The French critic Michel Ciment, 2019 in Paris. Menigault Bernard (Alamy / CORDO
The French film critic Michel Ciment, director of the magazine Positif, died this Monday in Paris at the age of 85. A great specialist in American, Italian and Soviet cinema, Ciment was one of the last survivors of the golden age of French criticism. He made his debut in 1963 with a text about “The Trial” by Orson Welles, which he defended against the almost unanimously negative opinion of his colleagues. He soon became one of the most prominent figures in the specialized press, where he shone for his inexhaustible erudition and his free and unexpected taste, characterized, as he claimed, by his philias and phobias, but also by his resistance to dogmatism and snobbery his professional colleagues, whom he often criticized. “Two dangers threaten criticism: populism and elitism,” he always repeated.
Ciment was a great lover of controversy, angry whenever the occasion required it and an advocate of a cinema “of maîtrise”, of control or dominance on the part of the filmmaker, who called for action in the face of defenders of the evocative capacity of more forms. abstract and imperfect. “Control is frowned upon. For me, this control has been a Western art since ancient times and I don’t see why it should stop today,” he said in 2019. The critic found in Stanley Kubrick the embodiment of the total filmmaker. Ciment was his most important interlocutor among European critics and dedicated a reference work to him in 1980. He was not the only name in his pantheon: he was an expert on the cinema of Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Francesco Rosi and Jane Campion he dedicated separate volumes. “I am simultaneously a supporter of modernity and an anti-modernist. “I like filmmakers who are revolutionary but at the same time have a dialogue with the culture of the past,” he said in an interview with Les Inrockuptibles.
Beyond Kubrick’s example, Ciment preferred Alain Resnais to Jean-Luc Godard, whose criticism he no longer saw as a signature of the Cahiers du Cinéma in his time, but preferred the less cryptic texts of François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. After a brief hesitation, Ciment preferred to work for the competition represented by Positif, a magazine founded in Lyon in the 1950s that would hide behind a more moderate criticism after the Maoist turn of the Cahiers after May 1968. In his almost five decades at the helm of the publication, Ciment has defended the great authors of international cinema, from the time of Buñuel, Tarkovski and John Ford to those of Terrence Malick, Tim Burton and Paul Thomas Anderson. Martin Scorsese, another Ciment favorite, once claimed that Positif was “the best film magazine in the world.”
Michel Ciment, second from left, with the remaining members of the 1978 Cannes Film Festival jury, including Andrei M. Kontchalovski, Claude Goretta, Liv Ullman and Alan J. Pakula. Bertrand LAFORET (Gamma Rapho /
Ciment was born in Paris in 1938, the son of a Jewish seamstress of Hungarian origin who had escaped the attack on Vel d’Hiv in 1942. He was raised Catholic by his mother, who pretended to be a non-Jew until she was 95 (actually she was also Jewish.) He baptized him and enrolled him in a Catholic school, where he was to become an altar boy, although this experience too a strong anti-clerical taste that stayed with him to the end, despite his interest in religious filmmakers like Dreyer and Rossellini. During his student years he sympathized with the surrealists, with whom he learned to debate until dawn, and was a student of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze before becoming professor of American civilization at the University of Paris VII. “I started in a time of prosperity, the 1960s. When you were critical, you weren’t afraid to make enemies,” he told Le Monde in 2019. “Today, young people are more cautious. I had the advantage of being a teacher and getting a monthly salary. “It gave me complete financial independence.”
Since 1970, Ciment has been a contributor to the program Le masque et la plume, a French public broadcaster in which critics from various artistic disciplines discuss the week’s premieres. His last participation in the program took place at the end of September. A few weeks later he was seen, already very weak, at a homage to the Lumière Festival, an event in Lyon dedicated to classical cinema. For almost 30 years he also directed Projection privée, a program on the France Culture radio station in which all the major French and international filmmakers appeared.
Ciment defended the importance of criticism at a time when it is being “alarmingly” reduced, recalling the good conditions in which he began to work in front of younger and almost always astonished critics. For example, to interview Francis Ford Coppola at the time of Apocalypse Now, they sent him to San Francisco to live with him for a week and sleep in an apartment in his own apartment. “In the sixties and seventies I had the personal telephone numbers of Fellini, Wilder, Kubrick and others. Today everything is nonsense. “To speak to Scorsese, for example, you have to involve several interlocutors,” he protested a few years ago. Another of his protégés was Quentin Tarantino, whom he defended from the start and repeatedly interviewed. “As long as the cinema is in the hands of people like Ciment, we are safe,” he once said. From today we enter unknown land.
All the culture that goes with it awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
GET IT