Cahiers du Cinéma, French film journal, first published in 1951 and co-edited by André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Cahiers du Cinéma was, through its polemical position on American cinema, a major influence on French- and English-language film criticism for more than 20 years. It established le politique des auteurs as its guiding principle and shifted the emphasis of criticism away from the interpretation of the film scripts towards the ways in which meaning was expressed visually. Cahiers contributors included a number of French critics who were also aspiring film-makers: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, all of whom became significant figures in the nouvelle vague (New Wave) that began in the late 1950s.

Cahiers argued against the 'old guard', le cinéma de papa, with its emphasis on quality and craftsmanship. The films of Marcel Carné, René Clement, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and André Cayatte were denigrated in favour of auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Max Ophuls. In American cinema, Alfred Hitchcock was preferred to John Huston, Joseph Losey to Fred Zinnemann, and Howard Hawks to Billy Wilder. In effect, it emphasized visual intelligence over literary expertise and argued that the film auteur articulated themes in a distinct and unique way. The magazines Movie in Britain and Film Culture in the United States both owe their inspiration to it, but the full influence of Cahiers was only felt in English-language circles after 1968, when Andrew Sarris, an associate editor of Film Culture, published the widely read The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Ironically, by this time Cahiers was reassessing its views on American cinema; after 1968 it effectively broke with its past and, influenced by Louis Althusser and other French academics, adopted a more consciously political position. Recent coverage has paid greater attention to 'anti-imperialist' cinema from countries such as China, Chile, and Algeria. In this respect, although Cahiers has changed, it has retained a radical agenda.