The death of the programmer Marie-Pierre Duhamel-Muller, a great discreet figure in French cinema

2023-06-23 16:52:49
Marie-Pierre Duhamel-Muller on the Place du Center Beaubourg in Paris, February 28, 2008. WILLIAM DANIELS

Died on June 19, 2023, at the age of 70, in the palliative care unit of the Cognacq-Jay hospital (Paris 15th) following cancer, Marie-Pierre Duhamel-Muller was a great figure in the French cinema. Her almost sacerdotal discretion, her iron humility, her pugnacious character covered a joyfully sisterly relationship and boundless generosity towards the filmmakers and moviegoers she esteemed. To the extent of this spiritual radiance, one might be surprised, at the time of the omniscience of the Internet, that it does not justify any Wikipedia file, any obituary notice worthy of the name. This power which was hers, she who abhorred power, is measured precisely by this absence.

Marie-Pierre Duhamel, by her maiden name, was a figure in the shadows, a formidable “passer”, and its action, not supported by any pride or any search for a career, consisted in helping filmmakers who could be described as “minority” to find their place in the cinematographic concert. She put all her passion into it, which was eruptive, to convince her interlocutors, and many directors – from Frederick Wiseman to Wang Bing, passing by Jia Zhang-ke and Marco Bellocchio, to name only the most famous – sought her advice and his wise look. Programmer, teacher, translator, interpreter, subtitler, her intelligence was keen, her erudition impressive, her sense of dialectic, like anathema, feared.

Born on November 28, 1952, to a father who was a great fish trader and an Italian-Breton librarian mother, she embarked on the world of cinema, after studying history and Chinese, and her career took a thousand detours, a thousand faces. In 1987, it was found at the National Center for Cinematography. In 1994, here she was administrator of the documentary unit of Arte alongside Thierry Garrel. In 1995, she was in charge of documentary production at Pathé television. She also teaches regularly from the 1990s, both at Femis, in the editing department, and in various European universities.

treasures of knowledge

Programming fascinated her. We owe him pioneering events, including, in 1995, “Animalia Cinematografica”, on the representation of animals in cinema, or, in 2017, an exciting retrospective of independent African-American cinema, both organized in this institution. which was dear to him, the Center Pompidou. The course of his professional life also owes to a decisive encounter, that of Marco Muller. The two young people – each not Maoist at all – met in China in 1975, among the first French scholarship recipients to study in the country. They married there in July 1976, never lived together (Marco lives in Italy, Marie-Pierre in France), divorced in 1996, but had a reciprocal esteem that defied the course of feelings like that of time. She will thus be alongside Marco Muller, who has become one of the most sparkling and inventive directors of film festivals in the world, in the selection committees of the festivals of Turin, Pesaro, Locarno, Venice or Rome, and more recently of the festival of Pingyao, China, created by Jia Zhang-ke.

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