Jean-Louis Comolli: 'Postscript: Hour of the Wolf

('Postface', Cahiers du Cinema 203, August 1968)

Behind the credits of Hour of the Wolf we hear the noise of a set being made ready for a shot - a black frame on which is written the title, Vargtimmen. A black screen in fact, an image (if one can so describe it) of total darkness before the first real, luminous images. But in this night before the film, soon to be driven out…

Jacques Aumont: 'Several Routes to a Reading: Switchboard Operator'
('Lecture a plusieurs voies', Cahiers du Cinema 197, Christmas 1967 - January 1968)

There are some films (for instance, Les Carabiniers, Les Contrabandieres) which are difficult to approach and which present the naked eye with surfaces as slippery as the celluloid they are made of. The nature of these films has already been discussed and explained in these pages and so, by a process of deduction, has the effort they demand…

Eric Rohmer: 'The Land of Miracles'

('La Terre du Miracle', Cahiers du Cinema 47, May 1955, written under his real name, Maurice Scherer)

The term 'neo-realism' has become so debased that I would hesitate to use it in relation to Viaggio in Italia if Rossellini hadn't in fact claimed it himself. He sees this film as embodying a 'neo-realism' that is purer and deeper than in any of his earlier films. At least that was his comment to one member…

Jean-Andre Fieschi: 'The Falling Sickness: Fists in the Pocket'

('Le haut-mal', Cahiers du Cinema 179, June 1966)

The kind of controlled fury, the methodical and calculated anger that marks out right from the beginning a radically new space - in which we can nevertheless all recognize and identify the demons of our own adolescence in spite of the deliberately exceptional nature of the mode of affabulation - bring powerfully into play the elements of a protest whose violence and impact…