Cahiers du cinéma launched as a new French film journal in Paris, co-founded by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. The magazine quickly became a key forum for rigorous postwar film criticism and the cinephile network that would feed the French New Wave.
François Truffaut publishes the polemical essay “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” in Cahiers du cinéma, criticizing prestige French literary adaptations and screenwriter-dominated filmmaking. The article became a landmark provocation for the critics’ push toward director-centered cinema and, soon, directing themselves.
Truffaut defines the politique des auteurs in Cahiers du cinéma, arguing for recognizing the director as the principal creative “author” of a film (in at least certain cases). This critical stance helped shape the magazine’s canon and provided an intellectual platform for the cohort’s move from criticism to filmmaking.
Éric Rohmer (Maurice Schérer) rises to editorial leadership at Cahiers du cinéma in the mid-1950s, helping formalize its style of close, director-focused criticism. Under his editorship, the magazine continued to cultivate a young bench of writers (Rivette, Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol) on the verge of directing.
Claude Chabrol, a Cahiers critic, begins principal photography on Le Beau Serge in late 1957. The production signaled that the magazine’s critical insurgency was turning into practical, low-budget feature filmmaking.
Chabrol’s debut feature Le Beau Serge is released, frequently cited as an early flagship of French New Wave practice. Its arrival helped validate the “critics-turned-filmmakers” pathway associated with Cahiers du cinéma.
Co-founder André Bazin dies at age 40, a major loss for Cahiers du cinéma and French film criticism. His death accelerated a generational shift as younger writers became more central and increasingly oriented toward filmmaking.
Chabrol’s Les Cousins follows quickly after his debut, consolidating his position as a leading early New Wave director. The film’s success further normalized the rapid transition from Cahiers criticism to feature directing within the cohort.
Truffaut’s debut feature Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) premieres at the Cannes Film Festival, becoming a defining breakthrough for the New Wave and demonstrating that a Cahiers critic could successfully translate polemical ideas into popular, internationally visible filmmaking.
Jean-Luc Godard—another prominent Cahiers writer—releases À bout de souffle (Breathless), a stylistic watershed widely taken as emblematic of New Wave editing, performance, and on-location immediacy. Its impact helped internationalize the Cahiers cohort’s ideas about authorship and cinematic modernism.
Jacques Rivette’s feature debut Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) finally receives its Paris release after a long, difficult production. The film broadened the cohort’s output beyond the most commercially successful New Wave titles and reinforced the sense of a shared Cahiers “team” entering cinema as makers.
Éric Rohmer’s first feature Le Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo)—shot in 1959 but delayed—reaches release. Its eventual appearance highlighted both the opportunities and distribution obstacles facing the early New Wave directors emerging from the Cahiers milieu.
Godard completes Le petit soldat in 1960, but French censorship delays its release until 1963, underscoring the political volatility facing New Wave filmmakers. The case became a notable example of how contemporary events (here, the Algerian War context) could collide with the cohort’s drive for immediacy and autonomy.
After internal tensions about the magazine’s direction, Jacques Rivette succeeds Rohmer as editor-in-chief. Under Rivette, Cahiers du cinéma shifts toward more explicitly political and theoretical criticism—showing how the critics-turned-filmmakers cohort also reshaped institutions of criticism while directing films.
Cahiers du Cinéma critics-turned-filmmakers cohort, 1951–1965
