Much earlier than the fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2001, Les Cahier du cinéma had already become a legendary magazine, known around the world. And for good reason: it was here that filmmakers (not simple critics) began publishing their writings, and it was exactly those filmmakers who, around 1959, established not only their individual talents but also the notion of the auteurism and a rereading of film history. The film attempts to trace the history of various generations, of internal wars, of dilapidated and revered heredity, of assassinated fathers, but also the love of cinema, the ambition to make cinema, a desire to belong to it. The method? Make the archive documents and testimonials “converse”, quotes from films and new images, coincidences and contradictions. A film with a story that took shape during editing. Its ambition: to grasp what is unseizable, the passing of time that leaves its mark upon faces, that depreciates ideas and finds, under changing names, an irreducible emotion.

Edgardo Cozarinsky