Cahiers du cinéma: Spécial photos de films n°1 + n°2

Paris: Les Éditions de L’Ètoile, 1985. 6to (28×22cm) each, illustrated wrappers. each around 90pp. Text in French. Mild handling wear to wrappers; pages clean and unmarked. Very good.

These two special issues from Cahiers du cinéma form a short, intense sub-series titled Photos de films: n°1: Spécial photos de films (1978) and n°2: Monstresses (1980). They sit between magazine, archive object, and photobook, built on a simple idea that still feels sharp: the film still is not just promotion or illustration, but a fragment that can think on its own.

Photos de films n°1 establishes the method. It sequences production stills, set photographs, portraits, and frame-derived images as if the archive were a film made of paper. The accompanying texts stay close to details and surfaces rather than plot or canon. Alain Bergala’s introduction describes the sensation of moving quickly through many stills until a “jolt” occurs: the images, even the flattest, are enough to crack the heavy, over-coherent ideas we think we have about cinema, making beloved films return as unstable memory and fragile remainder.

Photos de films n°2: Monstresses takes that same approach and focuses it on female figures that slip into myth, menace, excess, and apparition. Structured in thematic sections (ghosts, brides, cruel loves, Medusa), it turns the still archive into a kind of gothic atlas, where criticism drifts toward fiction and theory is generated by faces, gestures, and poses.

Together, these two volumes matter because they show Cahiers treating photography as a parallel medium to cinema, not a supplement. They are early proof that a single frame, printed and detached, can become an active site of montage, interpretation, and desire.