The French film critic Michel Ciment, director of the magazine Positive, 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 debuted in 1963 with a text about The process, by Orson Welles, which he defended against the almost unanimous 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 for free and unexpected tastes, marked by his philias and phobias, but also by his opposition to the dogmatism and snobbery that , as he claimed, characterized his professional colleagues, whom he often criticized. “Two dangers threaten criticism: populism and elitism,” he used to repeat.
Ciment was a great lover of controversy, choleric whenever the occasion warranted it and a supporter of a cinema “of the maîtrise”, of control or dominance on the part of the filmmaker who screamed action, before the defenders of the evocative capacity of more abstract and imperfect forms. “Control is frowned upon. For me, that control is 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 main interlocutor among European critics and dedicated a reference book to him in 1980. He was not the only name in his pantheon: he was an expert in the cinema of Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Francesco Rosi and Jane Campion, to whom he dedicated separate volumes. “I am, at the same time, a supporter of modernity and an anti-modernist. “I like revolutionary filmmakers, but who at the same time dialogue with the culture of the past,” he expressed in an interview with The Inrockuptibles.
Beyond the example of Kubrick, Ciment preferred Alain Resnais to Jean-Luc Godard, whose criticism he no longer understood at his time as a signature of the Cahiers du Cinéma, preferring the less cryptic texts of François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. After briefly hesitating, Ciment preferred to work for the competition he embodied. Positivea magazine founded in the Lyon of the fifties that, after the Maoist turn of the Cahiers After May ’68, he would hide behind a somewhat more moderate criticism. In his almost five decades at the head of the publication, Ciment defended the great authors of international cinema, from the times of Buñuel, Tarkovski or John Ford to those of Terrence Malick, Tim Burton or Paul Thomas Anderson. Martin Scorsese, another of Ciment’s favorites, once stated that Positive It was “the best film magazine in the world.”
Born in Paris in 1938, the son of a Jewish seamstress of Hungarian origin who had escaped the Vel d’Hiv raid in 1942, Ciment was raised Catholic by his mother, who posed as a Gentile until the age of 95 (in (Actually, she was also Jewish.) He baptized him and enrolled him in a Catholic school, where he would become an altar boy, although the experience resulted in a pronounced anticlerical taste that accompanied him to the end, despite his interest in religious filmmakers such as Dreyer and Rossellini. In his university years, he sympathized with the surrealists, with whom he learned to debate until dawn, and was a disciple of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, before becoming professor of American civilization at the Paris VII University. “I started in a time, the sixties, of prosperity. “When you were critical you were not afraid of making enemies,” he told Le Monde in 2019. “Today young people are more cautious. I had the advantage of being a teacher, with a monthly salary. “That gave me total financial independence.”
Since 1970, Ciment was a collaborator of the program The masque and the plume, an institution of French public radio, where critics from different artistic disciplines debate 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 weakened, at a tribute at the Lumière festival, an event dedicated to classic cinema in Lyon. For almost 30 years he also directed Private screeninga program on the France Culture station that featured all the great French and international filmmakers.
Defender of the importance of criticism at a time when it is reduced “alarmingly,” Ciment used to remember 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, sleeping in an apartment located in his own residence. “In the sixties and seventies he had the personal telephone numbers of Fellini, Wilder, Kubrick and others. Today it’s all nonsense. To talk to Scorsese, for example, you have to go through several interlocutors,” he protested a few years ago. Another of his protégés was Quentin Tarantino, whom he defended from the beginning and interviewed repeatedly. “As long as cinema is in the hands of people like Ciment, we are safe,” he once said. From today we enter unknown land.
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