PARIS. Cinephiles here breathed a collective sigh of relief last week when it was announced that Stephane Delorme had been appointed editor of Cahiers du Cinema, the prestigious film magazine that has served as an arbiter of international cinematic taste since it was founded in the 1950s. “We can count on him to continue the tradition of rigorous aesthetic analysis,” according to Jean-Paul du Maistre, a projectionist at Les Trois Maggots Cinema. “Also, to fawn over one really stupid American comedian for balance.”
Katell Quillevere, Stephane Delorme: “And then Buddy Hackett says ‘Yikes!’”
Delorme has been a writer at the magazine for the past decade, and during that time has absorbed the magazine’s raison d’etre at the same time that he has eaten thousands of bags of Raisinettes d’etre, the French version of the popular American movie snack.
“If Cahiers du Cinema stands for nothing else,” Delorme said in his first interview since assuming his new post, “we must epater la bourgeouisie“, a French phrase that means to challenge conventional tastes, “and the whole Jerry Lewis ‘schtick’ was getting a little old.”
Francois Truffaut: “I could really go for some Raisinettes d’etre right about maintenant.”
Cahiers has been responsible for defining the French “New Wave” cinema, and helped launch the careers of some of its most notable practitioners including Francois Truffaut, who began writing for the magazine when he was only 19. “I do not mean to overestimate what The New Wave accomplished,” Truffaut said shortly after his death in 1984, “but the Old Wave–Lilt Home Permanents, for example–always used to stink up my mother’s kitchen.”
Lilt Home Permanent Wave
Along with highbrow criticism, a Marxist political slant and a quirky affection for some Hollywood movies that American critics look down their nose at, it has been Cahiers’ policy to elevate at least one imbelic Borscht Belt comedian to iconic status at all times, starting with Jerry Lewis, the rubber-faced entertainer now known mostly for his Labor Day telethons.
Jerry Lewis: Humor so subtle an intellectual can’t understand it.
“Yes, Jerry Lewis is very stupid and so was the perfect pile of merdre in which to rub the noses of professors at American liberal arts colleges,” Delorme said as he puffed on a Gauloise cigarette, making smoke rings in the shape of croissants. “But it is time to move on. I am thinking we play up Buddy Hackett in the September issue, and start a new hoax.”
Buddy Hackett
Hackett is best known for his roles in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Love Bug, but by the end of his career had been reduced to frequent appearances on the TV game show “Hollywood Squares”. “This is embarrassing, yes, but we can, how you say, ‘deal with it’,” Delorme explains. “We change the magazine’s name to Cahiers du Cinema et Quiz Shows.”
(If that was French, so sorry. If not, hey what do I know
) You write faster than lightning, don’t you?
Je pense que c’est formidable de Truffaut , comme il, même apres son mourir, a raison n’est pas? Or raisens. Permanent waves sont très passé!