Cineaste editor Gary Crowdus invited me to write a letter for the Summer 2024 issue commenting on an interview they ran with the late Michel Ciment. Here’s what I sent and what they published. (Note: I was subsequently commissioned by Sticking Place Books’ Paul Cronin to be interviewed for the second volume in the series inaugurated by Michel Ciment and A Shared Cinema. I invited my friend Ehsan Khoshbakht, a programmer at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, to be my interlocutor, and the result, Travels in the Cities of Cinema, will be out this spring.) — J.R.
The Lasting Influence of France’s Michel Ciment
In N.T. Binh’s interview with the late Michel Ciment, labeled “The Seven Cardinal Virtues of the Critic,” responding to a question about the advice he’d give to an aspiring critic, Ciment replies, “First and foremost, the temptation to be avoided at all costs…is to want a film to be something other than what its author set out to make.” But if I were asked the same question, I’d be tempted to reply, “Above all, don’t con yourself into believing that a work’s conscious or unconscious intentions can be objectively known, even by its author, much less used as a basis for any value judgment.” To think otherwise is tantamount to believing that criticism can somehow be “objective” (apart from clarifying the basis of one’s subjectivity) or that calling any film good or bad can mean anything without adding good or bad for what and for whom. Which is another way of saying that Ciment falling into the critical hornet’s nest of intentionality and disinterested evaluation reflects an overall desire to address the status quo of mainstream critical consensus, whatever its pitfalls and delusions.
Having just read the English translation of Binh’s book-length interview with Ciment, A Shared Cinema (New York: Sticking Place Books, 2024), that these Virtues are drawn from, I must concede that most of what Ciment has to say is both intelligent and sensible as well as informative, despite his mainstream, middle-of-the-road disparagement of the avant-garde (e.g., “Béla Tarr has certainly made some wonderful films with sublime imagery, but five hours can be a bit much” — presumably in reference to Tarr’s seven-hour-plus 1994 masterpiece Sátántangó). I’m also personally grateful to him for having invited me to interview and write about Jim McBride for Positif half a century ago, years before Serge Daney got me to serve briefly as Cahiers du cinéma’s New York correspondent.
The feuding between those magazines was so fierce in those days that even a couple of years ago, a former Cahiers staffer actually chided me for saying hello to him at a festival. But Ciment’s work as a critic, interviewer, and historian will clearly last, however much his populism may collide with my more bohemian and niche-market instincts.
Jonathan Rosenbaum