Michel Ciment on old times

The September issue of Positif featured an interviews with both Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. This paragraph is translated from Michel Ciment"s editorial on page 1.

It is Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer who must be laughing to themselves at the booming proposition of the ex-editor of Cahiers du Cinema. Here are two metteurs-en-scene who, for 50 years, with ups and downs for the first and mostly highs for the second have known how to steer away from the fashionable and pursue an esthetical research in which woman and love are among its most beautiful fruits. If we had supported in the early 1960s Rivette's Paris nous appartient, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, Astruc's La Proie pour l'ombre, and the work of Resnais, Varda, Franju, Marker, Demy, Malle, Deville and Cavalier, this magazine was not kindly towards Rohmer's Le Signe du lion or Chabrol's Beau Serge and Les Cousins. On re-evaluation, we won't blush over it. But, from Les Biches and La Collectioneuse (1967-1968), our columns have been openly favorable to a number of their films. In any case, they confirm the astonishing vitality of a generation of directors, who -- unique phenomenon in the world -- more than a half century after their debuts, continue to bear witness to an independence and a brash originality, from Resnais to Marker, from Varda to Cavalier, and from Rohmer to Rivette and Chabrol. False quarrel, thus, that of young and old, ancient and modern, critical fluctuations as academic as they are sterile.