After the mass walk­out, what’s next for Cahiers du Cinéma?

Yes­ter­day, shock­waves rip­pled through the film world as the entire staff of the leg­endary French film jour­nal Cahiers du ciné­ma resigned as one. Fif­teen salaried edi­tors – allow us to first reg­is­ter shock that a niche arts pub­li­ca­tion had so much per­son­nel on the pay­roll in 2020 – all walked out in response to the magazine’s recent pur­chase by share­hold­ers that the crit­ics feel cre­ate a con­flict of inter­est irrec­on­cil­able with their mis­sion of total edi­to­r­i­al purity.

This may sound famil­iar to those read­ers keep­ing up with the world of media in the West­ern world, where it seems like every week brings a fresh sto­ry of vul­ture cap­i­tal­ists and pri­vate equi­ty firms lay­ing waste to some fine print or online outlet.

The Cahiers sit­u­a­tion isn’t quite so stark; an Indiewire item trans­lat­ing French news­pa­per Le Monde quotes long­time employ­ee Jean-Philippe Tessé as say­ing: ​“The new own­ers want to make it a ​‘chic’ and ​‘cor­dial’ review, it’s an absolute non­sense.” (One of the share­hold­ers would be a reg­u­lar pro­duc­er for Jacques Audi­ard, pre­sum­ably one of the direc­tors that Cahiers exists to critique.)

At a time when the con­tin­ued exis­tence of any pub­li­ca­tion is ten­u­ous at best, that might seem like insuf­fi­cient cause to hit the self-destruct but­ton, but Cahiers was explic­it­ly found­ed to be a hos­tile, con­trar­i­an voice. They con­sid­ered them­selves an essen­tial check to crit­i­cal con­sen­sus, and while their defi­ant opin­ions could some­times be mad­den­ing, they were just as often brac­ing entry­ways to recon­sid­er­a­tions of notions we’d tak­en for granted.

Cahiers as we know it may be dead, but that doesn’t mean that the pub­li­ca­tion has to be put in the ground. The share­hold­ers will osten­si­bly want to keep the valu­able brand alive, and will most like­ly hire replace­ments more amenable to the new atmos­phere of man­age­ment. (Though find­ing French crit­ics will­ing to step in as what essen­tial­ly amounts to scab­bing could be tricky.) Per­son­al­ly, this writer’s hope is that the dis­placed tal­ent might stick togeth­er, find some new hands-off bene­fac­tors, and start over under a new title.

Regard­less of what may come, the cer­tain­ty is that the glob­al land­scape of crit­i­cism has been irrev­o­ca­bly altered. Cahiers wasn’t just a pil­lar of the form, it was one of the last film mag­a­zines not behold­en to com­mer­cial imper­a­tives or the whims of an affil­i­at­ed body.

Even today’s most esteemed jour­nals – Film Com­ment, Sight & Sound – can only sur­vive by hitch­ing their wag­on to an orga­ni­za­tion like Lin­coln Cen­ter or the BFI, which cre­ates cer­tain restric­tions on what can and can’t be run. The French New Wave icon­o­clasts that start­ed Cahiers took it upon them­selves to be the thorn in cinema’s side, a man­tle now left near­ly vacant.