Afterlives of the Apparatus

Abstract

In this chapter, the focus lies on the “afterlives” of Cahiers du cinéma’s post- 1968 period in Anglo-American film studies since the latter’s consolidation as an academic discipline in the 1970s. Championed by journals such as Screen, the writings of the Cahiers critics attained a wide purchase in the nascent field, but this often came at the expense of a reductive interpretation, compounded by the limited corpus of available translated texts, and in later decades many of the positions associated with Cahiers increasingly came under attack, while even its defenders admitted to the state of crisis that the “political modernism” it represented had entered. But this chapter also shows the wider influences that Cahiers has had on film scholarship, such as the importance of Comolli for the rise of the “new film history” movement, and it concludes by stressing the necessity for a productive re-reading of the original Cahiers texts.