Film critic Michel Ciment has died at the age of 85, his entourage confirmed to France Inter on Monday evening, November 13th.
“Michel Ciment was a reference in film criticism. France Inter listeners have heard his voice in “Le Masque et la Plume” for more than fifty years wrote on X (ex-Twitter)Adèle Van Reeth, director of public broadcasting.
He was editor of the magazine Positif, which he joined as a critic in the 1960s, and also producer of the program “Projection privée” about French culture from 1990 to 2016. “He dedicated his entire life to teaching through language and writing, his scholarship and his passion for the seventh art,” honored France culture on.
A penchant for intellectual battles
Michel Ciment was also a lecturer at the University of Paris VII and author of books on cinema, in particular on Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Francesco Rosi, Jane Campion or on American cinema with Les Conquérants d’un new world.
“It is perhaps the freest and most encyclopedic spirit that film criticism has ever produced,” declared Jérôme Garcin, producer and presenter of the program “Le Masque et la Plume”. Arnaud Viviant, one of his friends on the France Inter show, appreciated to an “encyclopedic spirit that left nothing missing, a flawless disseminator of the 7th art”.
Read also the interview (2019): Article reserved for our subscribers Michel Ciment: “France is the only country in the world where so many authors have made films”
In 1994, at Cannes, he received the first Maurice Bessy Prize, which “recognizes a personality who practices his activity or talent in the field of film writing.” “Michel Ciment was not only a great critic, an internationally recognized historian, but also a curious mind for cinema and art who fought throughout his life,” praised the former president of the Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob.
A penchant for intellectual combat that Michel Ciment has always maintained. In the 1960s, “when we were critical, we were not afraid of making enemies. “Today film criticism is shrinking like nothing,” he complained in a 2019 interview with Le Monde. “Young people are more cautious.” Maybe they are secretly jealous of the time when metal could still be scrapped. I had the advantage of being a teacher and getting a monthly salary. This gave me complete economic independence,” he explained.