make any more films after 1960, more than Raoul
Walsh, whose last films were disappointing, more than Joseph Losey, who let himself be
tempted by an unfortunate mannerism, Otto Preminger embodied, around 1963-1965, the
paragon of the MacMahonian aesthetic.
Jacques Lourcelles devoted a book to him at Seghers in 1965 in which he drew general
lessons on cinema from his last films: " Preminger's films, like all interesting films, show
that cinema is an exclusively narrative means of expression. Freedom, invention, for a
filmmaker, does not consist in questioning this narrative structure or wanting to free oneself
from it, but in making it forgotten after having accepted it. It is precisely because it is, as
has been said and repeated, the art of time and the art of space that cinema cannot take
any liberties with time and space.

[...]
The essential, we are beginning to realize, would rather be in this realism, technical and
moral, which in Preminger is always synonymous with objectivity, variety, respect and
spirit of discussion. Of intelligibility too: and nothing, today is more important.

For about ten years, in fact, throughout the world, the title and appellation of film author
have finally been recognized for the director, and sometimes on the ruins of the star
system. But paradoxically, the same period has seen these so-called authors, and those
who by various advertising methods attribute this title to themselves, take advantage of it,
take advantage of the new title to "express themselves" certainly, but most often at the
expense of the elementary and essential qualities of photography and sound, at the
expense also of the clarity and intelligibility of the story. Thus at the precise moment when
the public was most willing to welcome them, these authors, abusively outbidding (to
impose their personal phantasmagoria) on powers newly conferred on them and which
they misinterpreted, cut themselves off from it, and put, in the more or less short term, their
art in peril.
Machine Translated by Google

This danger is of the very hour. Faced with this danger, Preminger's films,
free and independent as never before, and therefore moral in themselves,
offer as an antidote the example of a work whose growing contact with the
public has not stopped, but on the contrary has stimulated, progress. And
this progress all goes in the same direction: the direction of strict realism. "80
After six
years of diverse and varied new waves, it is as if
Lourcelles reaffirmed Michel Mourlet’s credo.

It was quite late, in issue 20 of March 1964 at the time of the French
release of The Servant, that Joseph Losey was entitled to his file in Présence
du cinéma. The detailed interview conducted by Mourlet and Agde and the
rave review by Marc Bernard showed, once again, the loyalty of the Mac-
Mahonians to their first hobby horse. Alfred Eibel remembers that Rissient
called him every morning to ask him: " Have you seen Eva ? Have you seen
how great it is? "; and to scold his friend if the tone in which the latter agreed
was too lukewarm for his taste. However, neither Rissient nor Mourlet had
liked The Criminals, a brilliant film but tinged with artifice. A reprehensible
tendency towards visual and intellectual sophistication was beginning to be
felt in Losey's work. This displeased Rissient, the mad lover of The Boy with
Green Hair and Haines that was. He saw this development as a racy attempt
to pander to the intelligentsia . McCarthy's enemy had begun to hobnob with
Rissient was appalled when his the financial elite. Eibel recounts that
idol began to have doubts after his son told him: " Dad, you're making old
movies."

Look at Antonioni, that’s modernity! ”

As Pierre Rissient got to know Losey personally, his disappointment, both
artistic and human, grew. It must be said that, to use the words of Michel
Ciment, a fine connoisseur of Joseph Losey who wrote a book of interviews
with him after discovering him thanks to the Mac-Mahonians: " for Rissient
and his friends from the Mac-Mahon cinema, once they had discovered
someone, he became a bit of their thing, he then had to ask them for advice
and listen to them " while Losey, who despite having been a communist was
nonetheless a son of the American upper middle class, " aspired to a certain
worldliness. He was
Machine Translated by Google

very proud to meet Marguerite Duras, to be in the living room with a

Prime Minister »81 .

Released in 1965, Pour l'exemple was the film of the rupture. Aesthetic, gaunt and
demonstrative, this anti-militarist pamphlet set during the First World War has nothing to do
with the luminous beauty of Haines. When, the same year, Pierre Rissient wrote a
monograph on Losey for Editions Universitaires, he did not hold back from expressing his
disappointment. This little book is, by far, his most important text. Alfred Eibel remembers
that his friend had difficulty writing; he doubted his prose: " Don't you think it lacks adjectives?
" - "No, the fewer adjectives, the better, " Eibel replied. However, if there were difficulties in
development, they are not noticeable when reading what remains one of the most vibrant
literary testimonies of MacMahonism, full of the sharp exaltation of its author. The
reservations expressed there about the direction his career was taking displeased Losey
and confirmed the falling out with the MacMahonians. According to Michel Ciment: " the
break came from both sides. One because he did not listen to them, the other because he
was tired of hearing them ."81 The honorary presidency of the Cercle du MacMahon had
therefore been offered to Michel Déon in 1962. The novelist accepted with all the more
eagerness as he was then seeking to penetrate the world of cinema.
.

According to Alfred Eibel, Michel Déon wanted to be a screenwriter but, unlike Roger
Nimier or Jacques Laurent, was never able to realize this desire.

As for Fritz Lang, he is the only director of the four aces not to have been the subject of
a cover of the Mac-Mahonian magazine. This is because, in 1964, Présence du cinéma
went so far as to dedicate a book to him. Conceived and composed by Alfred Eibel, it was
the only book published by the Présence du cinéma editions. It was a cinema work of a new
kind because it was devoid of any text by the master of the work. The Mac-Mahonians took
their logic of refusing commentary to its logical conclusion. Eibel had compiled working
documents and interviews with the master in order to provide film buffs with an exceptional
mass of documentation. In issue 20 of Présence du cinéma, an advertising insert
accompanied by a subscription voucher presented the work as follows: "It seemed
appropriate to us to publish, not in the form of these incomplete and wordy pamphlets which
proliferate and all resemble each other, but in a more noble presentation commensurate
with the
Machine Translated by Google

subject, the truly astonishing mass of written and photographed documents,

of entirely unpublished testimonies, relating to all periods, to all the films
of Fritz Lang's long career". Since then, this book has been translated and
reissued several times, notably by Flammarion in 1989.
Machine Translated by Google

11

The annexes of the Pantheon and Mac-Mahon

Distribution

Generally, the Mac-Mahon school is associated with a heroic, violent

or tragic cinema; at the very least dramatic. However, even if it was
obviously less ardent than the cult of aces, the defense of Michel Deville,
Pierre Etaix and Philippe de Broca already showed that the editors of
Présence du cinéma knew how to be sensitive to grace, comedy and
lightness.
After Marc Bernard praised Breakfast at Tiffany 's in issue 11, Blake Edwards was
featured on the cover of issue 15/16. Several of his early films released in the 1950s, such
as Mr. Cory and Holiday in Paris, had certainly been spotted by French critics who have
always been particularly attentive to American comedy. Laudatory notes by Jean-Luc
Godard in Cahiers du cinéma attest to this. Nevertheless, in 1962, Blake Edwards was just
40 years old and the bulk of his work was still to come. However, Pierre Rissient did not
hesitate to write: "Devoting a special issue to him does not seem to us to be a bet on the
future ." If the future creator of The Pink Panther was praised by the initiator of MacMahonism,
it was not so much for the quality of his gags as because he saw in him "a filmmaker who
touches the most organic life in us, this life which is the material and the very expression of
his work, [a filmmaker] whose attention is not torpid, like

82
that of most filmmakers but on the contrary alert and active" .

So it was for MacMahonian reasons.

Among the comedy directors highlighted by Présence du cinéma, we

should not forget Don Weis. Today, we especially remember this director's
The Adventures of Hadji Baba, a symbol of a certain "cinephile extremism"
since, in "On an Ignored Art", Mourlet wrote " We reproach our fathers for
having placed Meissonnier before
Machine Translated by Google

Cézanne, but do we not see - in our century of enlightenment - Visconti's

White Nights preferred to Don Weis' Adventures of Hadji ?
". There is a certain panache in going so deliberately against the grain of
the dominant opinion to bet so frankly on posterity... which in this case did
not validate the MacMahonian judgment. In 1991, in 50 ans de cinéma
américain, Tavernier himself acknowledged that French film buffs had
overestimated this colorful, lively and pleasant film, but still much less
memorable than the still lifes of the Aix painter. What is less well known is
that the director of The Adventures of Hadji Baba was also defended for his
sympathetic New York comedies such as Remains to be seen ( 1953) and
I love Melvin ( 1953) which belong to the same vein as the contemporary
non-musical films of Stanley Donen. It was a real study of Don Weis' work
that Gérard Legrand began in issue 13 of Présence du cinéma in March
1962. Unfortunately, out of fifteen films made at that date, he had only
managed to see four, most of which had never been released in France.

In June 1962, Présence also devoted an issue, the 14th, to "French and
American screenwriters". This served as a reminder that defending directing
does not mean minimizing the importance of the screenplay. In the foreword,
Marc Bernard wrote, contrary to the cult of auteurs: " Film critics succeed in
persuading their readers of an incredible world of meditations in the minds
of film directors.
In this review, and in this issue in particular, we would like to talk as much
as possible about cinema as it is, and precisely as it is in the minds of those
who make it, and not as we dream of it or comment on it ."
Then, the words of around fifteen screenwriters were transcribed, with in
particular the highlighting of “Four American screenwriters “blacklisted”
" Among those interviewed, some fell into the opposite extreme, denying the importance of
the director as fiercely as the successful playwrights hired by film producers in the 1930s
could do. Thus Paul Jarrico, going so far as to say " it is customary, in France, to designate
a film by the expression: "a film by So-and-so", So-and-so being the director, which is a total
absurdity, an improbable bluff, not to say a real imposture ", showed an understanding of the
seventh art as backward as that of a Louis Verneuil in his memoirs. Such words were of
course difficult to accept.

83
.
Machine Translated by Google

for a Michel Mourlet who, the same month, responded in Défense de l'Occident " in order not
to bring together potentially critical remarks
84
with the testimonies that these writers have been kind enough to grant us " .

The editor-in-chief of Présence preferred to give free rein to the expression of professionals
rather than impose his personal vision. It was therefore in Bardèche's review that he attempted
to establish his synthesis on the subject: " These periodically revived debates on substance
and form would vanish forever if we kept in mind that they are based on the paradox of all
expression: what we say and the way we say it are one and the same."

84
same thing, translate one and the same movement " .
To fill this issue 14,
while Jean Curtelin and Michel Mourlet had questioned the French, Pierre Rissient, helped
by Marc Bernard, had of course used his contacts with the Anglo-Saxons. For Rissient, it was
also the occasion to praise his dear Daniel Mainwaring, screenwriter of Haines and The Claw
of the Past: " Daniel Mainwaring is without doubt the most honest, the wisest and the simplest
of all cinema people ".

Alongside Présence du cinéma , for which he ultimately wrote little, Pierre Rissient began
a career as a press attaché. For the founder of the Cercle du Mac-Mahon, such a choice of
livelihood was logical. It began when José Giovanni, who found him to have " a certain
strength of persuasion " asked him to defend a thriller he had written for
5
,

Jacques Deray: Rififi in Tokyo (1961). Appreciating the film and finding it “ stylish ”
5
, Rissient accepted and applied the method he had set up for his film club: restricted
screenings for selected journalists and long interviews with the filmmaker. Praised by Marc
Bernard in Présence du cinéma, the film was a success and other orders, for recent films or
re-releases, were addressed to Rissient. He worked in collaboration with his friend from
Nickelodéon, Bertrand Tavernier, who had just slammed the door on the press office of Rome-
Paris-Films, the company of Georges de Beauregard, the emblematic producer of the New
Wave (Adieu Philippine, Le mépris, La 317ème Section, Pierrot le fou...). The two friends
revolutionized the profession of film press attaché by introducing a new passion. Tavernier
recounts: " There has never been the slightest contract between us, nor the slightest
disagreement. We deal with French, English, Italian, American films, new or old. We never
work on people promotion, galas, as the
Machine Translated by Google

publicists like Cravenne. We focus on the content, the quality of the film, the style of the
director. This pleases the filmmakers, who then impose us to promote their other films. »85

In 1962, Pierre Rissient and Claude Makovski saw Les bourreaux meurt aussi on
television at the latter's home. They then had the idea of re-releasing the second of the anti-
Nazi pamphlets directed by Fritz Lang.
Once again, the contribution of Brecht, who co-wrote the original story, interested the leader
of MacMahonian activism. Thanks to a loan from Rissient's father to pay the royalties, they
distributed the film through Makovski's company: Cythère films. In his interviews with
Blumenfeld, Rissient expressed his satisfaction that the exploitation had brought in enough
money to repay his father. As was fitting, Lang's film was the subject of two articles in issue
10 of Présence du cinéma.

Typical of the pluralism desired by Mourlet, the articles by Marc Bernard and Jean Curtelin
diverged as to the importance of Brecht in the final result. This did not prevent Robert
Benayoun from detecting fascist overtones in them. In a letter to the editor, he was moved
by a sentence from Marc Bernard: " to direct is to engage in brutality towards oneself and
towards the world " which, according to him, reflected " police nostalgia ". In the Readers'
Mail of issue 12, Michel Mourlet therefore split himself into a very precise commentary on
the text in which he explained to the scrupulous editor of Positif that the term " brutality "
should here be understood as a noun of " brut ", synonymous with " original ". Such
misunderstandings did nothing to attenuate the sulphurous reputation of MacMahonism.

Mourlet nevertheless wrote " we want to believe [our readers] in good faith ". He was
probably being ironic: in his memoirs, he recounts having received a letter written with inks
of several colours (which according to him would reflect " a certain mental imbalance ") in
which Benayoun had gone so far as to reproach him for having published issue 13 on Walsh
in May and thus making reference to the obviously sinister date of 13 May 1958...
6

Continuing on his path, Pierre Rissient founded in 1963, with Emile Villion, a distribution
company: Mac-Mahon Distribution. The idea was to release new releases as well as films
from the past that were not, according to Rissient, valued at their true value. They began in
1964 with an unreleased film by Joseph Losey: Les damnés (a science fiction film not to be
missed).
Machine Translated by Google

confused with Luchino Visconti's fresco on Nazism made five years later). This was
followed by the revival of several masterpieces by Raoul Walsh (Hell Is His, Gentleman
Jim, The Girl from the Desert, etc.) and then films by Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Jacques
Tourneur, Anthony Mann, Gregory La Cava, Leo McCarey, Josef Von Sternberg, etc. With
this distributor activity, Rissient exploded the pantheon established at the time of “On an
Ignored Art”. Even if the Hollywood tropism was maintained, we note the resurgence of
comedy writers and, above all, the astonishing presence of Sternberg from whom Rissient
brought out, with great success, The Red Empress, a pinnacle of aesthetic delirium very
far from the canons decreed by Mourlet.

While it would be tedious and uninteresting to detail each of the seventy

(re)releases from Mac-Mahon Distribution, two cases deserve attention.
First Ida Lupino. An actress whose beauty illuminated several major works by Raoul
Walsh, Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray, she herself directed half a dozen films between
1949 and 1953, self-produced with her husband Collier Young. It was in London in 1959
that Pierre Rissient, with Michel Mourlet and Michel Fabre, discovered three of these films:
Not Wanted (1949), co-directed with Elmer Clifton, Outrage (1950) and Hard, Fast and
Beautiful (1950). Mourlet reported in the Cahiers on the shock of this discovery: " the
closest thing currently to Losey's direction " that Not Wanted " would be the only film by a
colleague that finds favor in his eyes ". There is indeed, in these films that seek to follow
86
step by step the reconciliation . Losey which Mourlet says in the same article
with the world of young broken Americans, a nudity and a frontality that can recall Haines
or The Prowler. The alloy of social lucidity and faith in proven narrative patterns, forged by
a cutting burning with energy, also evokes the cinema of Samuel Fuller.

With this meteoric work, produced on the fringes of Hollywood, the Mac-Mahonians had
discovered a major author of American cinema. Mac-Mahon Distribution released three
films by Ida Lupino, unreleased in France: Not wanted (1949) called Avant de t'aimer,
Never fear (1949) called Faire face and The bigamist (1953). Despite the feminist vogue,
it was a failure. The mainstream press looked down on the melodramatic springs of the
intrigues and missed the force of an incandescent style. In Italy, Paul Agde had met Ida
Lupino for an interview that should have been exploited
Machine Translated by Google

by Jacques Lourcelles in a book devoted to the filmmaker, which he had the project for.
The book not having been completed, the interview has remained unpublished to this day.

Then there is Leo McCarey. To the eternal question "what is your favorite film of all
those you have made?", the author of the first Laurel and Hardy films, the best Marx
Brothers film (Duck Soup), the masterpiece of the remarriage comedy (The Holy Truth), the
biggest Hollywood success during the Second World War (The Road Strewn with Stars),
the two Her and Him and one or two other immense classics, invariably responded by citing
a then completely forgotten 1937 title: Make Way for the Young. This film about an elderly
couple neglected by their children was close to his heart: when he received the Oscar for
best director in 1938 for The Holy Truth, he addressed the Academy: " Thank you, but...
you didn't reward me for the good film! " Prefiguring Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Journey , this
heartbreaking and bitter masterpiece was a terrible flop. The failure was the same when,
after having unearthed the only surviving copy, Mac-Mahon Distribution re-released the film
at Studio de l'Etoile in 1967. A year later, the success, despite May 68, of this apology for
American values that is The Extravagant Mr Ruggles gave Rissient the idea of releasing
McCarey's black diamond once again. Alas! Only 600 tickets were sold, or about 283 times
less than for The Extravagant Mr Ruggles5 . When it doesn't want to, it doesn't want to.

Nevertheless. The restoration of the great Leo McCarey to his rightful place was
underway. It would continue with the supplement to L'Avant-scène cinéma written by
Jacques Lourcelles in 1972.

At a time when video did not exist and television in France consisted of two black and
white channels broadcasting only for part of the day, the re-releases of Mac-Mahon
Distribution were one of the rare ways to see old films. By choosing the films to be exhumed
after twenty or thirty years of invisibility, Rissient kept alive the History of cinema on which
he directly influenced because, for films to be commented on and ranked, they still have to
be seen by constantly renewed generations of spectators.

In 1965, to cope with the increasing workload caused by Mac-Mahon Distribution, Pierre
Rissient asked Tavernier for help.
Machine Translated by Google

Together, they shared the work according to their affinities. Tavernier was particularly in
charge of the films of Budd Boetticher and Losey since Rissient had fallen out with the
latter. In addition, Bernard Eisenschitz and the future producer Pierre Cottrell did several
subtitles for Mac-Mahon Distribution. Always on the lookout for discoveries, Rissient was
as passionate about Leo McCarey and Raoul Walsh as he was about Claude Sautet and
Jerry Schatzberg, whose first films he distributed in France.

In 50 Years of American Cinema, co-written with Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Tavernier recalls

that the discovery of Portrait of a Fallen Child and Panic in Needle Park was a shock for
them comparable to that of Fritz Lang's last films. This shock was echoed by the magazine
Positif with which Rissient, angry with Cahiers, had developed affinities. In the 60s, the
surrealist sectarianism of Cahiers' eternal rival , supremely embodied by Ado Kyrou, gave
way to a more open cinephilia. Arriving in 1963, Michel Ciment did not hesitate to assert
his taste for Carl Dreyer, Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock, hitherto rejected for ideological
reasons. Pierre Rissient showed him films and, often, Positif relayed the latter's enthusiasm.
Michel Ciment told me that he had " an esteem for the judgment and the eye of Rissient "
to whom, conversely, he made re-evaluate certain filmmakers such as Jerzy Skolimowski.
In January 1969, as part of the "Positif days" at the Acacias and Studio Parnasse cinemas,
The Hundred Horsemen, the cursed and unpublished masterpiece by Vittorio Cottafavi,
was programmed.

According to Rissient, Mac-Mahon Distribution closed in 1972 due to rising costs and
the refusal of its founder to bring in new shareholders to support the company's necessary
growth. Mac-Mahon Distribution's success helped to develop the release of old films in
France. Moreover, according to Rissient, the arrival of these competitors who " began to
flood the market with often less good films " tended to make it lose its credibility: "Telling
the public: 'You are going to discover an extraordinary film' that is of the stuff of Gentleman
Jim or The Extravagant Mr Ruggles, is possible ten times a year, but when it is repeated
fifty times, it is less convincing..."

5
.

However, Pierre Rissient was friends with Jean-Marie Rodon, co-founder with Jean-Max
Causse in 1966 of the Action cinemas, a circuit of Parisian cinemas specializing in the
golden age of Hollywood. Creating his own distribution company, Rodon relied on Rissient's
advice. In
Machine Translated by Google

2012, Jean-Marie Rodon did not hesitate to tell the American magazine Senses of Cinema : "
Although I arrived late in the MacMahonian crusade, it is to a large extent that I owe my career in
cinema to the Rissient movement "87
.

In their book of interviews published in 2016, Samuel Blumenfeld asked Pierre Rissient if there
was a filmmaker he regretted not having managed to establish. Rissient answered "Leslie Stevens".
Private Property, the first film by this former assistant to Orson Welles who later made a career in
television, had been praised by Marc Bernard in Présence. Rissient's friend had given free rein to
his tendency towards hyperbole: " I consider this film to be one of the most beautiful in cinema ."

88
.

The film was lost for several decades before being rediscovered in the archives of UCLA
(University of California, Los Angeles). The praise that accompanied its Parisian re-release
in September 2016, while not as enthusiastic as Marc Bernard's, must have pleased
Rissient. With fifty-five years of hindsight, it was all the easier to see in Private Property as
a milestone between Hitchcock-style film noir and American cinema of the 1970s since its
debuting lead, Warren Oates, had since made a name for himself in the films of Sam
Peckinpah and Monte Hellman.
Machine Translated by Google

12

Jacques Lourcelles at the head of Présence du cinéma :

definition of neo-MacMahonism?

When, at the end of 1960, Michel Mourlet was chosen by Jean Curtelin to take over the
editorial direction of Présence du cinéma, he became an employee of Curtelin. The company
continued to belong to Curtelin and Eibel. As editor-in-chief, Mourlet was the only one to be
-poorly- paid among the authors of the magazine. The latter cost more money than it brought in.
Alfred Eibel's savings melted like snow in the sun.

Even though the prospect of sharing their opinions on films with the world was enough to
motivate film buffs to provide their reviews free of charge, even though the British Film Institute
had generously granted permission to use his photographs to illustrate the magazine, even
though Rissient's personal collection and connections with press agents made it possible to
obtain other photographs...the printer still had to be paid.

Then, Curtelin and Mourlet took the latter's car and went to drop off copies of their magazine
themselves at bookstores who, in order to be convinced to take them, could be offered free
advertising inserts. As for subscribers, according to Michel Mourlet's recollections, there were
no more than a few hundred. As, moreover, the only conceivable advertising for a small print run
was based on exchange, the income was not enough to ensure the regularity of the publication.
This explains the absence of publication in April 62.

At the end of 1962, after issue 15/16 devoted to Blake Edwards, Michel Mourlet bought the
magazine from Curtelin and Eibel with the stated intention of transforming it into a quarterly. In
addition to the financial difficulties, the production took a lot of time for Mourlet, practically alone,
to design the layout and produce the model - at the time with scissors and glue.

However, this decrease in the frequency of publication did not prevent

Machine Translated by Google

the development of issue 17 to exceed the expected deadline. Less of a cinephile than he
had been, taken up with writing his own works, having to deal with a wife who was fed up
with seeing copies of Présence cluttering up the apartment, Michel Mourlet passed the baby
on to Jacques Lourcelles from issue 18 while keeping the title of "managing director" so as
to spare his friend a declaration to the prefecture. In issue 19 of December 1963, the critic
expressed his weariness during a report on the San Sebastian and Sestri-Levante festivals
by recounting from start to finish the screenplay of a particularly inept film. In the following
issue, Michel Mourlet's last text written for Présence du cinéma showed, however, that his
cinephile flame was not yet extinguished: it was his superb review of Preminger's Cardinal .
Again, his praise was a verification of the principles of his manifesto: " A film in which the
data of the world are rendered for what they are, dramatized without distortion, in a free and
natural movement. The serenity of the calm after the storm ."

It is perhaps because, of the main MacMahonians, he was the most attached to the theory
that Mourlet was the one who moved away most quickly from cinephilia. As if watching films
lost its interest once the general truth had been found and formulated.

In fact, issue no. 17 (dated spring 1963) already bore the imprint of Jacques Lourcelles
since half of it was devoted to Riccardo Freda, Lourcelles' darling if ever there was one.

An editorial clarified the magazine's positions: " We are pleased that more and more
readers (and subscribers) appreciate the importance we attach to discovery, far from the
perpetual rehashing of accepted ideas (Resnais, Nouvelle Vague, Antonioni, Welles, Bunuel,
Nouvelle Vague, Welles, Resnais, Bunuel, Antonioni, and so on). However, and contrary to
what some people think, we are not looking for originality in principle - a principle that would
be of very mediocre quality - we let ourselves be guided by our taste which, simply, happens
in several points not to overlap with fashion ." Signed "The editorial staff", it was written by
Michel Mourlet.

Unlike Vittorio Cottafavi, Riccardo Freda fully assumed the popular genres in which he
worked: peplum, adventure film and fantasy film. In his invigorating interview with Lourcelles
and Mizrahi, he says " I will never be able to make a film [...] if I didn't like it
Machine Translated by Google

totally. For example, Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan, I really wanted to shoot it, I
was sure it would make a good film with the character of Maciste, a film of taste, a film of
wit, not a stupid film ." Lourcelles told me that he and Mizrahi were delighted when, in
response to the classic question " Who are your favorite directors? ", Freda quoted Raffaello
Matarazzo, a specialist in melodrama and precursor of neorealism with his first film, Treno
populare : " In 1933, he had done much better than what was done in the 40s by
neorealism ."

This enthusiasm of a beloved filmmaker for another filmmaker that Lourcelles thought was
one of the only ones to love verified his idea that cinephilia creates communities of the
heart.
In the long presentation text in which he constantly went back and forth between the
particular and the general, Lourcelles praised in particular the genius of Freda's decor: "
after the Minnellian abuses [...], how can we show that the decor is the most serious, the
least decorative thing in a production? "
Alongside this passionate exegesis, this issue of Présence continued to highlight the
words of those who make cinema. Pierre Rissient presented the remarks, collected " at
random meetings " of twenty-seven actors speaking about their profession, for an equivalent
number of pages.
The sample ranged from John Wayne to Elsa Martinelli to Marlene Dietrich to Roger Hanin.

Once at the head of the Mac-Mahonian review, Jacques Lourcelles brought in his
friends: Alain Ferrari, Simon Mizrahi and Pierre Guinle. A film buff, teacher and long-time
companion of Lourcelles, Daniel Palas never wrote a line in Présence du cinéma. The
strictest columnists - such as Tavernier or Mourlet - call them "neo-Mac-Mahonians".

Aside from friendly affinities, the distinction between Mac-Mahonism and neo-Mac-
Mahonism is sibylline. The only trace of an aesthetic definition appears in a line of the
editorial of issue 18 of November 1963 of Présence du cinéma, the first of which Lourcelles
was the editor. We learn there that the magazine will become monthly again (wishful
thinking) " to have a little more presence than the title " and will continue on its line, namely
Mac-Mahonism and neo-Mac-Mahonism; the latter defined as being "Mac-Mahonism +
Guitry, McCarey, Tourneur, Freda "; that is to say Mac-Mahonism + Jacques Lourcelles'
favorites. Joseph Mankiewicz, to whom Lourcelles devoted the entirety of this first issue
edited by him, is
Machine Translated by Google

strangely absent from this brief enumeration. Raffaello Matarazzo is not there either,
although Lourcelles puts him on the same level as Lang and Mizoguchi. Less of a theoretician
and more of a cinephile than Michel Mourlet, essentially guided by his taste, Jacques
Lourcelles broadens the pantheon without worrying about defining an aesthetic coherence
between Riccardo Freda and Sacha Guitry, a filmmaker whose mischievous distancing
cheerfully contradicts "On an Ignored Art".

In fact, the most obvious connection between Guitry, McCarey, Tourneur and Freda was
their poor reputation at the time Lourcelles wrote these lines.
Once again, the MacMahonians were trying to impose new values.

Certainly, Sacha Guitry had been championed by François Truffaut and, thanks to his
revolutionary conception of voice-over, Le roman d'un tricheur was considered an important
film upon its release in 1936, but the filmmaker remained generally underestimated, prisoner
of an outdated and academic image that his biggest success (also his worst film), Si
Versailles m'était conté released in 1953, had contributed to forging. The battle to put the
author of Faisons un rêve at the forefront of the creators of talking cinema remained to be
fought.

In 1963, Leo McCarey was neglected by French film buffs. In the 1930s, he had been
considered a leading figure of great American comedy but, like Samuel Fuller, his fervent
anti-communism in the midst of the Cold War had not helped him to remain in the good
graces of French critics. Furthermore, since 1950, he had only made four films, three of
which were released in France. Among these were a pale recycling of his past themes, Une
histoire de Chine (although admirably defended by Jacques Lourcelles in Présence du
cinéma n°15-16) and a masterpiece completely out of its time and therefore generally
disdained except by Louis Marcorelles in Les Cahiers du cinéma who had seen it as " an
example of the purest cinema ": the remake of Elle et lui in 1957.

As for Jacques Tourneur and Riccardo Freda, they were almost completely ignored; one
article is an exception, concerning Freda. It is the review of The Charge of the Cossacks by
Fereydoun Hoveyda in the Cahiers du cinéma which is remarkable for its Mac-Mahonian
spirit: " The critics are more interested in Laslo Benedek, René Clément or Federico Fellini
than in Don Weis, Cottafavi or Ulmer. They are wrong! " or
Machine Translated by Google

again " Our art is based on staging. [...] It would be wrong to turn up our
noses at unpretentious films, precisely because they are not pretentious,
when they offer us a real festival of staging, when they are teeming with
ideas, when they are full of energy
89
and optimism. " These sentences, written by a critic who, a month
later, would take care to distance himself from the MacMahonians, reveal
the capillarity of their ideas in the world of film buffs.
Among the four cited by Lourcelles, only these last two filmmakers were
the subject - partially - of issues of Présence de cinéma.
These new filmmakers were not always to the taste of Pierre Rissient,
who had gently mocked Lourcelles when he told him he had gone to see a
film called Larmes d'amour, one of the six melodramas shot by Matarazzo
with the couple Amadeo Nazzari/Yvonne Sanson. More seriously, when
Lourcelles proposed a file on Riccardo Freda, Rissient accused him of
wanting to repeat the "Cottafavi stunt" with a filmmaker who did not deserve
it. As Mourlet says, for film buffs as passionate as Rissient and Lourcelles,
" it was a reason to declare
24
war than not liking the same director " Their frequent
.

conflicts were accentuated by the fact that Lourcelles had not liked Rissient's short films;
the young man was consistent with the future author of the Dictionnaire du cinéma where
Éric Rohmer's films would be criticized. This is how Rissient stopped his contributions to
Présence in 1963 with his testimonies of actors brought to n°17 and Marc Bernard, his
faithful sidekick, in 1964 with his review of The servant in n°20 devoted to Losey. However,
a witness assures that there was " a lot of mutual admiration between Rissient and
Lourcelles despite their immense respective pride ". This witness is Louis Skorecki alias
Jean-Louis Noames. He is sometimes counted among the "neo Mac-Mahonians" (by
Mourlet for example).

Louis Skorecki is worth dwelling on. In 1962, at the age of 19, he

founded his own magazine with two friends from Voltaire High School:
Claude Dépêche and Serge Daney. Visages du cinéma had two issues:
the first devoted to Howard Hawks, the second to Otto Preminger. In
addition to the latter, the editorial of the first announced: " Minnelli, Fuller,
Anthony Mann, Mankiewicz, Mizoguchi, Lang, Sirk, Dwan, Walsh, Cottafavi,
Aldrich, Cukor, Ray, Brooks, etc. "
Machine Translated by Google

Mahonian. He liked " the idea of transparency " and " didn't understand anything about Cahiers".
He therefore preferred Présence unlike Daney who, impressed by Jacques Rivette and Jean
Douchet, dreamed of writing in the yellow magazine.

Between 1963 and 1965, Skorecki and Daney made several trips to Hollywood to meet their
idols: Leo McCarey, Raoul Walsh, Samuel Fuller, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tourneur, Howard
Hawks, Josef von Sternberg... Among them, many were popular with the Mac-Mahonians.

Some had never been interviewed by French journalists. These interviews were to serve as a
sesame for Daney and Skorecki to penetrate the editorial offices of film magazines. Louis Skorecki
sent his interview with Samuel Fuller to Présence. This interview appeared spread over two
issues90 a major text by Jacques Lourcelles, "Thème du traiteur et du héros", accompanied . And
it. It was an opportunity to return in detail to a filmmaker who had been distinguished by the Mac-
Mahonians at least since Mourlet's texts in the Cahiers but to whom they had never yet devoted a
general article. For Lourcelles, Fuller did not belong to the tradition where " the camera tends
towards invisibility ", unlike Walsh, Lang, Preminger and Mizoguchi. It was as an exception to the
rule that he praised him: " Fuller is in my opinion the only baroque of American cinema, and the
only one that should be praised for being so [...] The editing, by its excesses and its instability, the
plot proceeding by leaps, jerks and repetitions constantly recall the presence of a panicked and
exclusive narrator. In doing so, the exception no longer opposes the rule even to consolidate it, but
joins it, is the rule seized by a vertigo, a fit of madness " here admitting the possibility of glorious
exceptions to the principle of transparency defended in "On an Ignored Art".

91
. Subtly, Lourcelles

However, the collaboration between Présence du cinéma and Louis Skorecki came to an abrupt
end because, under the influence of his " Daney soul " (according to Lourcelles), Skorecki committed
what Lourcelles considered a betrayal: an agreement was reached with Jacques Rivette allowing
Claude Dépêche, Serge Daney and him to enter the Cahiers in exchange for all the interviews,
including those that Skorecki had conducted alone, in the summer of 1963. This fact is confirmed
by Louis Skorecki today. Jacques Lourcelles held a grudge against him but called him back...a few
decades later, amazed by " the freedom " he enjoyed at Libération to be able to attack Truffaut as
he did.
Machine Translated by Google

This is how Leo McCarey and Jacques Tourneur found themselves in Cahiers du
cinéma, alongside Andrzej Munk and Orson Welles. According to Skorecki, his
interviews were very unfaithfully transcribed by Cahiers . Jacques Lourcelles'
bitterness was all the more understandable since, since Rohmer's ouster in March
1963, Cahiers had opted for a structuralist modernism far removed from classical
cinephilia, welcoming Brechtian critic Bernard Dort into their columns and going so
far as to have a long conversation with Pierre Boulez, a musician as innovative as
he was not very keen on the seventh art. In August 1963, Jacques Rivette had
redefined the positioning of the magazine he had just taken over: " One has plenty
of time to admire the chrome or patina that a Walsh, Dwan, Tourneur, Minnelli adorn
their chains with; what idiosyncratic trinkets they hang on them, the elegance or
nonchalance with which they wear them; it is increasingly difficult for me not to think,
first, of their weight... Such are the perils of the attitude of "pure gaze", which leads
to submitting to the film, to accepting it as it is, to contemplating it, as they say, but, I
fear, like cows the trains that pass, fascinated by movement or color, and little chance
of ever understanding what acts on these objects of fascination, and makes them
go, to the right rather than to the left .

62
Can one imagine a more scathing barb against Hollywoodophilia,
whether of the Hitchcocko-Hawksian or MacMahonian tendency? After having, during
the 50s, recognized the greatness of Howard Hawks or Otto Preminger, Jacques
Rivette, impressed by the discovery of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls , would come to
defend New York experimental cinema against the reluctance of editors from classical
cinephilia. Even his right-hand man at the time, Jean-Louis Comolli, recognizes
today: " this explains [...] why it was difficult for me to really like the so-called
experimental New York cinema [...]. However astonishing they may be, however
subversive, these films left me no other place than that of the non-dupe. I needed to
believe, to be caught up in the illusion and overtaken by it, a spectator like any other,
neither worse nor better, abused and amused. "

92 .

But the new editor-in-chief of the Cahiers wanted to broaden the spectrum " in all
directions " (dixit Moullet).
Another fact, more anecdotal and more underground, explains the rivalry between Cahiers
du cinéma and Présence du cinéma. Between 1961 and 1962, the Mac-Mahonian Claude
Makovski had managed the Éditions de
Machine Translated by Google

the star that owned the Cahiers. He had then asked Michel Mourlet to
return to the Cahiers. Mourlet had refused so as not to go back on his
promise to Curtelin and Eibel to devote himself from now on to Présence
du cinéma. According to Mourlet, this seemed to " greatly surprise and
somewhat upset the said Makovski " who then demanded to be paid for
an advertising insert placed by Présence in the Cahiers. The director of
Présence replied to him by registered letter, sending him the
advertisement that the Cahiers had placed in Présence, specifying that
it was an exchange and that there was no question of paying a cent. He
heard nothing more about it.
In retrospect, this mid-60s when John Ford, Claude Autant-Lara,
Glauber Rocha and Ingmar Bergman rub shoulders in the summaries
appears perhaps as the most ecumenical period in the history of Cahiers
du cinéma. In any case, by pre-empting interviews that would have
ideally suited the MacMahonian review, Rivette and Daney were not
going to contribute a little to hastening its end.
Machine Translated by Google

13

The agony of Presence of Cinema

The new director was struggling to fill his journal. A year passed
between issue 20 (March-April 1964) and issue 21 (March 1965). " I'm
quite slow ," Lourcelles admits. " He's crazy about detail and nitpicking ,"
Mourlet says. Author of the longest texts published in the MacMahonian
review, Lourcelles is also incapable of writing two at the same time. He
has a very personal relationship with writing: " I get it off my chest and
then I forget everything I've written ."
Furthermore, Simon Mizrahi and Pierre Guinle did not want to write,
even though their contributions to Présence were crucial. The former
led the historic interview with Allan Dwan, the most prolific filmmaker in
Hollywood history, to the United States in 1964, which was published in
issue 22/23 (autumn 1966). Sometimes helped by Brion or Mizrahi, the
latter established the filmographies. In the era of IMDB and Wikipedia,
it is hard to realize the expectation that their publications could arouse
among film buffs. Before glossing over, film magazines were required
to inform. Apart from them, no one then took the trouble to list all the
films made by the same man. Monographs on filmmakers remained
rare, even though Seghers had just started his collection "Cinéma
d'aujourd'hui" under the direction of Pierre Lherminier. An example of
this craze, Lourcelles recounts having been approached at the
Cinémathèque the day after the publication of the Mankiewicz special
by a spectator who pointed out a spelling mistake in the filmography.
The 2000 copies sold out very quickly.

In Présence du cinéma, Alain Ferrari wrote some reviews as well as

a general text: "John Ford or the good feelings" which developed a
comparison of the American master with Charles Dickens. For this n°21
dedicated to John Ford (March 1965), the editor-in-chief asked Bertrand
Tavernier for a text because he felt that he wrote with ease. From
Machine Translated by Google

Like Bernard Eisenschitz, the future filmmaker had already provided Lourcelles with some critical
notes. According to Tavernier, Jean-Luc Godard had wanted to pre-empt this text for Cahiers du
cinéma. Tavernier reportedly replied that it was impossible " because this text [...] had been
commissioned by Jacques Lourcelles for Présence du cinéma. Respect for one's word did not seem
essential to him, and he felt that it had been a long time since we had read articles of this quality in
Cahiers. Entitled "La chevauchée de Sganarelle", the article is part of the broad movement of
"rehabilitation" of John Ford started by young cinephiles since the end of the 1950s following the
85 » .
pioneering work of Lindsay Anderson in Great Britain in the magazine Sequence.

One might wonder about the need to "rehabilitate" a director who, since the 1930s, was considered a master. Four times

recipient of the Oscar for best director, he was and remains today the record holder in this field. From a more Francocentric point

of view, he was one of the first filmmakers to have a monograph devoted to him: the book by Jean Mitry published by Editions

universitaires in 1954, where his style is admirably analyzed. However, Lindsay Anderson, and then, even more so, Louis

Marcorelles and Jean-Luc Godard, proposed a new way of loving Ford, against the critics born before 1920. Jean Mitry, François

Vinneuil or, to a lesser extent, André Bazin, admired above all pre-war films, very influenced by expressionism and imbued with

the symbolist dramaturgy of the screenwriter Dudley Nichols: The Informer, The Lost Patrol and The Fantastic Ride were, with the

unjustly forgotten comedy The Whole Town Talks About It, considered in 1954 by Jean Mitry as the artist's masterpieces. However,

this formalist emphasis, which tends to make films sink into heaviness and abstraction, was rejected by younger film buffs who

were therefore sometimes unfair to John Ford, assimilating him to an outdated director; opinion in which they were comforted by

the reactionary sentimentality which, at first glance, seemed to emanate from more recent films such as It's Only Goodbye or

Permission Until Dawn. Serge Daney recognized an error in the Yellow Notebooks : the underestimation of John Ford. François

Truffaut, after having seen The Quiet Man again on television in the 60s, admitted to having been mistaken at the time when his

opinion was feared in the Parisian elite: 93 was in fact " American Renoir "

, the highest compliment that one can give

Machine Translated by Google

can imagine in his mouth. This is because, alongside an intellectual and

aesthetic vein of which the terrible God died in 1947 can be considered
the ultimate paragon, Ford's immense work is irrigated by a human
warmth and a tendency towards nonchalance that make him similar to
Marcel Pagnol. In 1965, young French film-goers were still not very
familiar with the new trilogy with Will Rogers, the height of Fordian
relaxation, precursor of the neorealist form and continuator of the spirit
of Mark Twain, but they played The Convoy of the Brave against The
Informer, The Heroic Charge against The Lost Patrol or even - this is
excessive - The Inspector on Duty against The Fantastic Ride. Westerns
shot between friends or police films made in a hurry in England, all that
was not very impressive. According to Jean-Claude Biette, it was the
retrospective at the new Cinémathèque de Chaillot in 1963 that prompted
his friends at Cahiers du cinéma to revise their opinion of Little by little,one-eyed man21
the famous
John Ford was put back in his rightful place. This time, unlike what had
happened for the other filmmakers featured on the cover (except
Mankiewicz), Présence du cinéma was not at the forefront. It accompanied
a more general movement of French cinephilia. With its overflowing
enthusiasm but always supported by specific examples, Tavernier's text
was entirely representative of it: " he experienced his failures when,
under the harmful influence of Dudley Nichols, he embarked on ambitious,
European-style attempts, conceived and developed outside of any
American trend or genre, which tried to react against rules rather than to
deepen them. Ford's true genius lies elsewhere, in a whole series of films
ranging from Young Mister Lincoln to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
including The Searchers, Wagonmaster, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

Tavernier did not forget the epic genius, to whom François Truffaut was
perfectly indifferent: " through these peasant dramas, westerns or social
films, it is the beginnings of American democracy that are told to us and
all its problems considered ". The release of this issue of Présence du
cinéma special John Ford in the mid-60s coincided with the master's visit
to Paris orchestrated by Pierre Rissient as part of the re-release of The
Massacre at Fort Apache. Tavernier recounts that Rissient was taken up
by Ford's alcoholism, having to hide or drink three-quarters of what he
ordered.
Machine Translated by Google

A year and a half passed between issue #21 and the following (double) issue
devoted to Allan Dwan and Jacques Tourneur. Jacques Lourcelles' solitude in the
pages of Présence grew ever more pronounced. He had in fact become the sole
editor. Of course, Guinle and Mizrahi filled a lot of space with the voluminous
annotated filmographies and the interview with Allan Dwan in which half a century
of Hollywood history was covered. But the issue began with a very long article by
Lourcelles on Allan Dwan that went way beyond its subject. It was supposedly a
presentation for a film club showing Queen of the Prairie but Lourcelles likes to
mock the gullible who imagine that such a dense text could really have constituted
a film club presentation. For the editor-in-chief of Présence, praising Allan Dwan in
1966 was to write a superb cinephile manifesto in which the swindling of authentic
great filmmakers by the noise maintained around false values would be dissected.
The spirit of the cine-club, with " its methodical and quasi-necrophilic cult [...] to
personalities such as Bunuel, Welles, René Clair, Kurosawa, Visconti, Feuillade,
Pabst, Eisenstein, De Sica [...] who constitute the cemetery, the vast well-kept
cemetery of this art that is said to be the youngest, which should be so in fact, and
which is so little so " was also among the targets.

According to Lourcelles, there were three obstacles to " the definitive rediscovery
"real classics of cinema ": "
fashionable filmmakers "
the " vast necropolis [...] where the debris of a fallacious History of Cinema
is piled up ". The opportunity for a provocative, but not unfounded, reflection
on DW Griffith: " There are few, very few filmmakers whose work presents
a historical interest truly distinct from their purely aesthetic interest. In
truth, there are even fewer, I believe, than there are talented filmmakers.
Among these, Griffith is the first name that comes to mind, a significant
- and rare - example of a work that should certainly be made known to curious
spectators, not for their pleasure but for their information. It should be
noted in passing that 99% of the critics who maintain the cult of Griffith as a
sacred trust do not usually come for long, or even do not come at all, to the
retrospectives, when there are any, and they are very rare, of this
infinitely respected work.

However, with the help of mentions and quotes that they judge without
Machine Translated by Google

doubtless opportune, they will continue to honor this work

with their ignorant admiration. Here again, conformism,
smokescreen, fear of being misjudged by violating a
cultural taboo, unite and have the consequence of perpetuating
a false idea. Because it is a false idea to consider most of
Griffith's films as masterpieces: it is not wanting to take into
account the complacency, the tiresome excesses and the
conventions of the scenarios that he was fond of; above all, it is
forgetting that we hardly ever see in his work the fusion
between the various elements of the staging (cutting, decor,
interpretation), a fundamental inadequacy but which undoubtedly
contributes to making even clearer the
progress that he made in each of them, taken in particular " the
doctrines such as that of cinéma-vérité" whose name alone is insulting to the res
In the face of these impostures, it was a significant position to brandish
Allan Dwan, then almost unknown. If this veteran had a small place in
the history of cinema for his silent period when he had directed some of
Douglas Fairbanks' most famous films, it is the splendor of the pseudo-
B-movies made in the 50s under the leadership of producer Benedict
Bogeaus that Jacques Lourcelles proclaimed: " after two hundred (or
one thousand two hundred, it doesn't matter) more or less pleasant,
more or less faded, more or less detached from their subjects and their
actors [...], Dwan made in less than ten years a small series of films (the
majority with the same team), films that we should not be so futile as to
classify in the history of cinema, but about which we must affirm, to be
fair, that nothing in this history could surpass them. There may be films
as beautiful as Dwan's; I don't think there are any more beautiful."

Against the adulterated prestige of cultural worldliness, Lourcelles

highlighted the eternal youth of Dwan's classical art and added another
layer to the MacMahonian postulate: " realism does not have to serve or
illustrate some sordid and monotonous conception of reality, any more
than any other conception of reality. [...] Realism solicits and welcomes
any invention likely to make us forget a little more the technicality of
cinema and its inevitable fragmentation ". However, in the same text,
Lourcelles praised Sacha Guitry, one of the most mischievous jugglers
of the art of film editing... Which
Machine Translated by Google

would tend to show that, in the present case, he was less concerned with theoretical rigor than with
polemical vigor.
This is how, still reeling from the betrayal of Skorecki and Daney, he rekindled the feud with the Cahiers
du cinéma, mocking in particular their about-face on John Ford: " you are surprised that a film like The
Wings of Eagles, John Ford, 1956, is for example - one example among a thousand - described as "old
man's delirium" by specialist journalists and is a few years later, in the same newspaper, listed among the
best American films ."

Later, this would not prevent Louis Skorecki from praising the " formidable double issue of Présence du cinéma Allan Dwan-

Jacques 94 whenever the opportunity arose. Given the Tourneur print run " that was still so low, its impact was enormous. Even

Roger Tailleur though La reine de la prairie had been given a glowing review by Philippe Demonsablon31 even though

considered Le mariage est pour demain to be a masterpiece even though Deux rouquines dans bagarre had been favorably cited

by Godard for its style in an article on Boris Barnet96 it was Jacques Lourcelles and his friends who discovered the vein of ,

Dwan's ten nuggets produced by Benedict Bogeaus. However, unlike other Hollywood filmmakers whose discovery by the French
95
indirectly forged their reputation across
, the Atlantic, the cult of Dwan's late-career films remained a French specificity. This

dichotomy is striking in the collective book published by the Locarno Festival in 2002 on the occasion of the retrospective it

devoted to the , filmmaker: Allan Dwan, the legend of the man of a thousand films. The French contributors to this book, such as

Jean-Claude Biette or Charles Tesson, editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma in the late 90s, continued to praise the secret garden

of B movies produced by Benedict Bogeaus and did not fail to recognize the capital importance that issue 22/23 of Présence had

had in their discovery. If, in 2009, a box set of seven of these films was released on DVD in France, it was a distant but direct

consequence of Lourcelles' article without which they would certainly have fallen into oblivion. On the contrary, the English Kevin

Brownlow and David Robinson paid little attention to the splendor and frontal simplicity of the veteran's last films and preferred to

praise the companion of Griffith and Fairbanks. Enthusiastic about the " innovative style of editing " of a 1916 film (Manhattan

Madness) but considering " sloppy " the work

Machine Translated by Google

At the end of his career, the venerable Kevin Brownlow was like those
spectators mocked by Lourcelles in his 1966 article, representatives of a
cinephilia more reverential than fascinated, preferring to track down
hypothetical formal innovations in films half a century old rather than to be
seduced by the immediate charm of B series with Edenic classicism.

This immediacy of the relationship to the work is a MacMahonian

principle on which Lourcelles relied: " even films from which one might
believe that the cinema that produces them will not recover, I am thinking
of films like A Monkey in Winter, Le vice et la vertu, Alphaville, even these
films are not bad for cinema. In reality, they can do nothing against it. What
is bad for cinema is each spectator taken individually, when he makes an
erroneous judgment about it; that is to say ourselves, by our lack of
resistance to the various forms of advertising, commercial advertising as
well as cultural advertising, and of which one cannot say which of the two
is the most brazen; it is us, by our nonchalance and our softness, by all the
artifices and precautions that we substitute for a direct and spontaneous
73
contact with the works " here finds the . Fifteen years later, we
characteristics of Pierre Rissient's "revelation" when he discovered Les
forbans de la nuit.
Finally, it should be remembered that this text was written by a 25-year-
old young man proclaiming his love for septuagenarian and even
octogenarian creators. Even if, in 1966, the hope of seeing them return to
business had not yet died, many of the acclaimed masters were retired:
Allan Dwan, but also Henry King, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, John Ford and
Leo McCarey had made their last feature-length fiction film. Cecil B. DeMille
and Sacha Guitry had died since the 1950s. As for Otto Preminger and
Joseph Losey (the youngest), they were, from a MacMahonian point of
view, in decline. In 1965-66, the following films were released in Paris:
Repulsion and Cul-de-sac by Roman Polanski, Pierrot le fou, Masculin-
féminin and Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard, The Gospel According to Saint
Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Juliette des esprits by Federico Fellini, The
War is Over by Alain Resnais, The Hopeless by Miklos Jancso, A Man and
a Woman by Claude Lelouch, For a Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars
More by Sergio Leone (the latter case being a little different because these
two films were assassinated by the critics although triumphant in theaters).
Not a single one of these films, in fact not a single one
Machine Translated by Google

film, was not criticized in this issue 22/23. Faced with this wave, Allan
Dwan's cinema was an all the more suitable refuge for the last Mac-
Mahonians since, thematically, this filmmaker is the champion of
threatened paradises and preserved communities. The John Milton of
Hollywood. For film buffs who remained convinced of the truths revealed
in On an Ignored Art, singing the praises of Dwan, King, Tourneur and
DeMille while superbly disdaining Polanski, Leone, Godard and "current
events" in general, was also enjoying one's melancholy in the face of a
world that no longer matched one's desires.
Machine Translated by Google

14

Farewell to MacMahonism

This divorce of Présence du cinéma from the times was confirmed in the last issue.
Released in the fall of 1967, a year after the previous one, it was a double issue, shared
between Cecil B. DeMille and a "Journal of 1966". The part devoted to DeMille did not
contain any critical text, apart from a brief foreword by Lourcelles concluding as follows: "
the number of spectators of DeMille's films amounts to four billion, or one and a half times
the population of the world. This figure creates, I believe, around the personality of DeMille
and his films, a certain silence".

The main part of the file was the filmography commented by the author on seventy pages
which made Claude Beylie say when he met Lourcelles: " Was it really necessary to publish
the complete and detailed filmography of Cecil B. DeMille? " With this monumental work by
Pierre Guinle and Simon Mizrahi who had sought out the words of the filmmaker who died
in 1959 in his autobiography and in various American magazines, Présence continued to
prefer the documentary approach to that of commentary. The following year, Michel Mourlet
would publish the first monograph of the filmmaker in the Seghers collection by Pierre
Lherminier.

Wanting to fill an editorial void but no longer a fervent enough cinephile to take on the task
of writing the critical section, he would entrust the latter to Michel Marmin. Some thirty years
later, in 2002, Christian Durante, a cinephile publisher who had discovered the seventh art
in the 70s with Action cinemas, old issues of Présence du cinéma and books by Mac-
Mahonians, would suggest to Mourlet to republish his book on DeMille in which he saw a
perfect example of a "book-dossier".

The only important text in the last issue of Présence du cinéma written by a member of
the editorial staff, the "1966 journal" made the magazine a space for expressing Jacques
Lourcelles' intimate feelings.
Machine Translated by Google

Spanning nearly thirty pages, it is a series of reflections, more or less

developed, inspired by current cinematographic events in the very broad
sense: Parisian exclusives but also films seen on television or at the
Cinémathèque.
Interest in French cinema of the 1930s, "a whole field to explore and list
with, as they say, 'a fresh look' ", is felt there. Marcel Pagnol, to whom his
friend Alain Ferrari would devote a book in 2000, and Paul Fejos are
(re)discovered. Avec le sourire, a jewel of invigorating cynicism directed by
Maurice Tourneur in 1936, is exhumed. This followed attentive reviews of the
last films of Julien Duvivier (Goosebumps in Présence n°20) and Pierre
Chenal (L'assassin connaître la musique in Présence n°21), good films that
were then neglected.
The latest works of the American masters allow us to clarify Lourcelles'
position with regard to them. Thanks to Marry Dad (1963), Goodbye Charlie
(1964) and The Sand Knight (1965), Vincente Minnelli " definitively entered,
leaving behind him many of his early admirers, the circle of great US directors
" while The Pirate (1948) or the final sketch of Ziegfeld Follies (1945) " remain
unforgettable for the degree of almost unbearable ugliness to which they
reached ". Minnelli's early admirers were the erotomaniac surrealists of the
Positif of the 1950s who defended him precisely for his colorful oneirism97

For the evocative richness of the details that Lourcelles transcribed, the
interview with Samuel Fuller turns out to be the most delicious of the interviews
that the picturesque American, who was beginning a long European exile after
falling out of favor in Hollywood, granted to his French admirers. He dwelt on
projects that would never see the light of day, with the exception of the one
closest to his heart: The Big Red One, named after the infantry division he
enlisted in during the Second World War. Lourcelles recounting Fuller imitating
Balzac is one of the bravura pieces in Présence du cinéma. Excerpt: " his
diction is such that with the help of a single-syllable word (great, fun, big), he
can let out a howl that lasts several seconds ."

Louis XIV's seizure of power, Red Line 7000 and Torn Curtain are an
opportunity to update Roberto Rossellini, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock;
namely the three favourites of The Yellow Notebooks (with Jean Renoir).
These three films cannot be considered the
Machine Translated by Google

best of their authors but Lourcelles returns to all of their works, keeping his propensity to go
from the particular (characteristic of a film) to the general (characteristic of its director), often
even going as far as theory (characteristic of the seventh art). Thus on Rossellini: " Cut off
from his sources of inspiration (neorealism, Ingrid Bergman), Rossellini wanders from
experiment to experiment. [...] Experimental works are generally recognizable by two traits:
the desire for originality has killed all originality in the subject and, at the limit, all interest
whatsoever (we always end up wondering why these films were made). On the other hand,
the flame, the creative ardor of the author always seem to have been exhausted in everything
surrounding the work, the preparation, the promotion by advertising, the interviews, and
nothing of it has remained in the work itself. There is thus a flame, a bitter, passionate tone
in Rossellini's words (cf. "Le cinéma c'est fini" in Le Figaro littéraire 6-10-66) which are totally
lacking in the film itself ." Here, Lourcelles reaffirms the MacMahonian principle of a cinema
in itself, where the work must be viewed and judged autonomously.

In July 2019, Jacques Lourcelles confided to me that, in his opinion, the Mac-Mahonians
had made a mistake about a filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock, who was his favorite filmmaker as
a teenager. This 1966 journal was an opportunity to revisit the severity of Mourlet and
Rissient, even if only partially.
For the last editor-in-chief of Présence du cinéma, Hitchcock is " stimulated by poor, openly
schematic material, offering if possible a challenge to his creative faculties." Drawing on the
example of Torn Curtain, the critic shows that "the objective qualities of [his films]
systematically rely on the imperfections, artifices and obstacles of the subject ."

As for Howard Hawks, his case would be that of a filmmaker " both unknown and
overestimated ". " Described as a Cornelian image of greatness, generosity, heroism
surrounded by perils, his work is not worth a dime " but "his dryness, his self-avarice, his
contempt for lyricism, now, serve him ". Lourcelles quotes Marc Bernard about Hatari : " a
Hawks film is a narrow but clear film" to give measured praise to an artist " with a highly
recommendable evolution " who has freed himself " from his own academicism ". Last
astonishing statement if we consider that the majority of Hawks' last films, starting with Red
Line 7000, are recyclings of his past themes.
Machine Translated by Google

in a most anonymous form. On the contrary, the Hawks films cited as paragons of academicism by
Lourcelles are either peaks of classicism (A girl in every port, Red river) or minor works from the 30s
suffering above all from weak scripts (The croad roars, Today we live) or from the hesitant technique of
the early days of talkies (Dawn patrol).

It should be recalled here that the Hawks/Walsh opposition was a recurring cause for quarrel with
the Cahiers. The first sentence quoted was a thinly veiled attack on the editor who had taken Skorecki
and his interviews away from him. Indeed, it was Jacques Rivette who, in his seminal "Genius of Howard
Hawks", wrote: "Red River, Only Angels Have Wings claims no other kinship than that of Corneille "

98
.
And the least we can say
is that, for a Mac-Mahonian, " described as a Cornelian image of greatness, generosity,
heroism surrounded by perils ", the work of Raoul Walsh is worth more than " tripette ". In
his interviews with Samuel Blumenfeld, Pierre Rissient remembers " Jean-Louis Comolli
arguing about the fact that the average of Hawks' films was superior to that of Walsh's films
". He recalls that the Mac-Mahonians did not think " that we should judge the work of an artist
on the average of his films, but on his peaks". For him, " talking about the "average" only
served to make us forget that Walsh was, at his peaks, superior to Hawks ".

5
. In retrospect, this harsh opposition between Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks
appears as a perfect example of these essentially circumstantial chapel wars that time has done
justice to. In April 1964, the Cahiers had devoted a file to Raoul Walsh, including a brilliant eulogy
of Adventures in Burma by Comolli. 42 In 1978, Mourlet wrote a beautiful obituary of Howard Hawks
in Valeurs actuelles , Lourcelles places his masterpieces in their rightful place in his dictionary .

published in 1992 (including Only Angels Have Wings and Red River) and Rissient acknowledges:
" we liked Hawks a lot " even if... " we placed Walsh at the very top ."

5
.
In the eyes of
MacMahonians, it is perhaps the cosmic magnitude and sublime vitality of his masterpieces - powerful
vectors of fascination - that make Walsh a little greater than Hawks in whom, according to Mourlet, " the
confrontations evoke resolutions of equations "99
.
Machine Translated by Google

Above all, in the last entry of the diary, which is that of December 20, Lourcelles
mentions some of the " 392 films released in Paris in 1966 " and draws up a sad assessment
which he calls, oh so eloquently, " Farewell to MacMahonism ."

He begins by attacking the flagship titles of French cinema that " are now going round in
circles ." Speaking of Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 , the critic, faithful to MacMahonian ethics,
denounces the cultural ready-made thinking that confuses promotional discourse and the
intrinsic value of the work: " We can clearly see the intention, not very estimable, that
presided over the making of the film: it was necessary to "put the viewer in one's pocket"
before he could see a single image of the film; it was necessary to intrigue him and at the
same time reassure him (defense of mortal civilizations, defense of books in peril: the
beautiful crusade!) by a shocking idea, in truth ultra-conventional, whose expression, if we
can speak of expression, would be the least disturbing and most academic possible on the
screen. On this level - cultural and advertising control over the category of spectators,
apparently serious and cultivated, but ultimately completely unconscious, who will always
prefer to grasp the scope of a film before having seen it - we can speak of a certain
success."

He then castigates Claude Chabrol's The Line of Demarcation and Jean-Pierre Melville's
The Second Breath , " odious prestige films that claim to continue American B cinema while
lacking both of the fundamental qualities of this cinema: concision and readability " and
describes Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman as " a catalogue of all the 'old stuff'
rediscovered in cinema over the last six or seven years ", despite its Palme d'Or and Oscar-
winning nature.

He also notes the failure of films that claim to be halfway between " serious " and "
entertainment ", a failure that highlights the stupidity of such opposition. In doing so, he
distances himself from the French directors defended by the MacMahonians during the first
half of the 1960s: "the names of Sautet, Deray, Deville, etc., are added to those of Truffaut,
Chabrol, Melville, Lelouch, Resnais, Astruc, Malle, etc. to create a comfortable, satisfied,
extinguished, risk-free cinema, almost unrelated to reality". Jacques Deray's L'Homme de
Marrakech and Avec la peau des autres , Pierre Schoendoerffer's Objectif 500 millions and
Jean-Paul Rappeneau's La vie de château are " empty, dead " films .
Machine Translated by Google

The now sole editor of Présence du cinéma reserves his sharpest

arrows, of course, for the so-called avant-garde: " This year, a large
contingent of avant-garde films were released in a fairly normal circuit.
From decade to decade, these films remain the same. In '66, there were
a few more than usual, and they were a little more successful than usual.
Endless speculations on the boundaries of dream and reality, characters
of neurotics, solipsists, degenerates of all kinds offering fertile ground
for sequences of puerile provocation, those who are fond of this kind of
film (the most reactionary in cinema) and its familiar characters will have
been delighted this year by The Man with the Shaved Head, Repulsion,
I pugni in tasca, etc. No more than these films change, one cannot
change one's opinion of them. Technical, dramatic, visual, historical,
social interest: zero. Originality: zero." As for the films from "
cinematographically young " countries, then defended on principle in the
Cahiers, Lourcelles, without citing any title, is no more enthusiastic: the
result is "shapeless".
He is hardly more tender with the new American filmmakers.
Franklin Schaffner, Arthur Penn, Ralph Nelson, Robert Mulligan and
Sam Peckinpah seemed interchangeable to him. To understand such a
judgment today, it is necessary to remember that they were then at the
beginning of their careers. Thus, Penn had not yet shot Bonnie & Clyde
nor Peckinpah The Wild Bunch.

In short, for Jacques Lourcelles, " what we are going through at the
moment, there is no hiding it, these are the dark years of cinema". He
confirms here that "most of the filmmakers of the first generation
(DeMille, Dwan, Guitry, King, Lang, McCarey, Walsh) have disappeared
or retired " while " in the following generation, the most talented
filmmakers accept and undergo various types of misadventures that
lead them to a quasi-decadence. " Tourneur and Ulmer, accustomed to
" small but worthy " productions , find themselves forced to accept
budgets " so tiny that they become paralyzing ". Furthermore, " others,
apparently happier, shoot but empty and in the wrong direction ". Here,
Lourcelles is of course thinking of Joseph Losey with whom the break is
well and truly confirmed: " his last films are poor, mechanical, without
force, without humor ". He also thinks of Stanley Donen, sharing his love
for Kiss them for me and Deep in my heart but noting that, in Arabesque, "
Machine Translated by Google

the abusive fragmentation of the editing, the excessive mechanization of the direction of
actors and all [the] optical delirium can only inspire, by comparison, a pity mixed with
regrets ."
However, Lourcelles does not give in completely to pessimism. According to him, the
new hopes are: Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jack Garfein (for Something Wild), Bertrand Blier (who
had only made one documentary and one short film) or Léonard Keigel whose two feature
films are " admirable ". Italian comedy would be a genre to be explored in depth despite "
the tendency of some [of the] films to deviate towards a systematic and conventional
immorality which drains them of some of their strength ". Pasquale Festa Campanile's
freedom of tone was praised at length in this "1966 Journal".

Finally, this last text of the last issue is an opportunity to look back on MacMahonism: "
in less than ten years [...], the works of 80% of the filmmakers of value will have been put in
their rightful place: Lang, Walsh, Preminger, Ford, Fuller etc. [...] As they say, a lot of water
will have flowed under the bridge since the time when defending, for example, While the
City Sleeps was considered a paradoxical fantasy ". The role of the movement " is now well
and truly over ": " it is indeed beginning to seem surprising that people were able to come
together and oppose others by simply advocating the merit of these four names: Lang,
Losey, Walsh, Preminger (and that of a certain number of other filmmakers who were similar
to them). What was originality, excessive paradox, even deplorable way of getting noticed
has today become obvious, a simple manifestation of common sense. So much the better.
In these matters, the fate of a successful movement is to dissolve, to dilute itself in general
acceptance."

What was " nothing other than an act of elementary lucidity " appears singularly linked to
" one of the richest periods in the history of cinema (1944-59) ". For Lourcelles, today, the
role of criticism would be very different, " less spectacular and more thankless ": " to
continue, among so many disappointments and dull evenings, to stubbornly seek the lines
of force and the rare pearl; to know nothing; to foresee nothing. "

That Présence du cinéma also stopped for economic or practical reasons (a Matarazzo
issue that will never see the light of day
Machine Translated by Google

was announced in this newspaper in 1966) ultimately matters little as this

conclusion seems perfect.
Machine Translated by Google

15

MacMahonism Review

Today, if we can quibble with Jacques Lourcelles on certain details of his "Adieu au mac-
mahonisme", it is difficult not to note his lucidity regarding the general observation, at least
as far as American and French cinemas are concerned. What is now called "the golden age
of Hollywood" was, in the mid-60s, well and truly over. The glorious veterans who had
started in the silent film era (Ford, Walsh, Dwan, Lang, King, McCarey...) were retired or
dead while those of the post-war generation (Preminger, Mann, Mankiewicz, Minnelli, Fuller,
Ray, Tourneur, Donen...) had lost their creative framework with the upheaval of the studios
in the face of television and were forced to disperse their talent in enormous machines or to
wander around Europe. As for French cinema, in 1966, the breath of the New Wave, which
Lourcelles had never been fond of anyway, had well and truly died down. Unless it continued
to devote itself solely to the cinema of the past, and thus, in a way, contradict its name,
Présence du cinéma could only stop. Lourcelles had never had the fiber of a magazine host,
the kind to seek out writers who were the opposite of his sensibilities to report on a cinema
he did not like;
for example Sylvie Pierre who, in Cahiers du cinéma, wrote about the films of Glauber
Rocha at the same time as Patrick Brion wrote about those of Gordon Douglas. At Présence,
Jacques Lourcelles worked with his friends who, as such, shared his tastes. Since cinema
was no longer up to MacMahonian standards, why continue the magazine?

Why pretend to be interested in current events?

The paradox is that, from a critical point of view, MacMahonism had won. As Lourcelles
notes, Lang, Walsh, Preminger and Losey had been imposed on the majority by the active
minority. But if, with the exception of a few minor names such as Don Weis or Stuart Heisler,
the tastes of the
Machine Translated by Google

MacMahonians had become widespread, but their disgusts had not.

Welles, Fellini and Resnais continued to be celebrated. They continue to be. What was
beginning to take hold was this sort of post-modern ecumenism where Raoul Walsh rubs
shoulders with Jean-Luc Godard in the pages of cultural newspapers, in repertory theaters
and at the Cinémathèque.
Contrary to Mourlet's prophecy, Visconti continues to be praised and Nuits blanches has
been released on DVD almost everywhere, unlike The Adventures of Hadji.

If we reduce MacMahonism to the square of aces then Lourcelles is right: everyone, more
or less, has become MacMahonian so the movement no longer has any reason to exist. It
has been diluted in the dominant opinion, which is the most obvious proof of its victory. But if
MacMahonism is an exclusivist cinephilia, a demand with a sectarian tendency, an attitude
where the celebration of a certain aesthetic must go hand in hand with the fight against what
contradicts this aesthetic, then the programming of cinematheques, the broadcast grids of
television, video publishing, forums on the Internet and what is written generally on cinema
force us to note that this fight has never been won. The Young Turks of the Cahiers had
made René Clair, Marcel Carné and others like Claude Autant-Lara look old-fashioned.

Several aggiornamentos (Rohmer and Douchet returning to Clair, Rivette and Godard to
Autant-Lara, Truffaut to Carné...) and regular attempts at rehabilitation by various eminent
film buffs (Bertrand Tavernier, Paul Vecchiali, Noël Herpe...) do not prevent this purgatory
from still being felt today. On the other hand, the attacks of the Mac-Mahonians have hardly
diminished the prestige of Bunuel, Kazan or Resnais.

This can perhaps be explained by the fact that, ultimately, these attacks were quite rare. If
Mourlet amused himself by peppering his texts with barbs against his bêtes noires, his
articles fully devoted to them can be counted on the fingers of two hands. As for the other
editors of Présence du cinéma, they were even less inclined to savagery. To my knowledge,
no Mac-Mahonian, during the active period of the movement, developed a critique against
films by Welles, Bunuel, Kazan or Visconti. Nothing comparable to the methodical campaign
led by François Truffaut between 1954 and 1958 in Arts and Cahiers du cinéma against "a
certain tendency in French cinema". His bombardment was all the more repeated because
he and his comrades of the Nouvelle Vague were personally interested in shelving the old
guard, while the motives
Machine Translated by Google

of MacMahonian activism remained essentially aesthetic. Ultimately, Rissient, Mourlet and

the others were more concerned with promoting than with debunking. In 1967, the year in
which the last issue of Présence du cinéma appeared, the MacMahonians' favorite target,
that is to say Michelangelo Antonioni, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for his last film Blow-
up ; that is to say, the supreme reward of the greatest festival in the world.

In its strictest, that is to say, most combative, sense, MacMahonism thus revealed itself
to be a niche. An aristocratism of taste. Between 1971 and 1974, Michel Mourlet directed a
new cultural magazine: Matulu. Its goal: to fight against the " dazed conformism of the elites

100
contemporaries " is then under the maximum influence of Marx and Freud. This "
perhaps not a coincidence if these three years coincide with the Maoist period of the Cahiers
du cinéma. Jacques Lourcelles, accompanied by Michel Marmin and the cursed writer Jean-
Pierre Martinet, took care of the cinema section. He wrote on Douglas Sirk and George
Sanders but also defended Alain Tanner's La salamandre or Maurice Pialat's La maison des
bois .

In 1972, Jacques Lourcelles translated a novel written by Raoul Walsh which had not
had the good fortune to be published in its country of origin: The Wrath of the Just.
Without this fan gesture, the great Raoul's ultimate work would have remained completely
unpublished. He also wrote screenplays for Pascal Thomas, whose Les zozos dans Matulu
he had passionately defended, and Jean-Daniel Pollet. During the 70s, he contributed a few
articles to the science fiction magazine Fiction, including a text of about thirty pages devoted
to Pinocchio after the broadcast of Luigi Comencini's adaptation. Lourcelles also participated,
very episodically, in the magazine Ecran. His most notable text was devoted, in June 1978,
to Henry King: "Henry King, a filmmaker of eternity". It was a long paper, worthy of the great
hours of Présence du cinéma, accompanied by an interview with the nonagenarian master
and a filmography established by the faithful Pierre Guinle, who remained a film buff as
erudite as he was passionate until his death in 2012. As for their friend Simon Mizrahi, he
invested himself in the distribution of Italian films and made the Italian comedy of Dino Risi,
Ettore Scola, Luigi Comencini and others Mario Monicelli known in France. In accordance
with Lourcelles' prophecy in the last issue of Présence du cinéma, he
Machine Translated by Google

had discovered a magnificent vein. He also wrote many subtitles and founded a production
company that allowed him to produce, in the early 80s, Riccardo Freda's last film, Murder
obsession, as well as one of Comencini's masterpieces: Eugenio. In 1992, AIDS took his
life, as did Daniel Palas.

Alain Ferrari made several documentaries for television, notably on the Yugoslav war,
and an adaptation of Perrault's tale Bluebeard. He also wrote several books on French
cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, which he helped to rediscover, like his friend Lourcelles.

In 1969, three Mac-Mahonians helped Nelly Kaplan write La fiancée du pirate : Claude
Makovski, her husband and producer, but also Jacques Serguine and Michel Fabre. The
latter, who according to Mourlet was the comic of the group, participated in the writing of ten
comedies by Claude Zidi, in the 70s and 80s. According to Thibault Decoster, author of a
monograph on Zidi, the Mac-Mahonian, seduced by the burlesque style, therefore based on
staging, of the director, brought his " bad wit, a point of view always offbeat and mean on
society and a good-natured cynicism " to the world of Zidi with whom he collaborated
between 1973 (Le grand bazar) and 1987 (Association de malfaiteurs). Michel Fabre is now
deceased.

Spotted by Jean Paulhan's NRF in the late 1950s, Jacques Serguine became known as
a writer and published books until the late 2000s. His best-known work is certainly L'éloge
de la fessée.

In addition to producing his wife's films, Claude Makovski directed a short film in 1970,
Au verre de l'amitié, and, in 1975, a police comedy with Annie Girardot and Claude Brasseur:
Il faut vivre dangereusement. He died in August 2020. Georges Richard left the group very
quickly to become a teacher.

Alfred Eibel provided literary criticism to various magazines including Matulu before
founding his own publishing house where he published texts by, among others, Georges
Perros, Jean-Pierre Martinet, Léo Malet, Fernando Pessoa, Yves Martin and Kim Il-Sung.
He then continued his collaborations with the Quotidien du Paris and then Valeurs actuelles.
Jean Curtelin died in 2000 and wrote several novels and screenplays, notably for Alexandre
Astruc,
Machine Translated by Google

Yves Boisset, Claude Chabrol and Alain Delon, and directed a feature film in 1985: Follow
My Gaze.
Alexis Klémentieff became a diplomat. He is the father of actress Pom Klémentieff, star
of the Marvel films.
Marc C. Bernard continued his brilliant career as a press attaché at Fox. He and Alain
Archambault died a few days apart in the fall of 2013. Their friend Pierre Rissient dedicated
a touching obituary to them, published in March 2014 in the Brazilian magazine Foco.

After leaving Présence du cinéma, Michel Mourlet continued to write in various

newspapers, magazines and journals including NRF, Cinéma et télécinéma, Nouvelles
littéraires, Valeurs actuelles and Le spectacle du monde. Less passionate about cinema
than he had been, he became interested in television in 1967; which did not prevent him
from writing about films by Claude Sautet, Bertrand Blier, Andrei Tarkovski or Yasujiro Ozu,
discovered in France at the end of the 70s. If it is excessive to say, like Serge Bozon
comparing Mac-Mahonism to a rock group, that Mourlet " was inspired for four or five years,
and since then he has only written uninteresting stuff ", it is clear that polemical vigor and
theoretical ambition had deserted his texts on the seventh art, with a few exceptions such
101
as his remarkable dithyramb on Eric Rohmer: "Rohmer, or the staging of language". It was
also due to his new employers, general press bosses. Thus Raymond Bourgine, founder of
Valeurs actuelles and Le Spectacle du monde, gave his teams instructions to write " swiss
", that is to say "Film criticism was only one of Michel Mourlet's many activities, less and less
important as the years went by, among the writing of plays, novels and essays, teaching at
university, directing magazines, publishing, radio and a few brief political engagements (the
so-called "fascist" took an active part in two electoral campaigns: Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
6 neutral » in 1974 and Jean-Pierre Chevènement in 2002). In his foreword to his
.

retrospective book L'écran éblouissant, Michel Mourlet nicely formulates the current state of
his relationship with cinema: " Uncontrolled impulses no longer throw me out of my home to
run immediately to a distant cinema that would show, if it still could, an Edgar Ulmer film
unknown to me. I no longer scream with rage while watching a sequence filmed in slow
motion by an idiot who wants to create a stylistic effect. I no longer believe that only a
Machine Translated by Google

A dozen directors deserve this name and a dozen shots in their best films require us to bow
down at their feet.
But a kind of continuous bass, a soundtrack made of pleasure, tenderness, balance and
habit, lines my days as a peaceful cinephile.
».

As for the first Mac-Mahonian, he directed two feature films (Alibis in 1977 and Cinq et la
peau in 1982), produced a few films but, above all, continued his work as a discoverer until
his death in 2018, scouring festivals all over the world. New Zealander Jane Campion,
American Clint Eastwood and Iranian Abbas Kiarostami all owe Pierre Rissient a decisive
boost at the beginning of their careers.

After Mac-Mahon Distribution, he developed a passion for Asia and introduced the West
to the committed melodramas of the Filipino Lino Brocka and the kung-fu films of the Hong
Konger King Hu, a montage artist who completely contravened the most elementary
principles of transparency.
Jacques Lourcelles liked neither. Michel Mourlet was never interested in them. In short,
MacMahonism was well and truly over as a movement unifying the various facets of a fight
to impose a taste on Paris, on France, on the world.
Machine Translated by Google

16

Reminiscences

There were, however, unexpected surges. In the mid-70s, the editors of Cahiers du
cinéma were beginning to come back from the leftist adventure they had thrown themselves
into after May 68. Maoism having revealed itself to be a dead end, was it not necessary to
reconnect with a narrative cinema, possibly classical and essentially American, which, all
the same, had formed their early youth? After having drastically reduced the scope around
the Godard/Gorin or Straub/Huillet style pensums, the critics were starting to seriously ask
themselves: " Why are we so bored? "

102 .
" The crisis of cinema is also the crisis of romantic
cinema, the frustrated cinephile desire to vibrate with a story as exciting and moving as
Moonfleet, The Lady from Shanghai, Mrs Muir, for example, have been for our generation,
randomly and unevenly. "102 This timid return to cinephilia echoed the concerns of
emblematic filmmakers of the .

time such as Benoît Jacquot, whose tastes had been formed by the Mac-Mahon of Pierre
Rissient's time, or Wim Wenders whose The American Friend, an intellectual reinterpretation
of film noir with Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, was seen as the cinephile's film par
excellence.

In the second half of the 1970s, a major event contributed to this new boom in classic
cinephilia: the launch in March 1976 of the famous "Cinéma de minuit". In exchange for
abandoning the televising of Le Masque et la plume, a programme where their productions
could be severely criticised, French cinema professionals had granted FR3 a fifth weekly
slot to broadcast films.

The age of the films chosen and the late hour were intended to minimize the risk of
competition with theaters. Still directed and presented by its founder in 2022, the show
was created by Patrick Brion, a Hollywood specialist who, during the 1960s, had written
both in Cahiers and in
Machine Translated by Google

Presence. This man was undoubtedly the most important transmitter of cinematographic culture in
France because not only did he initiate three generations of film buffs by showing many classics on
television, but he also allowed already trained amateurs to discover splendid rarities: among other
Mac-Mahonian nuggets, House by the river by Fritz Lang, Hitler's madman by Douglas Sirk and
Wait till the sun shines Nellie by Henry King had their first French broadcast in the 70s thanks to
Brion. Previously in charge of the Antenne 2 film club with Claude-Jean Philippe, he had also
unearthed a copy of Cinq femmes autour d'Utamaro, an important film by Kenji Mizoguchi that had
never been shown in France. There was enough to revive the passion of "old" film buffs, such as
Jean-Claude Biette who devoted an article to several of these films in Cahiers du cinéma : "the
ghosts of the permanent." About House by the River, he wrote: " if we are today sensitive to the
dialectical flight of a thought that circulates between all the points of a narration that it has previously
arranged in the most meticulous and tangible way in a fiction, if we still admit this severe and hardly
flattering charm, it is in the work of Fritz Lang that we will find the best accomplished exercise of
103 » .
it ." Biette's pen was more tortuous than Mourlet's but his words would not have been
disavowed by the latter, especially since the editor of Cahiers took up another MacMahonian refrain,
that of the truly good films that are eluded by cultural advertising around false values, by sending
digs at two sacred cows of the time, Joseph Losey, who had decidedly changed a lot since the
1950s, and Woody Allen. The broadcast of this new release on French television constituted for
Biette " a minor event when the absence of cinematographic thought gives rise to conglomerates
of dull mechanics (Don Giovanni) or to navel-gazing aesthetics (Manhattan) ". More and more film
buffs were being tempted by the melancholy expressed by Lourcelles in the last two issues of
Présence du cinéma.

A few months earlier, the same Jean-Claude Biette had addressed a tip of the hat to the Mac-
Mahonians where he regretted the fading of the cinephile debate: " [the Mac-Mahonians] managed,
by dint of insisting, to impose their tastes - debatable (especially with regard to Preminger, Sautet
or Freda) but coherent and full of all the authenticity of tastes: Walsh, Preminger, Lang, Losey owe
them a little of their fame
Machine Translated by Google

to the general French public around 1965, a public that is now scattered as the
Mac-Mahonians are today. The films they defended - orally, then in Michel
Mourlet's theoretical manifesto, "On an Ignored Art" published here in August 59
and which had a great influence, and then in their magazine Présence du Cinéma
which devoted special issues to Walsh, Dwan, Jacques Tourneur, Cecil B.

DeMille, Fuller, etc. - were then scorned or demolished by the same established
critics who today rave about all films. It would be enough to recall the almost
general lambasting, around 1960, of Fritz Lang's Moonfleet or the condescending
article by Claude Mauriac on The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse, to limit
ourselves to a filmmaker who is today undisputed, perhaps even by these
people. But this blindness of the time is still preferable to this so-called openness
of today. We have gone from bad taste, which is a relative evil, to the absence
of taste, which is an absolute evil. "104
.

Still in the Cahiers, an essential text responded in October 1978, in a very

singular way, to these questions: "Against the new cinephilia" by Louis Skorecki.
105
It was both a subjective history of cinephilia and a pamphlet against what it had
become. Describing the cinephilia of the 50s/60s, Skorecki considered that
MacMahonism had been its purest form: " groups are formed, around film clubs
and magazines, mini-groups, rather, each with its particularities; there is
however an idea (hardly a theory, it is an implicit a priori), which, while not
formulated, is nevertheless common to all groups of film lovers: transparency.
[...] First consequence: the editing must be invisible, the illusion of reality, the
illusion that the whole film is only a single scene, a single movement, must be
total. "

However, the praise was ambiguous. If MacMahonism was the " only truly
coherent critical system to date, which explains and justifies a certain type of
cinephilic passion ", it was also because the MacMahonians were " the only
cinephiles, in [his] opinion, to have been logical with themselves to the end: even
if it meant passionately defending this or that American fragment, it was
necessary to recognize the validity and legitimacy of the system which had made
them possible, hence the praise of American society, the defense of the most
reactionary political system,
Machine Translated by Google

the most radical adequacy of the form that one defends to the substance that
it implies and that it conveys .
As if it were necessary, after all, to pay allegiance to what the Cahiers had
become by maintaining the hyper-rightist image of the MacMahonians...
However, no MacMahonian writing corresponds in the least to this " praise of
American society " except, if we decide to include the late Michel Marmin in
the movement, the latter's monograph devoted to Raoul Walsh as well as his
text on Cecil B. DeMille in Mourlet's book. It is marginal to say the least.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that, if he had dedicated his book
to the GIs who died in Vietnam, Marmin became a slayer of American
civilization from the moment he met Alain de Benoist. In the mid-1970s, in
the columns of Le Figaro and Valeurs actuelles, he defended the cinemas of
Werner Herzog, Dino Risi, Jan Troell, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Claudine
Guilmain and Eric Rohmer against Hollywood imperialism.

But that was not the point of Skorecki's argument. The idea was to show
that the heroic era of cinephilia, that of the discovery of great authors by a
handful of young men who preferred the screen to life, was over and that, in
an era dominated by " the omnipotence of producers, distributors, associated
exhibitors, the standardization from below of basic products intended for
mass consumption [and] the increasingly radical and incompatible division
between the films of the system that conform to standards and marginal,
isolated works, without an audience ", there was no going back: "the old
cinephilia, the old one, no longer exists [...] as for the new one, what I want
to try to show is that it does not exist either, that it is a sham [...] at the time
when the so-called authors' policy had passed into customs and the media,
most of the filmmakers to whom it had succeeded in having this status
recognized, most of these filmmakers were out of harm's way, out of use -
they were already no longer filming. Since the rating machine cannot run
empty, here comes an international cohort of young filmmakers who show up
at the door, with all their papers in order: certificate guaranteeing the
authenticity and coherence of the world vision, global project, themes
guaranteed to be long-lasting and bulletproof, solid obsessions and the
stature of a poet with a long tooth, with supporting evidence and theories, in
short, young people firmly eager to inscribe their name in letters of gold, both
on the illuminated signs of the
Machine Translated by Google

cinemas and — through recognition, reviews and official and artistic awards of all kinds —
on the yellowed pages of the history of cinema, a history in the making — we had been so
wrong in the past: it was better this time to take precautions — in full view of everyone: who
does not know their authors today! Who is unaware of the Goncourts of cinema! Who knows
films? We know nothing about a film, we can no longer say anything."

Here we find the theme of the forces of cultural advertising altering the fair evaluation of
films, a typical theme of cinephilia thinking of itself as a counter-culture, a recurring theme
under the pen of the Mac-Mahonians (particularly Lourcelles in the last two issues of
Présence du cinéma). Skorecki also joins Mourlet in his contempt for the analysis of a
filmmaker's recurring themes, a poor criterion for assessing his value. At the end of the 70s,
he notes that " the new films of the new filmmakers function with the effect of a signature ".
Even if some, such as Fassbinder or Jacquot, are " worthy of being admired ", such cinema
risks leading to the dead end " of a stylized and unsurprising universe, of a small world with
a signed imitation of life ".

To these newcomers, Lourcelles' former companion opposed " the cinema of the invisible
" of Jacques Tourneur, who had died a year earlier, " the greatest of filmmakers " according
to him. Finally, he concluded his article by praising television, the last territory to explore for
optical gluttons who refuse the ready-to-digest cinema plied by the cultural establishment .
In 1978, for Louis Skorecki, the equivalent of the glorious B series of the 50s was Columbo
and Kung-fu. Although already proposed by Patrick Brion106, this thesis shocked many film
buffs of the great era, first and foremost his editor-in-chief and friend Serge Daney, before
he himself, a few years
, later, wrote a fine eulogy to Columbo in Libération.

This pamphlet, both nostalgic for the cinephilia of before May 68 and provocative in its
celebration of the small screen, attracted the wrath of Skorecki's colleagues. According to
him, Daney had taken almost a year to publish it because of the opposition of Pascal
Bonitzer and Pascal Kané; it was accompanied by a response from the latter that "Against
the New Cinephilia " finally appeared. As much as with Louis Skorecki, Pascal Kané settled
his scores with Michel Mourlet and MacMahonism, thus rekindling a quarrel of almost twenty
years. The editor of Cahiers du cinéma did not
Machine Translated by Google

did not take on a hypothetical right-wing spirit of the MacMahonians but criticized
"On an Ignored Art" for aesthetic or even philosophical reasons. He rejected
fascination as a sterile attitude and a source of hallucinations. For Pascal Kané,
affirming the superiority of Jacques Tourneur over all other filmmakers was a
"particularly extravagant " proposition, unless one " perpetually hallucinates in this
or that detail of staging invisible to the neophyte, the whole "truth" of cinema ". If
it is healthy to mock the mystical posture dear to " terrorist cinephiles ", Kané
exaggerated somewhat by denying any analysis of the staging in Mourlet: " the
"staging" [...] whose usual function of mask and covering in Hollywood operates
through figures as diverse as the temporal ellipse, the first-person narrative, the
mastered control of depth of field, is it never analyzed as such". We find here, by
the way, a theory of Jean-Louis Comolli, editor-in-chief of Cahiers during the
Maoist period, now distant from the magazine: the essential in cinema is what
we do not see, what thwarts the scopic drive.

A definition of the seventh art that is certainly more paradoxical than the
MacMahonian theory but not completely contradictory with it: Jacques Tourneur,
inventor of the bus effect, was he not a master of off-screen?
In any case, rereading the texts written by Michel Mourlet at the end of the 1950s
allows us to realize that, beyond the overplayed exaltation and the polemical
formulas, he knew how to identify the concrete reasons for what fascinated him.
It is easy to contradict Kané with two examples taken from the same article,
29
"Trajectory of Fritz Lang" .
In a first excerpt, Mourlet
analyzes the use of color: " such abstraction experiences color as a hindrance, or
at least as a superfluous element, and tends toward black and white, which
directly reveals the essential without taking the detours—even the shimmering
ones—of concrete realism. Also, the colors of The Tiger and The Tomb are
admirable because far from the shimmer of warm American colors (which suit
more carnal filmmakers, like Losey or Don Weis), they shine with a muted
brilliance, by a refinement of sobriety that does not contradict, but rather supports,
this purely intelligible universe ." In the second, he speaks of the decor: " This
decor, thus assimilating the German experience, if it is not erased (as in Beyond
a Reasonable Doubt in particular) by the same movement of abstraction as the
physical relief of the actors, is established
Machine Translated by Google

in a purely dramatic perspective, charged with an evil power, with anguish (the famous
clocks of the primitive period being the outline and the symbol), massive, opaque
architectures whose nudity accentuates the mystery". Without falling into structuralist
coldness, while preserving the flame of subjectivity which must animate any criticism
worthy of the name, Mourlet, here, " analyses the staging ". As for the direction of actors,
which is undoubtedly the main object of Mourlet's criticisms, it is also, let us not forget, an
integral part of the work of staging. Generally speaking, it must be noted that the intellectual
rigour of the "Boileau of Mac-Mahon" preserved him rather well from the extrapolations and
speculations dear to many of his colleagues.

Going so far as to state that according to him, " MacMahonian cinephilia was never a
critical school ", Pascal Kané also attacked the tastes of MacMahonians. As the twentieth
anniversary of "On an Ignored Art" approached, he of course had every right to recall this
famous phrase: " we can predict without much danger of being contradicted that Welles,
Kazan, Visconti, Antonioni and other current lords will become intolerable

14
in twenty years " . However, when he assimilated the quest for transparency
from the Mac-Mahonians to the celebration of the Hollywood machinery as such, the critic
of the Cahiers pushed bad faith to the point of confusing an Otto Preminger with - may
Patrick Brion forgive me - a Richard Thorpe.

Once again, the conflict between MacMahonism and the Cahiers would have been that
between a marble ideal and the hic et nunc: " for cinephilia to play a role in the history of
cinema, that is to say to become a critical school and a school of directors, it was therefore
necessary for other considerations - concrete, political in the broad sense - to intervene. It
was necessary for cinephilia to be confronted with a present, with a desire for cinema. " Of
course, it was first of all the glorious heritage of the New Wave that was alluded to here.
Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, at least, " [got] to the heart of the matter ." However, if the
movement did not produce any major director (which was not even the opinion of Biette for
whom " one filmmaker, all the same, came out of this historical school: Pierre Rissient "
107), to affirm that " its contemplative will " has " taken away all productivity " from
MacMahonism is to deny not only the theoretical fertility of "On an Ignored Art" but also the
revelations of filmmakers brought about by Présence du cinéma as well as the decisive
character
Machine Translated by Google

of the activism of Pierre Rissient and his cronies on the dissemination of the works
of their favorites.
If Kané's text hits the mark when it points out the limits of mystical-snobbish
cinephilia, the castigation of MacMahonism sometimes has the appearance of a
justification for the extreme politicization of the Cahiers which, a few years earlier,
led them to almost completely neglect cinema: " Skorecki's propositions and
presuppositions go too much in the direction of reproducing this fascination that
cinephiles ultimately did nothing about, before being swept away by a political critique
(because politics did not fail to produce something, it, and in all fields)

».

As if to drive the point home, Pascal Kané made a film five years later in which
one of the protagonists was a MacMahonian who started working for the OAS; which
contributed greatly to the movement's sulphurous reputation... Less derogatory than
the MacMahonians said - or believed - towards a character who ultimately had a
great greatness of soul, Liberty Belle could not, however, compete with the tact of
Wild Roses, a masterpiece made in 1994 on a similar theme by André Téchiné,
another former member of Cahiers.

In the 90s, the spirit of Mac-Mahon blew mainly in two places. First, in 1992,
Jacques Lourcelles published with Robert Laffont the fruit of a titanic work: his
dictionary of cinema. 1500 films, 95% of which were reviewed for the writing of the
book, were listed and criticized. In the preamble, Lourcelles announced the color: "
in an obvious way, the period 1930-1960 will have had a more beautiful part than the
period 1960-1990. In the first, cinema -miraculously- found itself without looking for
itself; in the second, it searches for itself, searches for itself and searches for itself
again ". These terms are almost exactly those of Michel Mourlet interviewed by a
Tunisian newspaper in 1966: " we cannot speak of precise trends in current cinema,
except that it searches for itself and does not find itself; he feels obliged to seek
himself, when he has already found himself: in this constructive path which is that of
Fritz Lang, Preminger, Losey, Raoul Walsh, Vittorio Cottafavi»

108 .
In his dictionary, the last director of Présence du cinéma
did not compromise with his tastes and dislikes: Preminger, Walsh, Mizoguchi and
others like McCarey had pride of place, while Godard's Breathless , Rohmer's Le
rayon vert and Pour une
Machine Translated by Google

Leone's Fistful of Dollars were dispatched in murderous notes that did much for the
misoneistic reputation of a book that was much more balanced and eclectic in its
judgments than has been said: among other figures of so-called "modern" cinema,
Marguerite Duras, Jacques Rozier, Alain Tanner, Gleb Panfilov, David Lynch and
Gueorgui Daniela were defended. But among those who consider the French New
Wave as the alpha and omega of the seventh art, who cares about the films of
Gueorgui Daniela, the Georgian director and author of the most beautiful film
adaptation of Mark Twain (The Lost Boy, 1973)? After his farewell to MacMahonism,
Jacques Lourcelles could finally give free rein to his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock,
devoting to the author of Psycho a maximum number of notices: twenty-four.
Generally speaking, the taste for classic Hollywood was affirmed and widespread:
Howard Hawks was no longer underplayed as he was in the last issue of Présence,
the fantasy genre was explored in depth, the gems of musical comedy were praised
despite their possible unrealism.

In a way, Jacques Lourcelles' Dictionary of Cinema

testifies to a peaceful and broadened MacMahonism.
The clear and concise style, the accuracy of the factual information, an argument
always based on the content of the works and the erudition of a man who never
stopped watching films from all periods and all countries, in addition to reading a lot
(he often quoted Chesterton, Borges and Wilde in Présence du cinéma) and going
to the show a lot (he is a specialist in Labiche) have made Lourcelles' dictionary the
vademecum of all film buffs looking for a sharp and passionate look at the history of
the seventh art. The success of this dictionary, regularly reissued and often cited as
the reference in the field, is a superb revenge for the man who failed the 1959 IDHEC
entrance exam because of a bad mark in "film criticism": the young Raymond
Ravanbaz had the misfortune to denounce Hiroshima mon amour... Louis Skorecki
confided to me that it was Serge Daney's favorite book, even if the latter wrote that
he was bothered by " Lourcelles's contemptuous indifference to his era ."

109
For Michel Delahaye, a fine critic who, thirty years earlier,
.

had not opposed Jacques Rivette's putsch at Cahiers du cinéma, it was also " the
best book on cinema ever made, the equivalent of the Dictionnaire des œuvres de
110
Laffont-Bompiani " the work that had given him back his taste for the seventh art ,

after his
Machine Translated by Google

distance from the environment because of the violence of leftist sectarianism of which he
was the victim at the beginning of the 70s.
Representative of a more recent generation of spectators, the filmmaker and critic Serge
Bozon does not hesitate to define himself as a "neo MacMahonian". Initially drawn to the
New Wave, his tastes were influenced by Lourcelles' dictionary. This does not mean that
this devotee of Rohmer and Oliveira has denied his first loves, but the exciting discovery of
the last Langs, the first Loseys, Lupino, Matarazzo, Tourneur, Dwan and Cottafavi led him
to " be wary of radicalism ". Between 1997 and 2005, with his comrades Frédéric Majour,
Camille Nevers and Axelle Ropert, he worked at La lettre du cinéma, embodying a cinephile
tendency alongside a tendency more interested in video and contemporary art. Whether in
the Lincoln Center magazine Film Comment or in the French magazine So Film, Bozon
wrote several articles on the Mac-Mahon school. His interview with Fernando Ganzo, “ Une
bonne gorgée de bozonade ” for the online magazine Elumiere, also contains penetrating
reflections on Mac-Mahonism, informed by the culture of Bozon, a graduate in logic and
philosophy. Thus, using a categorization inherited from the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Bernard Williams, he notes the Mac-Mahonians’ attachment to a “thick” morality, that is,
a morality expressed in concrete and descriptive terms (courageous, cruel, generous,
traitorous, obsequious, etc.) rather than abstract terms (good, evil, just, unjust, etc.). He
cites as an example Ambre, the eponymous heroine of Preminger’s film, whose behavior,
motivated solely by her love for Bruce Carlton, is indeed beyond (or below) good and evil.
Specifying that the more sophisticated a society becomes, the more it "thinns out" the moral
terms by which it defines itself, Bozon implicitly settles the debate on the political color of
MacMahonism. In this interview, which I recommend reading in its entirety on the website of
the journal where it is made available, he also points out the analogy between Mourlet's
writing and the beauty of certain favorite films of MacMahonians such as The Bengal Tiger :
the tension between the sublime and the ridiculous.

For nearly thirty years, Jacques Lourcelles' Dictionary has certainly been the first culprit
in the posterity of MacMahonism. Another notable example: the filmmaker Nicolas Pariser
who remembers having bought Jacques Lourcelles' Dictionary on the day it came out and
having been
Machine Translated by Google

taken aback when he discovered that a dozen notices were devoted to

films by Allan Dwan, which he did not know: " What is this thing? " he
asked himself. A few years later, the aspiring filmmaker knocked on
Pierre Rissient's door and became his assistant for four years. Haines
by Joseph Losey is now his favorite film.
Moreover, Nicolas Pariser bought Libération " solely for Skorecki's
columns ". In the 90s and 2000s, reading Lourcelles' dictionary often
went hand in hand with Louis Skorecki's daily posts. From 1996 to 2007,
the latter wrote a column every day on a film shown on television. The
breadth of programming, between cable and satellite, allowed him to sail
at will through the history of cinema and offer a very personal view of it.
Singular and even poetic, his texts affirmed a vision of the seventh art
that was all the more melancholic because he quickly decided to no
longer watch films and to base himself solely on memories of his youth
as a film buff. Ford, Walsh, Tourneur, Lang, McCarey were regularly
praised, Skorecki not holding back from returning several times to a
beloved film when it was broadcast several times a week.

This openly subjective writing stimulated the desire of many young

readers ( Libération 's circulation in the 1990s was not comparable to
that of film magazines in the 1960s) to tackle "old films" because it
demonstrated a personal, and therefore living, relationship with
filmmakers of the past, great and less great. Indeed, when it came to
trashing sacred cows - Pialat, Scorsese, Truffaut and even Renoir,
whose anti-Semitic correspondence he liked to recall - Skorecki was
also an expert at it. However, if comrade Lourcelles and his dictionary
were often cited by Skorecki, a free electron such as him cannot be
purely and simply linked to MacMahonism: the praise of filmmakers such
as Paul Newman, Stavros Tornes, Jean-Claude Brisseau or Robert
Frank as well as several TV series (Ally McBeal, New-York Police blues,
Hélène et les garçons...), in the logic of "Against the new cinephilia",
singles out Skoreckian taste. Finally, his time in the Cahiers du cinéma
box in the 60s and 70s obviously implies a real admiration for Jean-Luc
Godard which began in 1964 with the discovery of Bande à part.
Machine Translated by Google

On the other side of the world, the career of Brazilian critic Bruno
Andrade illustrates well the impact that Mac-Mahonism could have on a
film buff in the 2000s. In 2002, Bruno Andrade discovered Le malgré au
occasion de une grande retrospective Jean-Luc Godard en Brésil. First
contact with Mac-Mahonism via Mourlet's epigraph. Two years later, as
a journalist at Contracampo, he discovered issues of Cahiers jaunes in
the magazine's offices . The articles by Michel Mourlet, Jacques Joly
and Michel Mardore particularly pleased him, but Mourlet's stood out in
his eyes for their assertive force and profound coherence.
They seemed to him closer to philosophy than to film criticism.
At the same time, in the library of "La maison de France" in Rio, he
discovered in the chapter "Apologie de Preminger" of the book by
Jacques Lourcelles published by Seghers an equivalent coherence.
One cannot help but note here how the impact of certain cinephile
publications of the 50s and 60s was inversely proportional to that of
their original print run, which was very small. There is no doubt that his
film criticism was a lasting source of France's influence throughout the
world. Discovering the texts of Mourlet, Lourcelles and Marc Bernard,
the young Brazilian was struck by an aesthetic consistency that is for
him the prerogative of very great critics: "it is the overall vision and not
taste that makes the great critic ". It is this importance of the overall
vision in "On an Ignored Person" that convinced him even if, moreover,
Andrade adores Luchino Visconti. He found in Lourcelles's last texts for
Présence du cinéma the same theoretical solidity, this theoretical solidity
which allowed for example the Mac-Mahonians to detect that Cottafavi's
staging had more in common with those of Preminger or Mizoguchi than
with that of any of his contemporary compatriots. According to Bruno
Andrade, only Alexandre Astruc and Jacques Rivette were able to
approach this height of view.
He likes the clarity of the Mac-Mahonians' position. For Bruno, " an
aesthetic theory is not an absolute truth but the definition of a field within
cinema ". According to him, it was a merit of the Mac-Mahonians to
clearly delimit this field and, once this was done, to eventually distance
themselves from it (Guitry's defense, for example). If the Brazilian film
buff was passionate about the Mac-Mahonians, it was because they
were the critics furthest removed from journalism that he could imagine:
they watched the recent Classes tous risques or a film from the 1930s with the
Machine Translated by Google

same approach. Hence, according to Andrade, their profound modernism.

For him, such an aesthetic requirement makes them more akin to Alexandre
Astruc than to André Bazin. The Mac-Mahonians were an avant-garde
because according to Andrade, " finding yourself in the avant-garde is finding
yourself in a minority with the right people ". In 2009, Bruno Andrade founded
Foco with two friends, Felipe Medeiros and Matheus Cartaxo. The objective
was the same as that of the Mac-Mahonians: to brandish in the cinephile
debate names and works that they considered undervalued against a
sociological and politicized tendency of Brazilian criticism that evaded
aesthetic issues and which was then regaining ground. However, those who
have devoted files to John Flynn as well as to Jean-Claude Guiguet do not
claim affiliation with MacMahonism and have also drawn on other critics,
such as the Portuguese João Bénard da Costa. They simply try to talk about
the films in the most direct way possible, without cultural, ideological or
political filters. Like Pierre Rissient when he discovered Les forbans de la
nuit.
This is how contemporary reminiscences of MacMahonism perhaps have
more to do with a certain way of understanding the history of cinema outside
of any ideological conformism, an unwavering aesthetic requirement and the
attachment to a few filmmakers who have become fetishes (if, as Lourcelles
said, the four aces have been integrated by the dominant opinion, referring
to Dwan, Ulmer and Cottafavi remains revealing of a particular cinephilia)
than with absolute fidelity to an aesthetic principle; a principle that it is
moreover relevant to reexamine in the light of the most recent technical
progress in cinema.

Indeed, when, at the turn of the 2000s, the digital camera became
widespread, André Bazin's postulate seemed to be shattered. Of course, this
postulate had already been severely questioned by critics who opposed a
materialist deconstruction to the idealism of the founding father.
Let us quote Gérard Gozlan in Positif in June and July 1962 and, ten years
later, Jean-Louis Comolli in Cahiers du cinéma (his famous series of articles
"Technique and ideology"). But today, is it still possible to consider the
camera as " a means of capturing reality directly, without mediation "?
14
? In a book published in 2014, David
Fincher or the digital hour, Guillaume Orignac describes this mutation of the
seventh art well: " in the time of 35 mm and its baths of
Machine Translated by Google

development, everything was played out during filming, either to validate

or to destabilize a programmed breakdown. Digital technology has
shifted these issues to post-production: this is where images and sounds
now find their graphic balance. »111
However, when asked about this, Michel Mourlet considers that this
development does not fundamentally alter the nature of cinema: " it is
not digital technology in itself that changes the situation, but the use that
is made of it. There are films shot entirely with digital cameras that do
the same job as a traditional camera: direct recording of reality without
any other intervention, then, than editing". I then objected to him that
the reality of filmmaking corresponds less and less to this principle.
Computer-generated images are widespread and no longer confined to
big-budget Hollywood films. Depicting accessories or passers-by is
increasingly done with a computer because it simplifies the logistics at
the time of shooting. Mourlet then answered me by broadening the
notion of editing: " if you insert a real passer-by in a real street, you are
still in the definition of cinema that "captures reality", even if it is broken
down and recomposed (as in editing and editing.

Visual incrustation in no way contradicts the starting point of my thinking,

which is the mechanical and unmediated capture of reality. The passer-
by taken from an image bank, or such a flyover of New York at night,
were photographed . The rest of the operation, acceptable or not, is only
“editing”, spatial editing of elements taken from reality like temporal
editing. Realistic digital film obeys or does not obey MacMahonian
requirements in the same way as film.
However, some digital incrustations do not result from samples taken
from photographic images but from ex-nihilo modeling. Do, for the
theoretician of MacMahonism, the films in which they are placed still
belong to the domain of cinema or are they cartoons (which according
to Mourlet is not cinema)? Here, the debate becomes more complex
and Mourlet, as in "On an Ignored Art" which comes from both theory
and criticism, brings back the subjective factor: " if the identity of the film
becomes more or less bastardized due to the introduction of computer
artifacts, several criteria of appreciation then come into play: the nature
of the incrustations (photographic or graphic), their proportion in the
whole, their degree of illusionism, finally the feeling
Machine Translated by Google

intimate of the spectator, on which no reasoning has any hold. For my part, I would say that
if the illusion of reality is perfect – which cannot be the case with purely imaginary objects
or beings – I would see no obstacle to the reception of the film as a cinema film. But will it
be perfect? Artificial diamonds are currently being manufactured that imitate real ones to
the point of being mistaken, except for authentic jewelers. They, it seems, do not find certain
reflections, certain transparencies, what do I know… invisible to ordinary mortals.

Indeed, when visual incrustations are used not to represent monsters but to enrich the
realism of the image, how can the MacMahonian spectator manage to distinguish the
artifice from the “objective reality” whose capture defines the singularity, radical and new,
of the seventh art? A vast question that questions in depth not only the nature of
cinematography but also the relationship of each and every person to reality in the digital
age. A vast question that goes far beyond the scope of this book.
Machine Translated by Google

Appendix: Summary of numbers

Presence of cinema

1. The new French cinema (June 1959) 2-3. Situation of the western (July-
September 1959) 4-5. The cinema of the black jackets (April 1960) 6- 7.
Sadism and libertinism (December 1960) 8. The new actresses of French
cinema (March 1961) Mac-Mahonian period 9. Vittorio
Cottafavi (December 1961)
10. Future of French Cinema (January 1962) 11. Otto Preminger (February
1962)
12. Claude Sautet – Don Weis (March-April 1962) 13. Raoul Walsh (May
1962)
14. French and American Screenwriters (June 1962) 15-16. Blake Edwards
(September-October 1962) 17. Riccardo Freda – The Actors (Spring 1963)
18. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (November 1963) 19. Samuel Fuller (December
1963 - January 1964) 20. Joseph Losey – Samuel Fuller (March - April
1964) 21. John Ford (March 1965)
22-23. Allan Dwan – Jacques Tourneur (Autumn 1966) 24-25. Cecil B.
DeMille (Fall 1967)
Machine Translated by Google

Bibliography
Books:

On an ignored art: staging as language, Michel Mourlet,

Ramsay pocket cinema, 2008

The Dazzling Screen: Journeys in Cinephilia 1958-2010, Michel Mourlet,

PUF, 2010

A life in freedom, Michel Mourlet, Séguier, 2016

Survivor of the Golden Age, Michel Mourlet, Editions de Paris-Max Chaleil, 2021

In the fourth row seat, Michel Mourlet, France Univers, 2021

Cecil B. DeMille, Michel Mourlet, Seghers, 1968

Television or the Myth of Argus, Michel Mourlet, France Univers, 2001 Joseph

Losey, Pierre Rissient, Éditions Universitaires, 1965

Mister Everywhere, Pierre Rissient and Samuel Blumenfeld, Actes Sud, 2016
Les Cahiers du cinéma, History of a magazine, volume 1: Attacking the cinema,
1951-1959, Antoine de Baecque, Cinema Notebooks, 1991
The Cinema Notebooks, History of a magazine, volume 2: Cinema, twists and turns,
1959-1981, Antoine de Baecque, Cinema Notebooks, 1991

Cinephilia - Invention of a gaze, history of a culture. 1944-1968, Antoine de Baecque,

Fayard, 2004

Dictionary of cinema, volume 3: films, Jacques Lourcelles, Robert

Laffont, 1999

Otto Preminger, Jacques Lourcelles, Seghers, 1965

Anthology of cinema 70: McCarey, Jacques Lourcelles, L'Avant-Scène cinema, 1972

Raoul Walsh, Michel Marmin, Seghers, 1970

Machine Translated by Google

Raoul Walsh or the saga of the lost continent, Michael Henry Wilson, Cinémathèque
française, 2001 The cinema man,

Jean Douchet and Joël Magny, Écriture, 2014 Cinema in sharing,

Michel Ciment and NT Binh, Rivages, 2014 The book of Losey, Michel

Ciment, éditions Stock, 1979

Selected Maids, Luc Moullet, Capricci, 2009

Cinema in the Blood, Bertrand Tavernier and Noël Simsolo, Writing, 2011

The Republic Does Not Need Scientists, Michel Marmin and Ludovic
Maubreuil, Pierre-Guillaume De Roux, 2017

Matulu: Rebel Journal (1971-1974), anthology established by François

Kasbi,

Paris Editions-Max Chaleil, 2017

What is cinema, André Bazin, Le Cerf, 1999

Memoirs, Jean-Charles Tacchella, Séguier, 2017

David Fincher or the digital hour, Guillaume Orignac, Capricci, 2014 Faced with the

resurgence of handbag thefts, Serge Daney, P.OL, 1991 Perseverance, Serge

Daney, POL, 1994

Cinema according to François Truffaut, François Truffaut and Anne Gillain,

Flammarion, 1992

50 years of American cinema, Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier,

Omnibus, 1995

Movie theaters: Issues, challenges and perspectives (text by Marc

Cherry on the

Mac-Mahon), Laurent Creton, Kira Kitsopanidou, Armand Colin, 2013

Cinema and staging, 2nd edition, Jacques Aumont, Armand Colin, 2010 In search of
French

cinema, written directly in French by Robert J. Berg, professor at American universities,

preface by Michel Mourlet.
Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2011
Machine Translated by Google

The Anti-Bazin, Gérard Gozlan, The Water's Edge, 2013

Fausto, Vania, Kaspar and Veronica. Cinematic Chronicles (1972-1976),

Michel Marmin, Alfred Eibel editor, 1977

Spotlight on criticism, Jean-François Houben, Le Cerf, 1999

Hollywood Exiles in Europe : The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture,
Rebecca

Prime, Rutgers University Press, 2014

Cinema versus spectacle, Jean-Louis Comolli, Verdier, 2009

The Cinémathèque, inventory and legends, Pierre Barbin, Vuibert, 2005 Éric

Rohmer: The French Paradise (with an interview with Michel Mourlet), under the direction
of Hugues Moreau, Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2017

Poetics of authors, Jean-Claude Biette, Cahiers du cinéma, 1988

Allan Dwan, the legend of the man of a thousand films, under the direction of
Giorgio

Gosetti, Cahiers du cinéma/Locarno International Film Festival, 2002 Cinematographic

Chronicles, Bernard de Fallois, Ed. De Fallois, 2019 In the Time of the New Wave,

Philippe d'Hugues, Auda Isarn, 2016 The Cinema of Claude Zidi: Crazy, Insolent

and Facetious, Thibault Decoster, LettMotif, 2019

Newspapers, magazines, sites, blogs:

First of all, of course, the collections of Cahiers du cinéma ,

Presence of cinema and, to a lesser extent, of Positif, L'Écran, Écran, Cinéma (+ vintage)
and the Brazilian online magazine Foco

Then two reference documentary sites:

Calindex : https://calindex.eu

Cine-resources: http://www.cineressources.net
Machine Translated by Google

And, without claiming to be exhaustive:

“Cinema and its criticism”, Raymond Bellour, Esprit, March 1963
"Love of American Cinema", under the direction of Francis Bordat,
CinemAction/Corlet/Télérama, 1990

“The Mac-Mahonians” file, Apaches n°1, June 2020

"On the Dwan side", Louis Skorecki, Libération, 02/08/2002

“In good company”, Michel Mourlet, Eléments n°170, February-March 2018

"On Joseph Losey (extracts from Critical Journal) ", Michel Mourlet, La Furia
Umana, http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/29-archive/lfu-17/8- michel-mourlet-
sur-joseph-losey
Chronicles of Serge Bozon in So Film n°43, 44
“The Mac-Mahon is 60 years old: Hollywood-sur-Seine”, Alain Riou, Le Nouvel
Observer No. 1769, 1998

“The legend of Mac-Mahon”, Sophie Grassin, L'express n° 2469, 1998

“Too early too late”, Serge Daney, Trafic n°3, summer 1992
“Poetics of authors”, Jean-Claude Biette, Trafic n°85, Spring 2013
« Michel Mourlet’s On aMisunderstood Art (1959) : Plunging Back into the Screen »,
Pr Tom Gunning, Critical Inquiry, Spring 2022, Volume 48 Number 3, University of
Chicago Press, 2022.
“Eclipses: filming with the projector. Interview with Serge Bozon”, Fernando Ganzo,
Lumière, http://www.elumiere.net/numero5/bozon.php "1960: seen from Spain,
the New Wave is fascist, or the New Wave according to Jean Parvulesco", Hélène
Liogier, 1895, cinema history review, n°26, 1998

"Run, comrade... The session has begun, film buffs, film enthusiasts and film critics
in the post-war period", Laurent Chollet, L'Homme & la Société 2001/4, n° 142

« The artist and the macmahon factor », Zafar Masud, 2012, Senses of cinema,
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/the-artist-
Machine Translated by Google

and-the-macmahon-factor/

“Small, incomplete bibliography from Alfred Eibel Editions”, The Maritime Prefect,

L'Alamblog, http://www.alamblog.com/index.php?post/Bibliographie-des- editions-alfred-

eibel

“Cinephiles 3 ½”, Louis Skorecki (comments), club skorecki, http://skorecki.blogspot.com/

2007/07/cinphiles-3-12.html

Academic work:

What is MacMahonism? , Geneviève Puertas, thesis available

in the archives of the Michelet Institute (UER cinema and audiovisual of Paris I), 1983

Cinephilia in Paris 1954-1966, 3rd cycle thesis, Geneviève Puertas, id., 1984

The critical reception of Raoul Walsh in France, Robin Hirsch under the direction of Pierre-
Olivier Toulza, Université Paris-Diderot, 2013

Singularities of the review Presence of cinema within the critical context of the 1950s and
1960s, Justine Alleron under the direction of Laurent Le
Forestier, Master Cinema and Audiovisual History and Aesthetics of Cinema,
Rennes 2 University – Haute Bretagne UFR Arts, Letters, Communication, 2016-2018
Machine Translated by Google

Video and audio recordings

Journey through French cinema Episode 8: My 60s, Bertrand

Tavernier, 2017

The Square of Fortune, Pascale Bodet and Emmanuel Lefauvre, 2007

Cinephiles of our time, Laurent Chollet, 2012

Serge Daney, itinerary of a cinema son, Dominique Rabourdin, Pierre-André
Boutang & Régis Debray, 1992
Jacques Rivette, the watchman, Filmmakers of our time collection, Claire
Denis and Serge Daney, 1990
Critical cinema, Philippe Collin, broadcast of January 10, 1969

Private screening, France Culture, 02/04/2011 (speakers: Michel

Cement and Michel Mourlet) Free Cinema Journal, Radio Courtoisie,
01/12/2005 (intervenants : Jean-Paul Török, Philippe d'Hugues, Michel
Mourlet, Christian Durante, Alfred Eibel) [Anatomy of criticism] About a
until ignored (Michel Mourlet), 06/22/2021,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuMzfhCAEzA

Session of the cultural history of cinema seminar of March 30, 2017,

Christophe Gauthier, listenable https://archive.org/details/ on
Gauthier30mars2017Conf
Machine Translated by Google

Onomastic index
Agde, Paul, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Agel, Henri, ÿ, ÿ
Ajame, Pierre, ÿ
Aldrich, Robert, ÿ
Allary, Georges, ÿ
Allen, Woody, ÿ
Anderson, Lindsay, ÿ, ÿ
Andrade, Bruno, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Antonioni, Michelangelo, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Archambault, Alain, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Aristotle, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Arland, Marcel, ÿ
Arnheim, Rudolf, ÿ, ÿ
Astruc, Alexandre, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Aumont, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Aurenche, Jean, ÿ
Autant-Lara, Claude, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Bach, Jean-Sébastien, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Baecque, Antoine de, ÿ, ÿ
Barbin, Pierre, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Bardeche, Maurice, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Barkan, Raymond, ÿ, ÿ
The child, Boris, ÿ
Barthes, Roland, ÿ
Bazin, André, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ
Beauregard, Georges de, ÿ
Beethoven, Ludwig van, ÿ
Beethoven, Ludwig Van, ÿ
Belasz, Bela, ÿ
Belmondo, Jean-Paul, ÿ
Benayoun, Robert, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Benedek, Laszlo, ÿ
Benoist, Alain de, ÿ, ÿ
Bergman, Ingmar, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Bergman, Ingrid, ÿ
Berkeley, Busby, ÿ
Bernard, Marc, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Berry, John, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Beylie, Claude, ÿ, ÿ
Bickerton, Emily, ÿ
Biette, Jean-Claude, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Bitsch, Charles, ÿ
Bizet, Georges, ÿ
Blier, Bertrand, ÿ, ÿ
Blondin, Antoine, ÿ
Blum, Leon, ÿ
Blumenfeld, Samuel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Boetticher, Budd, ÿ, ÿ
Bogarde, Dirk, ÿ
Bogeaus, Benedict, ÿ, ÿ
Boisset, Yves, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Bonitzer, Pascal, ÿ
Borges, Jorge Luis, ÿ
Bory, Jean-Louis, ÿ
Borzage, Frank, ÿ
Bost, Pierre, ÿ
Boulez, Pierre, ÿ
Bourgine, Raymond, ÿ
Bouvard, Philippe, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Bozon, Serge, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Brando, Marlon, ÿ
Brasillach, Robert, ÿ, ÿ
Brewer, Claude, ÿ
Brecht, Bertolt, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Bresson, Robert, ÿ, ÿ
Brion, Patrick, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Brisseau, Jean-Claude, ÿ
Broca, Philippe de, ÿ, ÿ
Brocka, Lino, ÿ
Brooks, Richard, ÿ
Brownlow, Kevin, ÿ, ÿ
Büchner, Georg, ÿ
Bunuel, Luis, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Byrnes, James, ÿ
Calderon, Pedro, ÿ
Callegari, Gian Paolo, ÿ
Bell Tower, Easter Feast, ÿ
Campion, Jane, ÿ
Capra, Frank, ÿ, ÿ
Carne, Marcel, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Cartaxo, Matheus, ÿ
Cassavetes, John, ÿ
Causse, Jean-Max, ÿ
Caussimon, Jean-Roger, ÿ, ÿ
Cerisuelo, Marc, ÿ, ÿ
Chabrol, Claude, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Chaplin, Charles, ÿ
Charisse, Cyd, ÿ
Chase, James Hardley, ÿ
Channel, Pierre, ÿ
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, ÿ
Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, ÿ
Cement, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Clair, Rene, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Clement, Rene, ÿ
Clifton, Elmer, ÿ
Clouzot, Henri-Georges, ÿ
Cocteau, Jean, ÿ
Shots, Henri, ÿ
Comencini, Luigi, ÿ, ÿ
Comolli, Jean Louis, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Cooper, Gary, ÿ
Costa, João Bénard da, ÿ
Cottafavi, Vittorio, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Cottrell, Pierre, ÿ
Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, ÿ
Sugar, George, ÿ
Curtelin, Jean, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ d'Hugues, Philippe,
ÿ, ÿ
Daney, Serge, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ
Daniela, Georgi, ÿ
Daquin, Louis, ÿ
Give you, Bella, ÿ
Dassin, Jules, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Daves, Delmer, ÿ, ÿ
De Sica, Vittorio, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
De Sica, Victor, ÿ
De Toth, André, ÿ, ÿ
Dean, James, ÿ
Delahaye, Michel, ÿ, ÿ
Delluc, Louis, ÿ, ÿ
Delon, Alain, ÿ
DeMille, Cecil Blount, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Demonsablon, Philippe, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Denis, Claire, ÿ
Deon, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Dispatch, Claude, ÿ, ÿ
Deray, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ
Deville, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Dietrich, Marlene, ÿ
Domarchi, Jean, ÿ
Donen, Stanley, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Funny-Valcroze, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ
Dorleac, Françoise, ÿ
Dort, Bernard, ÿ
Douchet, Jean, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Douglas, Gordon, ÿ
Dreyer, Carl Theodor, ÿ, ÿ
Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, ÿ, ÿ
During, Christian, ÿ
Duras, Marguerite, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Duvivier, Julien, ÿ
Dwan, Allan, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ
Eastwood, Clint, ÿ
Edwards, Blake, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Eibel, Alfred, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Eichorn, Franz, ÿ
Eisenschitz, Bernard, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich,ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Epstein, Jean, ÿ
Etaix, Pierre, ÿ, ÿ
Fabre, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Fairbanks, Douglas, ÿ, ÿ
Fallois, Bernard de, ÿ, ÿ
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, ÿ
Fellini, Federico, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Fenelon, ÿ
Ferdinand, Roger, ÿ
Ferrari, Alain, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Feuillade, Louis, ÿ
Fleischer, Richard, ÿ
Flynn, Errol, ÿ
Flynn, John, ÿ
Fonda, Henry, ÿ, ÿ
Ford, John, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Fraigneau, André, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Franju, Georges, ÿ
Frank, Robert, ÿ
Frankenheimer, John, ÿ
Freda, Riccardo, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Freed,
Arthur, ÿ Freud,
Sigmund, ÿ Fuller,
Samuel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Gable, Clark, ÿ Gance,
Abel, ÿ Ganzo,
Fernando, ÿ
Gardner, Ava, ÿ
Garfein, Jack, ÿ
Giovanni, José,
ÿ, ÿ Girardot, Annie, ÿ
Giscard d'Estaing,
Valéry, ÿ Godard, Jean-Luc,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Goimard, Jacques, ÿ Gold, Lee, ÿ
Gorin, Jean-Pierre, ÿ
Gozlan,
Gérard, ÿ, ÿ Grant,
Cary, ÿ Grémillon,
Jean, ÿ Gréville,
Edmond T., ÿ, ÿ
Griffith, David Wark, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Guégan, Gérard, ÿ, ÿ Guiguet,
Jean-Claude, ÿ Guilmain,
Claudine, ÿ Guimard,
Paul, ÿ Guinle, Pierre,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Guitry, Sacha, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Hait-Hin,
sisters, ÿ Halévy, Ludovic, ÿ Hanin,
Roger, ÿ Hansel,
Frank, ÿ Harbou,
Thea von, ÿ Hart,
William, ÿ Hawks,
Howard, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Hayworth, Rita, ÿ Heisler, Stuart, ÿ Hellman, Monte, ÿ Heraclitus, ÿ
Herpe, Noel, ÿ
Herzog, Werner, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Heston, Charlton, ÿ
Hitchcock, Alfred, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ Hoveyda, Fereydoun, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Howald, Patrice, ÿ Hu, King, ÿ Hugo,
Victor, ÿ Hugues,
Philippe d', ÿ
Huillet, Danièle,
ÿ Il-Sung, Kim, Beno, ÿ
Jac, ÿ ÿ Jancso,
Miklos, ÿ Jarrico,
Paul, ÿ, ÿ Joly, Jacques,
ÿ Kafka, Franz, ÿ
Kané, Pascal, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ Kaplan, Nelly,
ÿ, ÿ Karina, Anna,
Pierz, ÿ Karezan, ÿ Elia, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ Keaton, Buster, ÿ
Keigel, Léonard,
ÿ Kelly, Gene, ÿ
Kiarostami, Abbas, ÿ King,
Henry, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Klee,
Paul, ÿ Kléeff, Alex,
ÿ Menmenti, ÿ ÿ
Klémentieff, Pom, ÿ
Klossowski, Pierre, ÿ
Koulechov,
Lev, ÿ Kubrick, Stanley, ÿ
Kurosawa, Akira, ÿ
Kyrou, Ado, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
L'Herbier, Marcel , ÿ
La Cava, ÿ Gregory
Laage, Barbara, ÿ
Labarthe, André S., ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ Labiche, Eugène, ÿ
Lamarr, Hedy, ÿ
Landry, Freddy, ÿ
Lang, Fritz, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ,

ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Langlois, Henri, ÿ
Laurel et Hardy, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Laurent, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Leenhardt, Roger, ÿ, ÿ
Legrand, Gérard, ÿ
Lelouch, Claude, ÿ, ÿ
Leone, Sergio, ÿ, ÿ
Lewis, Jerry, ÿ
Lewis, Joseph, H.
Reminier , Pierre, Herre, ÿ ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ The Duke, Joseph
Marie, ÿ Losey, Joseph, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Lourcelles, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,

ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Lubitsch, Ernst, ÿ, ÿ
Ludwig, Edward, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Lupino, Ida, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Lynch, David, ÿ
Mac-Mahon Distribution, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Mailer, Norman, ÿ
Mainwaring, Daniel, ÿ
Major, Frederic, ÿ
Makowski, Claude, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Malet, Léo, ÿ
Mallarmé, Stéphane, ÿ, ÿ
Headline, Jean-Patrick, ÿ
Mankiewicz, Joseph Leo, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Mann, Anthony, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Marcabru, Pierre, ÿ
Marcorelles, Louis, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Mardore, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Marker, Chris, ÿ
Marmin, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ
Martin, Yves, ÿ, ÿ
Martinand, Bernard, ÿ
Martinelli, Elsa, ÿ
Martinet, Jean-Pierre, ÿ, ÿ
Marx, Brothers, ÿ
Marx, Karl, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Matarazzo, Raphael, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
McCarey, Leo, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
McCarthy, Joseph, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Medeiros, Philip, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Meilhac, Henri, ÿ
Melville, Jean-Pierre, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Milton, John, ÿ
Minard, Michel, ÿ, ÿ
Minnelli, Vincente, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Mitry, Jean, ÿ
Mizoguchi, Kenji, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Mizrahi, Simon, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Mocky, Jean-Pierre, ÿ
Monicelli, Mario, ÿ
Monroe, Marilyn, ÿ
Moreau, Jeanne, ÿ, ÿ
Morin, Edgar, ÿ, ÿ
Moullet, Luc, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ

Mourlet, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,

ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,

ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,

ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Mulligan, Robert, ÿ
Munk, Andrew, ÿ
Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe alias, ÿ, ÿ
Narboni, Jean, ÿ
Nazzari, Amadeo, ÿ
Nelson, Ralph, ÿ
Nevers, Camille, ÿ
Newman, Paul, ÿ
Nichols, Dudley, ÿ, ÿ
Nietzsche, Friedrich, ÿ, ÿ
Nimier, Roger, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Oates, Warren, ÿ
Ophuls, Max, ÿ
Orignac, Guillaume, ÿ, ÿ
Ozu, Yasujiro, ÿ, ÿ
Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, ÿ
Pagnol, Marcel, ÿ, ÿ
For, Daniel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Panfilov, Gleb, ÿ
Pariser, Nicolas, ÿ, ÿ
Parsy, Michel, ÿ, ÿ
Parvulesco, Jean, ÿ, ÿ
Pascal, Gisele, ÿ
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Paulhan, Jean, ÿ, ÿ
Pauvert, Jean-Jacques, ÿ
Peckinpah, Sam, ÿ, ÿ
Penn, Arthur, ÿ
Dogs, Georges, ÿ
Person, Fernando, ÿ
Philipe, Gerard, ÿ
Philippe, Claude-Jean, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Pialat, Maurice, ÿ, ÿ
Pierre, Sylvie, ÿ
Plato, ÿ
Polanski, Roman, ÿ
Pollet, Jean-Daniel, ÿ
Poudovkine, Vsevolod, ÿ
Preminger, Otto, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Presle, Micheline, ÿ
Psichari, Ernest, ÿ
Puccini, Giacomo, ÿ
Quine, Richard, ÿ
Racine, Jean, ÿ, ÿ
Rappeneau, Jean-Paul, ÿ
Ray, Nicholas, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Rebatet alias François Vinneuil, Lucien, ÿ
Redgrave, Michael, ÿ
Renoir, Jean, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Resnais, Alain, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Richard, Georges, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
I laughed, Dino, ÿ, ÿ
Rissient, Pierre, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,

ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Shore, Emmanuelle, ÿ
Rivette, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Robinson, David, ÿ
Rocha, Glauber, ÿ, ÿ
Rodon, Jean-Marie, ÿ
Rogers, Will, ÿ
Rohmer, Eric, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ

Rollin, Dominique, ÿ
Ropert, Axelle, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Rosetti, Antonio, ÿ
Rossellini, Roberto, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Rozier, Jacques, ÿ
Ryan, Robert, ÿ
Get, Jacques, ÿ
Sanders, George, ÿ
Sanson, Yvonne, ÿ
Sautet, Claude, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Schaffner, Franklin, ÿ
Schoenberg, Arnold, ÿ
Schoendoerffer, Pierre, ÿ
Schwarz, Hanns, ÿ
Scola, Ettore, ÿ
Scorsese, Martin, ÿ
Seguin, Louis, ÿ
Serguine, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Servants, Albert, ÿ
Severac, Jacques, ÿ
Shakespeare, William, ÿ
Simon, Michel, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Circus, Douglas, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Skolimowski, Jerzy, ÿ
Skorecki, Louis, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Sologne, Madeleine, ÿ
Stendhal, ÿ
Sternberg, Josef von, ÿ, ÿ
Stevens, Leslie, ÿ
Stewart, Alexandra, ÿ
Stewart, James, ÿ
Stone, Sharon, ÿ
Straub, Jean-Marie, ÿ
Sturges, Preston, ÿ, ÿ
Syberberg, Hans-Jurgen, ÿ
Tailor, Roger, ÿ
Tanner, Alain, ÿ, ÿ
Tarkovsky, Andrei, ÿ
Tashlin, Frank, ÿ
Tavernier, Bertrand, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Téchiné, André, ÿ
Tesson, Charles, ÿ
Thomas, Pascal, ÿ
Thorpe, Richard, ÿ
Tierney, Gene, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Tornes, Stavros, ÿ
Toubiana, Serge, ÿ
Turner, Jacques, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ,
ÿ

Turner, Maurice, ÿ
Troell, Jan, ÿ
Truffaut, François, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ
Twain, Mark, ÿ, ÿ
Ulmer, Edgar, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Vailland, Roger, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Valery, Paul, ÿ
Old, Paul, ÿ, ÿ
Vedres, Nicole, ÿ
Venture, Lino, ÿ
Verneuil, Louis, ÿ
Vidor, King, ÿ
Villion, Emile, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci, ÿ
Win, Vega, ÿ
Visconti, Luchino, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ
Wagner, Jean, ÿ
Walsh, Raoul, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ,
ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ

Warhol, Andy, ÿ, ÿ
Wayne, John, ÿ, ÿ
Webb, Robert D., ÿ
Weis, Don, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Welles,
Orson, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ, ÿ , ÿ, ÿ, ÿ Wellman, William, ÿ
Wenders, Wim, ÿ
Widmark, Richard,
ÿ Wilde, Oscar, ÿ
Wilder, Billy, ÿ
Williams,
Bernard, ÿ Wilson,
Michael Henry, ÿ
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ÿ
Wyler, William, ÿ
Young, Collier, ÿ
Zavattini, Cesare, ÿ
Zidi, Claude, ÿ, ÿ
Machine Translated by Google

Endnotes
1
Perseverance, Serge Daney, POL, 1994
2
Serge Daney, itinerary of a cinema son, Dominique Rabourdin, Pierre-
André Boutang & Régis Debray, 1992
3
The Cinematheque, inventory and legends, Pierre Barbin, Vuibert, 2005
4
“Ontology of the photographic image” (André Bazin) in The problems
painting, under the direction of Gaston Diehl, 1945
5
Mister Everywhere, Pierre Rissient and Samuel Blumenfeld, Actes Sud,
2016
6
A life in freedom, Michel Mourlet, Séguier, 2016
7
Alfred Eibel's words to the author
8
“The splendor of the false” (Luc Moullet) in Cahiers du cinéma n°109,
July 1960
9
“Sun Spots” (Fereydoun Hoveyda) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 110, August 1960
10
“A chapel that inhabits the bell clapper of spoken criticism”
(Philippe Bouvard) in Le Figaro, 10/04/1962
11
The Cross, 09/20/1958
12
"On adventure in cinema: outline of a definition" (Michel
Mourlet) in Screen No. 1, January 1958
13
“Cinema versus novel” (Michel Mourlet) in Revue des lettres
Moderns No. 36-38, Summer 1958
14
“On an ignored art” (Michel Mourlet) in Cahiers du cinéma n°98, August
1959
Machine Translated by Google

15
"The Misfortunes of Orpheus" (Jacques Rivette) in La Gazette du cinéma
No. 5, November 1950
16
"In Search of Lost Time" (André Bazin) in L'écran français,
30/09/1947
17
Vittorio de Sica, Pierre Leprohon, Seghers, 1966
18
The Cinema Man, Jean Douchet and Joël Magny, Writing, 2014
19
Cinema and directing, 2nd edition, Jacques Aumont, Armand
Colin, 2010
20
The dazzling screen: journeys in cinephilia 1958-2010, Michel Mourlet,
PUF, 2013
21
Poetics of authors, Jean-Claude Biette, Cahiers du cinéma, 1988
22
for Radio-Cinema-Television (n°475)
23
CinémAction, n°96, first quarter 2000
24
Interview with Justine Alleron on 10/10/2016 in Survivor of the Golden Age,
Michel Mourlet, Paris-Max Chaleil Editions, 2021
25
Arts n° 559, 14-20 mars 1956
26
Cinema Notebooks No. 36, June 1954
27
Email from Michel Mourlet to the author
28
Cinema Notebooks No. 97, July 1959
29
“Fritz Lang’s trajectory” (Michel Mourlet) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 99, September 1959
30
“The Fabled Indies” (Fereydoun Hoveyda) in Cahiers du cinéma n°99,
September 1959
31
"Love of the classics" (Philippe Demonsablon) in Cahiers du
cinema n°56, February 1956
32
“Little diary” (Philippe Demonsablon) in Cahiers du cinéma n°73,
July 1957
Machine Translated by Google

33
Spotlight on criticism, Jean-François Houben, Le Cerf, 1999
34
"The Myth of Aristarchus" (Michel Mourlet) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 103, January 1960
35
"The film writer in search of his paradox" (Luc Moullet) in
Cinema Notebooks No. 103, January 1960
36
"The Criticism of Critics" (Henri Agel) in La revue française,
December 1961
37
“Spotlight on criticism” (Raymond Barkan) in Cinéma 60 n°45,
April 1960
38
“Apology for violence” (Michel Mourlet) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 107, May 1960
39
« The French Line » (Richard Roud) in Sight and sound, automne 1960
40
“Ottobiography” (Luc Moullet) in Cahiers du cinéma n°101, November
1959
41
"Is pure cinema just a myth?" (Luc Moullet) in Signes des
time, november 1959
42
"The spirit of adventure" (Jean-Louis Comolli) in Cahiers du cinéma
n°154, avril 1964
43
“Readers’ letters” (Jacques Goimard) in Cahiers du cinéma n°107,
May 1960

44
Cinema Notebooks No. 110, August 1960
45
Cinema Notebooks No. 102, December 1960
46
Literary News, 05/27/1965
47
Losey's book, Michel Ciment, Stock editions, 1979
48
“Beauty of knowledge” (Michel Mourlet) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 111, September 1960
49
“Note on The Lawless” (Marc Bernard) in Cahiers du cinéma n°111,
September 1960
Machine Translated by Google

50
“Black masses for dark rooms” (Michel Mardore) in Cinéma 62,
January 1962
51
The Frank or Serious and Jest, 11/09/1806, quoted by Romain
Rolland in The great creative eras of Beethoven, Albin Michel,
1967
52
“Knowledge of Joseph Losey” (Pierre Rissient) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 111, September 1960
53
“Interview with Paul Vecchiali”, Paul Vecchiali and Arnaud Hallet,
Critikat https://www.critikat.com/panorama/entretien/paul-vecchiali/

54
Philippe de Comes, The French Nation, 12/05/1065
55 Cinema Notebooks No. 21
56 Cinema Notebooks No. 32
57 Cinema Notebooks No. 46
58
Positive #21
59
« A controversy about the little soldier -II » (Jean Parvulsco)
Primer Plano n°1045, 23/10/1960, cited by Hélène Liogier in “1960:
From a Spanish perspective, the New Wave is fascist, or the New Wave according to
Jean Parvulesco », 1895, cinema history review, n°26, 1998
60
Defense of the West, New Series No. 21, March-April 1962
61
Jacques Rivette, the watchman, Filmmakers of our time collection , Claire
Denis and Serge Daney, 1990
62
“Reviewing Verdoux” (Jacques Rivette) in Cahiers du cinéma n°146, August
1963
63 Email from Michel Mourlet to the author
64
published in Accent grave n°6, June 1963
65
published in La revue littéraire n°9, December 2004
66
published in La revue littéraire n°11, February 2005
67
Review of Spies (Michel Mourlet) in L'écran n°1, January 1958
Machine Translated by Google

68 in Presence of Cinema No. 14

69
"On Hollywood" (Michel Mourlet) in Defense of the West Nelle
series No. 19, January 1962

70 Cinematographic studies n°3-4, summer 1960

71
“Reflections on the vamp” (Michel Mourlet) in L'écran n°2,
February 1958

72
like François Truffaut when he praised Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
by Jacques Becker in issue 44 of Cahiers du cinéma
73
“Allan Dwan” (Jacques Lourcelles) Presence of cinema n°22/23,
fall 1966

74
“A virile lucidity” (Michel Mourlet) in Présence du cinéma n°13, May
1962

75
Raoul Walsh or the saga of the lost continent, Michael Henry Wilson,
French Cinematheque, 2001
76
"Editorial-Positive?" (Gérard Guégan and Jean-Pierre Léonardini) in
Counter-shot No. 5, April 1963
77
“Cinema and its criticism” (Raymond Bellour) in Esprit, March 1963
78
“A review: Presence of cinema” in Feuille d'Avis de Neuchâtel, 13
July 1962
79
Example: “The essential” Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du cinéma n°32,
February 1954

80
Otto Preminger, Jacques Lourcelles, Seghers, 1965
81
Sharing cinema, Michel Ciment and NT Binh, Rivages, 2014
82
“Presentation of Blake Edwards” (Pierre Rissient) in Présence du
cinema n°15-16, September 1962
83
Memoirs that are nonetheless fascinating: Curtain at nine o'clock,
Editions of the Two Shores, 1945
Machine Translated by Google

84
"What is a scenario" (Michel Mourlet) in Defense of the West
New series No. 23, June 1962
85
Cinema in the blood, Bertrand Tavernier and Noël Simsolo, Writing,
2013
86
“London Ticket” (Michel Mourlet) in Cahiers du cinéma n°102,
December 1959
87
« The artist and the macmamahon factor », Senses of cinema, Zafar
Masud, 2012, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/the-artist-and-the-
macmahon-factor/
88
"Importance of Private Property" (Marc Bernard) in Présence du
cinema n°12, march 1962
89
“If the mountain does not come to you…” (Fereydoun Hoveyda), Cahiers du
cinema n°109, august 1960
90
No. 19 from December 1963-January 1964 and No. 20 from March-April 1964
91
“Theme of the traitor and the hero” (Jacques Lourcelles) in Présence du
cinema n°20, march-april 1964
92
Cinema versus spectacle, Jean-Louis Comolli, Editions Verdier, 2009
93
Cinema according to François Truffaut, François Truffaut and Anne Gillain,
Flammarion, 1992
94
“On the Dwan side” (Louis Skorecki), Libération, 02/08/2002
95
Review of Marriage is for Tomorrow (Roger Tailleur), Positif n°21,
February 1957
96
Review of The Wrestler and the Clown (Jean-Luc Godard), Cahiers du cinéma
n°94, avril 1959
97
Examples: “Notes on the eroticism of dance films” (Ado Kyrou) and “
The work of Vincente Minnelli" (Etienne Chaumeton) in Positif n°12,
December 1954
98
“Genius of Howard Hawks” (Jacques Rivette) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 23, May 1953
Machine Translated by Google

99
“Hawks the classic” (Michel Mourlet) in Valeurs actuelles, January 16
1978
100
editorial by Michel Mourlet, Matulu n°1
101
“Eclipses: filming with the projector. Interview with Serge Bozon”,
102
Fernando Ganzo, Lumière, http://www.elumiere.net/numero5/bozon.php review of
Children in the Cupboard (Pascal Bonitzer) in Cahiers du cinéma
No. 281, October 1977
103
Cinema Notebooks No. 297, February 1979
104
Cinema Notebooks No. 290/291, July-August 1978
105 Cinema Notebooks No. 293

106 On the microphone of France Culture on 04/23/1978 in the show of Claude-

Jean Philippe “The cinema of filmmakers”
107
“Poetics of authors”, draft preface (Jean-Claude Biette) in Trafic
No. 85, Spring 2013
108
The action of Tunis, 11/12/1966
109
“Too early, too late” (Serge Daney) in Trafic n°3, summer 1992
110
The Square of Fortune, Pascale Bodet and Emmanuel Lefauvre, 2007
111
David Fincher or the digital hour, Guillaume Orignac, Capricci,
2014
Machine Translated by Google

© 2022 Christophe Fouchet

Publisher: BoD-Books on Demand GmbH [email protected]

Printing: Books on Demand GmbH, In de Tarpen 42, Norderstedt (Germany)
Print on demand

ISBNÿ: 978-2-3224-4711-4
Legal deposit: May 2022