Positif
Due to a characteristic mix of laziness and stubbornness, I took sides for Cahiers against Positif some 30 years ago and never looked back.
In case you don’t know (but if you read The MacMahonian, you should) Positif led a not always elegant campaign against Cahiers du Cinema back in the mid-to-late 1950s, criticizing, when not downright mocking, the generation of Chabrol, Godard, Rivette et al for their love of Hitchcock, Hawks, Walsh, the American Lang etc (Ill stop here, although I feel like going on) to the detriment of Huston, Kramer etc (Ill stop here, gladly). Could it really be that those ignorant brats actually preferred the commercial entertainment of the former to the worthy literary humanism and social engagement of the latter?
Well, the jury was out on that one some 60 years ago. Positif spent most of the intervening time unapologetically turning into a latter day copy of the Cahiers with worse design and picking up where their rivals/master trendsetters left off. By the 1990s or so, Positif was the magazine to read if you wanted senesce in the comfort of the Cahiersorthodoxy so disparaged some four decades earlier.
That was then, this is now. Courtesy again of the Institut Français Pekin (which Ill make a mental note to stop mentioning, lest my abundant readership start to suspect I´m one-track minded) I thoroughly perused last October´s issue of Positif and found it the most interesting movie mag I read in a long while. The critical section rivals with that of Sight and Sound and it has a 15-page or so special on Richard Brooks, filmography divided by decades and so on, that´s a feast for the neurons.
So all is forgiven and forgotten. Positif is back in the fold.
Due to a characteristic mix of laziness and stubbornness, I took sides for Cahiers against Positif some 30 years ago and never looked back.
In case you don’t know (but if you read The MacMahonian, you should) Positif led a not always elegant campaign against Cahiers du Cinema back in the mid-to-late 1950s, criticizing, when not downright mocking, the generation of Chabrol, Godard, Rivette et al for their love of Hitchcock, Hawks, Walsh, the American Lang etc (Ill stop here, although I feel like going on) to the detriment of Huston, Kramer etc (Ill stop here, gladly). Could it really be that those ignorant brats actually preferred the commercial entertainment of the former to the worthy literary humanism and social engagement of the latter?
Well, the jury was out on that one some 60 years ago. Positif spent most of the intervening time unapologetically turning into a latter day copy of the Cahiers with worse design and picking up where their rivals/master trendsetters left off. By the 1990s or so, Positif was the magazine to read if you wanted senesce in the comfort of the Cahiersorthodoxy so disparaged some four decades earlier.
That was then, this is now. Courtesy again of the Institut Français Pekin (which Ill make a mental note to stop mentioning, lest my abundant readership start to suspect I´m one-track minded) I thoroughly perused last October´s issue of Positif and found it the most interesting movie mag I read in a long while. The critical section rivals with that of Sight and Sound and it has a 15-page or so special on Richard Brooks, filmography divided by decades and so on, that´s a feast for the neurons.
So all is forgiven and forgotten. Positif is back in the fold.