Les Cahiers du cinéma sind kaput.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

The entire staff at Les Cahiers du cinéma has just resigned because the magazine is getting sold to a group of investors that includes eight film producers. This would have resulted in conflicts of interest according to the staff, and a new editorial line that would have been more consensual.

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/cahiers-du-cinema-staff-quits-1202214044/

To be frank, there wasn't much about the Cahiers these days, as they had been on auto-pilot (or in self-parody) for quite a time. It's basically like The Simpsons, which are now a shadow of their former selves.

Les Cahiers were actually dead in the seventies, when they had switched to a nearly spirit-duplicated Maoist fanzine. A few writers then managed to get the rights to the title and had a few directors associated with the Golden Age of the 50s-early 60s (like Éric Rohmer) signing a few cheques that allowed the magazine to get a second birth in the late seventies.
Around 2000-2001, after being bought by Le Monde, they prepared a new formula that favored a post-modern take on critical speech. The sales went down, and Le Monde then put in charge the head of their own film pages, some guy who was predictable to a T, with part of the staff leaving because of it. In 2009, Le Monde got rid of it and sold the title to Phaidon Press, which let some long-time contributors assume again editorial control of its content. But, if I'm being honest, there hasn't been a lot of interesting content for ages. If they had been published under a different title, few people would actually care about the fate of the magazine.

Phaidon wanted to sell the title for months, but didn't receive any substantial offer, until early this year when a group of wealthy patrons decided to save the magazine. But eight of these patrons are French film producers with a hand in the auteur repertoire that's the bread and butter of Les Cahiers (the guy who's produced all of Desplechin and Jacques Audiard's films, the producer for Les Misérables by Ladj Ly), and the staff considered that anything they would write about these films would be regarded as collusion (among a few other issues). So, they signified their independence by resigning collectively.

This will most likely be a fatal blow to the buyout. But, in any case, the magazine isn't in a position to be around for much longer. It's been bleeding money for decades, and it's getting nearly impossible to find a generous patron that would leave the staff alone.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

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[Mister Six]

Great post, but what does this mean?

Around 2000-2001, after being bought by Le Monde, they prepared a new formula that favored a post-modern take on critical speech.

[Sin Agog]

Great post, but what does this mean?

Le Pitchfork

[Mister Six]

I don't read Pitchfork so I'm still none the wiser.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

In 2001, they actually devoted fewer pages to film coverage and theory and decided instead to talk about reality TV, music videos, ads, video games or to write long essays about teen movies, picking a lot of random crap (not just Spider-Man, stuff by Friedberg and Setzer) just for the sake of validating their ideas.
It's true that it makes sense to consider that cinéma is not an isolated medium with zero connections to the rest of creative endeavors. It was just that the change happened along with a new formula and a new layout, overnight, and that these new sections weren't even impressively written or thought out. Readers were confused and wondering what the magazine was aiming at.

Two years later, Le Monde, which had lost a ton of money with the failed relaunch, stopped the experiment and asked the new staff to stick with the basics instead, which was mostly "Which young French directors carry the legacy of the New Wave the best?", but most historical collaborators took their distance with these Lumpencahiers. They returned when the title was sold to Phaidon. At this point, they had atoned the post-modernist approach or it was now relevant to the situation of film in the 2010s.