2023-11-14 18:48:51
Film criticism is not an easy art. In sixty years of practice, Michel Ciment has worn its colors high. A curious and erudite spirit, he worked at the head of the magazine Positive as on the radio to share his love of the 7th art, without giving in to a certain requirement and a marked taste for controversy. The criticism is “a mixture of research, a relatively objective approach and, at the same time, expression of taste and personal relationship to the work”he explained to The cross in 2014.
He never hesitated to scrap to defend his choices in the columns of Positiveand he regularly attacked in outraged editorials “the Bermuda triangle of criticism” (Release, The world, The Unrockuptibles), accused of theoretical dogmatism. This taste for intellectual confrontation, born from the historical rivalry with The Cinema Notebooksdid not prevent him from continually exploring new territories and devoting extensive interviews to the filmmakers he admired.
Around twenty works on cinema
Born on May 26, 1938 in Paris to Hungarian Jewish parents who had fled the pogroms, Michel Ciment did part of his studies in the United States and discovered American cinema on this occasion. Back in Paris, he addressed the magazine Positive an article about The trial by Orson Welles and joined the editorial board, before becoming its publishing director. In 1970, he joined the “Masque et la Plume” team where he was still speaking on September 24. “It is perhaps the freest, most encyclopedic spirit that film criticism has ever produced”reacted Jérôme Garcin, the producer of the show.
In 1973, he published Kazan couple Kazana book of interviews with the filmmaker which will be followed by around twenty others devoted to Francesco Rosi, Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick and Jane Campion, as well as several classics on American cinema such as The Conquerors of the New World (1981) or Crime on Screen: A History of America (1992). From 1990 to 2016, he also hosted “Private Projection” on France Culture.
Teaching in secondary school and then at university, Michel Ciment took pride in his financial independence which made him free of his opinions. Honored during the last Lumière Festival in Lyon, the man who was for a long time president of the Critics’ Union had gathered in 2019 some of his texts in A life in cinema (Ed. Gallimard).
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