Monday, October 14, 2013

Je suis fâché!

The Cahiers du cinéma chief-editor Stéphane Delorme has been carving a unique editorial position for the magazine since he took the role in 2009. Every new issue gradually builds on this editorial and aesthetic position by way of appreciations, polemics, and an engagement with the actualities of cinema in Paris. But even though the general tone of Delorme's writings is appreciative and authoritative - opening the magazine with his editorial that puts the whole rest of the issue in perspective - sometimes there is an underlining frustration and anger that seeps through.

This clash with the rest of the French film criticism establishment can be seen in each issue in their Le Conseil des Dix section that compares their writers taste and evaluation to critics from other major newspapers and magazines. But more directly this anger can be seen, and expressed, in some of the debates Delorme has participated in on the French radio channels France Inter and France Culture. The most recent one is a round table on contemporary French cinema with Delorme, which builds upon a previous Cahiers essay that also became a podcast Pour un cinéma qui nous exalte!. Delorme has also participated in a fierce debate about American Cinema, and in another podcast, in a different register, he praises the films of childhood with a special emphasis on Steven Spielberg's E.T.

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