Cinéma contre spectacle (French Edition)

A network of new conceptions, arguments and debates about cinema produced in the 1970s made these years one of the key periods in the history of film theory. With the contemporaneous “take-off” of university film studies in the English-speaking world, these ideas assumed foundational status during a period of expansive professionalization and academic institutionalization. As contested as some became, certain ideas and concepts from 1970s film theory have had staying power. However, many of the most important formulations of 1970s film theory claimed motivation in the politically radical impulses and ideas of the period, which also permeated some of the most important filmmaking of the time. By the mid-1960s, there were already important claims for a distinctive break with earlier, “classical” film theory. Then, in 1968, a number of political tensions and conflicts erupted in spectacular political disruptions and oppositional public events all over the globe. For a few years after 1968, yearnings for political transformation often intersected with desires for the radical transformation of intellectual sectors, desires which one finds in certain of the initiating texts of 1970s film theory. Among all of these events, May 1968 in France was the time and place where film culture was most famously – and perhaps even mythically – associated with politicized practices and understandings of cinema.