Michel Ciment is dead: the French film critic and historian was 85 years old

The French film critic and historian Michel Ciment, longtime director of the film magazine Positif, has died at the age of 85, French media reported on Monday evening.

Ciment began writing for Lyon magazine in 1963, when he contributed an article on the film of Orson Welles.

The magazine was launched in 1952 shortly after Les Cahiers du Cinéma by Bernard Chardère, who also died that year.

In a talk at the Forum Des Images in Paris in 2022 to celebrate Positif’s 70th anniversary, Ciment spoke about how he started reading the magazine as a teenager in the 1950s while Germain was at Le Minotaure bookstore in the Saint -district of Paris hung around – des-Près. .

“It was a great place to meet other film artists, like Jean-Claude Romer, who later made films [the cinema magazine] “Midi Minuit Fantastique,” says Ciment.

“There were many people from Les Cahiers and Positif there… The cinema revues were not to be found at the newsstands at the time. I went there once a week to buy Sight and Sound, Positif or Les Cahiers.”

Ciment became one of France’s most famous critics.

In addition to writing for Positif, he has also been a regular contributor to radio station France Inter’s weekly cultural program “Le Masque et la Plume”, most recently appearing at the end of September to participate in discussions about Pham’s Camera d’Or winner Thien An. The Golden Butterfly TreePhilippe Garrels The team and that of Aki Kaurimäki Dead leaves.

Throughout his career, Ciment has conducted extensive interviews with a number of leading directors for seminal books about their work, including Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman, Andreï Konchalovsky and Elia Kazan.

Most recently, he explored the appeal of Hollywood in the book 2022 Passport to Hollywoodwith interviews with Billy Wilder, John Huston, Joseph Mankiewicz, Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Wim Wenders.

Ciment was also proud of the directors who put Positif on the cover with their first films, such as Pascale Ferran, Quentin Tarantino and James Gray.

Former Cannes Film Festival director Gilles Jacob posted a tribute to Ciment on X.

“Michel Cinema was not only a great critic and an internationally recognized historian, he was also someone with a curious approach to film and art, which he struggled with all his life. His proximity to the major filmmakers kept the momentum of Positif, which he led for a long time. Respect,” he wrote.