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Q: The "new" CAHIERS was critical of its heritage: you reread Ford, dissected Bresson, psychoanalyzed Bazin. Why was this necessary?

Serge Daney: This criticism was obviously a last homage, more or less avowed, that we rendered to what we have always loved. We wanted to reread Ford, not Huston, to dissect Bresson and not Rene Clair, to psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael. Criticism is always that: an eternal return to a fundamental pleasure. Why, as concerns me, was my relationship to cinema bound up with THE INDIAN TOMB, RIO BRAVO, UGETSU MONOGOTARI, PICKPOCKET, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PAISAN, GERTRUD? There is a dimension to cinephilia which psychoanalysis knows well under the name of "mourning work": something is dead, something of which traces, shadows remains...

Incidentally, in the collective text on YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, we distinguished clearly between ideology and writing. We were very conscious then of the danger (which we subsequently did not always avoid) of confounding ideology and writing. Now - it's quite simple - the cinema loved by the CAHIERS - from the beginning - is a CINEMA HAUNTED BY WRITING. This is the key which makes it possible to understand the successive tastes and choices. This is also explained by the fact that the best French filmmakers have always been - at the same time - writers (Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, Jean Epstein, etc.)