2023-11-04 07:14:00
“Stop the violence”: for three months (November 1999-January 2000), a noisy controversy raged in France not to protest against police baton blows but against film criticism, its role, its competence ( in this case “its incompetence”), its networks, its language, its reflexes, its power of nuisance, its corrosive part in the crumbling of the ecosystem of a French cinema fearing for its market shares, and why not , one’s eating habits or one’s mental health… Never again since has there been such a concert of ulcerated howls, articles by the dozen to find out whether it was necessary to urgently open university courses of constructive criticism after having torn out armfuls of the self-satisfied “feathers” in place and too lively: “There is this jubilation, almost palpable, in the pleasure of destroying, of damaging, this joy that one senses in writing this or that execution, in imagining this or that smashing title”, could we read in a devilish manifesto written by several hands by angry filmmakers, from the ranks of the ARP (the Civil Society of Authors-Directors-Producers), having poor management of this which was then only a fax telephone (to the point of mistakenly sending their missive under construction to various incriminated media) and gathered around the kind Patrice Leconte (les Bronzés, Monsieur Hire, Maigret…), initiator of this critical anti-violence conspiracy which had lit the fuse… in Libération: “I would like to think that critics are no longer systematic enemies but attentive partners”, he declared in an interview which was published on a double page, on October 25, 1999, Libé being explicitly one of the main points of fixation of this cohort of filmmakers believing that not only were we not taking the full measure of their talents but that they were also being ridiculed or dragged through the mud . From this publication, and following a meeting half collective catharsis half war council of members of the ARP (Claude Miller, Claude Lelouch, Bertrand Tavernier, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Claude Berri, Cédric Klapisch for the most upset ), the quarrel will swell unreasonably and everyone, through interviews, round tables, forums, interposed indiscretions, will go with their opinion, throwing names at each other’s faces. We bring out the old files, the old refrains (Truffaut was also tough but… it was Truffaut) and the suitcases of reproaches filled to overflowing with cans of vinegary feelings. Libé is expensive with, among other things, the eternal example that has become a running gag of a crime by a worthy (and left-wing) lèse-auteur still not digested twelve years later, the canonical “Time.news of a Shit Announced” in the title of the descent into arrow by Gérard Lefort, May 9, 1987, from the new film by Francesco Rosi adapted from Gabriel García Márquez and presented at Cannes: “Rich, like pasta, in casting and budget ($12 million), Time.news of a Death announced pays homage to the famous Nescafé ad: special filter images, freeze-dried actors, Colombian aroma. Boiled coffee, ruined coffee.”
Another symptomatic date, May 8, 1997. At the opening of the 50th Cannes Film Festival, Luc Besson screens his big-budget science fiction film, The Fifth Element, an attempt to compete with mainstream American cinema on its own turf and with its own stars. (Bruce Willis). The film was burned by American critics but here, Libé will not be outdone as is often the case with the author of Le Grand Bleu (who will even end up suing us for defamation after an article published in 2003 on Fanfan la Tulipe that he had produced and of which we had denounced “racism”, a trial which he lost). Olivier Séguret points out the “childish canvas that the filmmaker boasts of having imagined at 16” for a “deformed film but not sick enough to be interesting”. However, six days later, and while the blockbuster filled theaters in France (400,000 admissions in one week), the newspaper made its front page with the film and headlined “the Besson vote”. The slightly ideological orientation – and a priori very “offbeat” in relation to the film-loving editorial line used in our columns – of the different articles thus published together can be read straight away with an interview with Michel Ciment and Jacques Zimmer, two journalists from monthly Positive, titled: “What the critic writes no longer matters.” Moreover, on each page it is a matter of emphasizing the extent to which the public does as it pleases, as if it were a new fact that deserved to be analyzed. Legend has it – and it is true for once – that the staff of journalists from the cinema section, always special correspondents in Cannes, had not been at all aware of this clarification in the form of a stab in the back on the glaring divorce between critic and public, treacherously managed from Paris by a fraction of the management at the time with weak concepts and casual malevolence.
The process of criticism is constitutive of criticism itself. It seems that it can only survive and thrive in hostile environments. Consider it acceptable, legitimate in all circumstances, in phase with the market and the public, it withers or survives in the quasi-medical form of the “prescription” (criticism as a guide to consumer culture). He needs a gap, a margin, a dissonance. At least this is how it is experienced, thought of, transmitted in the field of cinema by the offensive legacy of the 50s and 60s, from André Bazin to Godard. The post-war boom in the film-loving field and the advent in France of the turbulent generation of New Wave filmmakers, then in the 1970s, in the United States, the studio crisis and the shock caused by what we called the New Hollywood, produce a relationship with films punctuated by incessant theoretical, moral and political deductions, themselves at the origin of schisms, quarrels to the death, invectives and vengeful libels. We almost end up forgetting that it is also work and even, in the best case scenario, in-depth work. Films are not just works to be loved or hated according to the expeditious criterion of the “stars” that we stick to them like a sticker but facts as objective in many respects as the vote on a law in the Assembly, a industrial accident in a petrochemical factory or a pole vault performance.
From 1973, Libération published articles on cinema and the question of the real nature of what was represented was immediately raised. We read in particular a controversy on the Adventures of Rabbi Jacob with Louis de Funès, Pascal Bonitzer (who has since become a screenwriter and filmmaker) pointing out in Gérard Oury’s successful popular comedy political issues under the layer of unifying laughter: “And then when even if you want to be demanding: 1) the friendly Arab […] is therefore played by a French actor (the character of Mohamed Larbi Slimane played by Claude Giraud, editor’s note). 2) The bad guys are Arabs, very typical, who constantly make the gesture of slitting their throats.” In an article published in March 1990 on the first film by the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, Where is my friend’s house?, which was then about to be released on French screens, Gérard Lefort wrote: “It is very rare indeed that cinema be taken for what it is: a machine for seeing seeing, for sorting vision, even if it means contesting this sorting and even disqualifying it.” This effort to “see see” and see how things are going or why things are going wrong, or showing badly while seeming to show right, applies precisely to criticism, and beyond all the folklore and foam of punchlines or catchy titles, is, and remains, the nerve, if not of war, at least of the profession.
When Serge July in 1981 hired Serge Daney, who had eight years behind him at the head of Cahiers du cinéma for what would remain as one of the most hardcore theoretical periods of the magazine (the Mao years and the rest under the influence of Derrida-Deleuze), it endorses the idea that a still young daily newspaper can integrate into its pages a cinephile ambition which guarantees neither the favors of the market nor the support of a readership which, at the dawn of the 80s, with the arrival from Canal+, can begin to slide deliciously towards pure hedonistic consumption. Olivier Séguret was around twenty years old when he joined the team: “We must still remember that the press did not shine with its avant-garde. Daney has worked hard to neutralize the ever-possible attraction of anti-intellectualism when a monthly like Première was born and established itself precisely on a “cool” defense of commercial cinema, in any case breaking with the authors’ policy. . On the other hand, it is the time when cinema enters universities, in schools, and where the political will of the left in power creates a favorable climate for the emergence of a new generation of French authors with whom Libé will be synchronous.” Always caught between the industry – and therefore marketing – on the one hand (of which Leconte and others were the spokespersons under the guise of pacifying virtues) and society (the “public vote”, the box office ), critical journalism – and not only in the field of cinema obviously – develops where “the distinction between the world of indisputable facts and debatable values”, to use the categories of Bruno Latour, cannot exist, where it is necessary on the contrary, working together information and judgment according to a rather strange alchemy where film-loving memory, personal intuition, social, moral and aesthetic perspectives are mobilized and juxtaposed. “We had to reach out to the little ones, and cast away the powerful,” summarizes Gérard Lefort today, who from the 1990s was the conductor of an editorial line and writing that quickly stood out in the landscape (until the invention of a real-fake critic, Bill Chernaud, who puts all the press officers on edge), setting up a proper cinema service. In 1987, a monster special edition directed by Louis Skorecki was released, Why are you filming? with responses collected by telephone, post or fax from 700 filmmakers from 70 countries. Some answers: Bergman (“I don’t film”), Godard (“I film to avoid the question of why”), Altman (“It’s my job. I think it’s a stupid question. I don’t have no desire to answer it”)…
Very early on, it will be a question of surveying a territory which cannot be reduced to the articulation of French cinema versus Hollywood. Hence a wandering vigilance, which has never wavered, for everything that can emerge anywhere and especially beyond the reach of the attention of the majority, as well as an almost vital investment not to be missed the first films, to find talents before they explode or reach consensus. The word given in 1978 to the young Italian Nanni Moretti (I am an autarkic), the articles on an unknown New Zealander (Sweetie by Jane Campion, in 1990), or the first steps of a melancholic Taiwanese (Rebels of the Neon God by Tsai Ming Liang), the revelation of independent, marginalized Chinese filmmakers (Xiao Wu, artisan pickpocket by Jia Zhangke, the eight hours of West of the Rails by Wang Bing), of an enlightened Portuguese author (O Fantasma by João Pedro Rodrigues), the first film by a French touch musician (Steak by Quentin Dupieux) or the first fiction by a brilliant documentary filmmaker (the recent Saint-Omer by Alice Diop) boasts authority and regularly gives priority to more identified, richer or more marketed productions. As Jean-Marc Lalannne says, who also moved from Cahiers du cinéma to Libé for three years at the start of the 2000s, and today to Inrocks, “it is not a question of writing for posterity but Above all, we must not miss the present, in which there is a very specific pop dimension and undoubtedly a more personal relationship than elsewhere to what we can allow ourselves to write. In a recent interview on the Critikat site, Camille Nevers also says it while practicing it since she is a regular and very singular signature of today’s cinema pages: “Criticism, I believe, seeks, the most in phase possible with the thing seen, to account for a subjectivity and an objectivity of cinema. […]. The question remains: how to find a form of renewed joy, or anger.
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