Longtime Positif Editor, Film Writer Michel Ciment to Be
Guest Programmer in San Francisco
By Jerry White

After a long and influential career in film writing, Michel Ciment has been chosen to be the guest programmer for the 46th San Francisco International Film Festival. Ciment, a prolific writer and lecturer, is most associated with Positif, the French film journal of which he has been the longtime director. He has been on the editorial board since 1966.

“Michel has attended the Festival as a journalist and has written film notes for the program, so he knows the Festival well,” said Roxanne Messina Captor, executive director. “He will complement and augment our programming team perfectly,” she added. “I know that our audience will be caught up by his passion for film and appreciate his discovery of and advocacy for important new works.” Ciment will deliver the Festival’s inaugural State of Cinema address.

Ciment is the author of a number of books that have sprung from his work on Positif on filmmakers, including Theo Angelopoulos, John Boorman, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Loseph Losey, Francesco Rosi and Erich von Stroheim. Until recently Ciment taught American Studies at the University of Paris; he is now retired.

He has served as president of the FIPRESCI jury at the 1996 Venice Film Festival and also on juries at Cannes, Berlin and Locarno. Most recently, Ciment attended the Telluride Film Festival on behalf of Positif to accept a special medallion for dedication to the celebration of film as an artistic medium.
“Criticism is both an intellectual and an emotional activity,” says Ciment, and Positif’s signature has always been its hostility towards a doctrinaire approach to criticism. This stems from the fact that it has no editor-in-chief: Positif has always been a collective operation. “We have an editorial board of 15 people, and we meet every Sunday,” he says. “We discuss everything together. Nobody has the power to decide what’s on the cover, it’s all discussed.”

This process, although sometimes lanky, assures that no one opinion can dominate the magazine. Indeed, disagreements regularly occur. Ciment recalled recent arguments among the editorial committee about brutal films like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) and Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998). “Mostly they were discussions about sexuality or violence, not on moralistic grounds, but on ethical problems,” he says. That said, a certain voice has emerged over the years; Positif has been quite sympathetic towards artistically ambitious Hollywood filmmakers, and has always been a champion of emerging filmmakers all over the world.

Arguments about the virtues of Hollywood cinema have been a central part of the French film criticism scene since the 1950s, and Positif’s contributions included defenses of John Huston and important work on the American-born Joseph Losey (who was blacklisted in the 1950s and made his best films in England).

Positif has also been committed to internationalism, consistently drawing attention to important filmmakers from around the world. Ciment sees this kind of discovery and advocacy as part of the magazine’s responsibility: “You have to be passionate, you have to want to discover new things.” Reflecting on the tendency of mainstream media in both Europe and North America to ignore important new work, he called magazines like Positif “a counterweight. A Korean film or an Iranian film without the support of the press can hardly exist. We play this small role, but it’s important. It keeps a flame burning.”

Jerry White teaches film and is a frequent contributor to the Program Guide of the San Francisco International Film Festival. He may be reached at gswhite@ualberta.ca.