Michel Ciment, film critic, 1938-2023
The "father" of Positif, Michel Ciment, French historian and film critic for over 60 years, has left us on monday (13 November 2023)...
He was the first to talk about "Le cinéma de la lenteur", later translated in English into "Slow Cinema". And he was contrasting the legacy of the Lumière brothers with that of Méliès, defining two trends of cinema pervasive until today: on one hand, the documentary, reality (Lumière) leading to Neorealismo, Modern Cinema, Contemplative Cinema and on the other hand, the animation, or spectacle (Méliès) leading to Hollywood.
"Facing this lack of patience and themselves made impatient by the bombardment of sound and image to which they are submitted as TV or cinema spectators, a number of directors have reacted by a cinema of slowness, of contemplation, as if they wanted to live again the sensuous experience of a moment revealed in its authenticity. Angelopoulos in Greece, Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Turkey, de Oliveira and Monteiro (who died a few weeks ago) in Portugal, Béla Tarr in Hungary, Abbas Kiarostami in Iran, Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien in Taiwan, Philippe Garrel and Bruno Dumont in France, Souleymane Cissé and Idrissa Ouedraogo in Africa, Sharunas Bartas in the Baltic state, Aleksandr Sokurov in Russia, and several directors in Central Asia have been proponents in recent years of a resistance to the fetishism of technology. [..]"
The State of Cinema, Michel Ciment speech at the 46th San Francisco Film Festival in 2003
Read the full speech here at Unspoken Cinema :
Also a radio broadcast on France Culture, a series of 5 Michel Ciment interviews, of 30min each, on his life, career and passion for cinema:
Homage in the press:
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