POSITIF THINKING: A talk with Michel Ciment, a prime mover in the French film magazine Positif
Interview by Paul Brunick
Long-term editor and contributor to Positif, France’s preeminent magazine of film-lover fanaticism. Author of Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, “the best book ever put together about a filmmaker” (James Toback). Field commander of the anti-Cahiers camp, firing pointed polemics and withering wisecracks deep into enemy territory (“When Godard says, we were the first one to assign the director the chief role in the canon, it’s absolute bullshit”).
If film critic Michel Ciment has become a national treasure, he takes great pride in remaining a diamond in the rough. Ciment’s piercing intelligence is characteristically barbed with a caustic sense of humor. He doesn’t skewer his critical nemeses—he guts them. But this mischievous wit is always and everywhere gilded to a personally heartfelt and critically generous appreciation for filmmakers and their works. An ecumenical enthusiasm for all kinds of moviemaking—high and low, foreign and domestic, art and otherwise—is amply on display in Positif: Fifty Years, an English-language anthology of the magazine’s greatest hits edited by Ciment and published by MoMA in 2002. But Ciment the man is an equally eloquent embodiment of this spirit. Shuttling between modernist masterpieces and pop ephemera, the 70-year-old critic displayed a level of physical energy and up-to-the-minute awareness that put this 24-year-old interviewer to shame. Merely suggest a topic for discussion, and Ciment takes off like a bottle rocket.
Ciment was recently in New York to present the film series Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema.
PAUL BRUNICK: Let’s start at the beginning. Unlike most of the film journals founded in early Fifites France, the editorial board of Positif was originally based in Lyons's "provincial town." [Lyons is actually the second largest city in France.] How did this location affect the initial tone of the magazine? And did these outsider origins serve a symbolic function after the editorial board relocated to Paris? MICHEL CIMENT: First of all, most of the people who created Positifwere disbursed after two years, because they were not going to be professional film critics. They were all students who started this magazine. The characteristic of it was amateurism, not in the bad sense of the word, but in the good sense of “to love.” People who loved movies. Who had no plan of a career. Who did not want to become directors or producers through criticism. They just wanted to have cinema considered as a cultural field and to be taken as seriously as music or painting or literature. Also, nobody was paid. And because of the provincial aspect they were not inside this self-centered Parisian intellectual life, which is at once great but also has its limitations.
Because major cultural centers produce their own kind of provincialism?
Yes in a way, in a way. Like Belgium is sometimes more open than France to a lot of intellectual currents because they are more curious and so on, because they are not the center. When you’re in the center it’s sometimes easy to forget that there is something around the center. So I think that in a way the magazine has kept this spirit. I don’t think it could have survived in the provinces as it’s impossible in France, which is such a centralized country, to really make a good film magazine from Bordeaux or from Strassbourg. It’s just impossible. All the directors are in Paris, they hardly visit the provinces. All the private screenings are there. It’s in Paris that you see all these huge retrospectives at the Cinémathèque. The Cinémathèque, for instance, was a place that was extremely important for the young Positif and Cahiers critics. So it was impossible.
But still I think the spirit of these early days has survived. Very few of us have become professional filmmakers or screenwriters or producers. The motivation to write has really remained curiosity, the love of intellectual exchange, and mostly passion—the love of cinema. When we look at a film, the criterion really has never been ideological or theoretical—it has always been, do we like this film? Which can be Last Year at Marienbad or a John Ford movie. And it’s why we survived the horrible theoretical decade of the Seventies with Lacanism and Maoism and structuralism, and so on. Because people had totally forgotten what cinema was about. They were just looking at films and trying to put them into slots. Either they fitted into the slot or they didn’t. Positif never reacted like that. After that of course, once the pleasure is there, once the love is there, there is a will to analyze, the will to use concepts, the will to use psychoanalysis or sociology or history or whatever. But the aesthetic approach has always been paramount.
Do you think that the Surrealist orientation of many early Positif editors is connected to the magazine’s anti-ideological politics? The Surrealists were interested in aspects of art that are analytically irreducible, that can’t be fully rationalized. And they were happy to screen the most banal, artistically unambitious and politically reactionary films in the hope of discovering some transcendent moment of accidental art. It seems like this mindset is fundamentally less prone to dogma and more catholic (small-c!) in its tastes.
Definitely, definitely. You could say that in the first period of Positif, the first 10 years, there are two strands. The first is the provincial strand, with Bernard Chardere, who was the founder of the magazine and who is still alive and kicking. That was left-wing, love-of-cinema syndrome. And then there was the addition of a few writers when they came to Paris, like Robert Benayoun, Ado Kyrou, and Gérard Legrand, members of the Surrealist group. And they added this idea—which was not contradictory to the first strand—that horror films, Jerry Lewis, musical comedies or whatever could be as much art as, if you want, Rossellini or Bresson. So this lack of hierarchy—of course there was a hierarchy in the sense that they loved this painter more than the other painter—but it was not a hierarchy of low art and high art, between genre films and auteur films. So that obviously confirmed the initial style of the magazine, emphasized it. Perhaps the Surrealist period is not as representative of the whole magazine as Bernard Chardére. I think the magazine has been more faithful to Chardére’s initial youthful, passion-for-cinema openness than to the Surrealists. The Surrealists gave Positif its originality. Its total originality.
And also politically, those were left-wing people. Chardére was liberal in a classical way. The Surrealists were more Trotskyist, anarchistic and so on. But they were all anti-Stalinists, all of them. They were against the Communist party, which ruled the intellectual life of the period. In the Fifties, the Communist party represented 25 percent of the voters in France, it represented a huge colony of writers and so on, plus Sartre who was a fellow traveler and who worked with the Communists in many ways. But on the whole Positif totally escaped this context. Whereas Cahiers was extreme right-wing by many standards—
—even Bazin?
No! In fact Bazin and Doniol-Valcroze, who were the editors of Cahiers, were rather close to Positif. They liked the magazine very much, because they did not believe in the politique des auteurs in the strict sense of Truffaut, and they did not believe in Truffaut and Rohmer’s politics. So they were closer to us in fact. And the relationship to Cahiers, from the point of view of Positif, was against the new Right embodied by Truffaut and Rohmer rather than being against Bazin and Valcroze and Pierre Cast, who would write for both Positif and Cahiers. And each magazine had their own auteurs. Positif was defending Huston, was defending Aldrich—
Well, Aldrich was a shared passion.
Yes, perhaps. But Huston definitely and Wajda and Buñuel. Cahiers preferred Rossellini, Dreyer, and Hitchcock. The Cahiers people with their characteristic sense of self-promotion and public relation have emphasized (wrongly!) that the auteur theory started at Cahiers in the Fifties. That’s absolutely bullshit. It does not stand. If you read a magazine from 1928, Le Revue du Cinéma or even Louis Delluc’s first magazine Cinéart in 1921—what do you find as the body of the table of contents? What do you have? Sjöström, Stiller, King Vidor, Stroheim, Sternberg, Cecil B. DeMille, Griffith, Chaplin, and so on. And you have in Europe Lang, Murnau, Pabst, and so on. In France you have Abel Gance, René Claire, etc. So the auteur was already the director. I mean it was absolutely obvious! If you look at M, you have a “Fritz Lang Movie.” It was not Godard who first said, oh the auteur is now the center of the movie. No! What Cahiers did was find new auteurs like Tashlin (who was also recognized by Positif!) but they liked for instance directors like Nicholas Ray who were not well regarded in America. When Godard says, we were the first to give the director has place in the canon: it’s absolute bullshit.
Beyond this ongoing and quite spirited debate between Positif and Cahiers, I wonder if you see any major differences between these two French-language magazines and their English-language counterparts, Sight & Sound and Film Comment. Obviously the latter are underwritten by larger non-profit organizations where the former are not. But do you think there are also major differences in perspective or format?
Well, I like both of them very much, together with Cineaste, I think they are very serious magazines. I don’t read foreign languages, but I don’t think in Italy or in Germany there is anything comparable to them. I would say that the difference really is—we are all magazines of film buffs, that is clear—but I think in the French magazines there is more of a tradition of asserting one’s taste. If you read Positif over the years you really get the feeling that these are the people who we really defend, even if we sometimes over exaggerate in our praise. But still there is a canon of directors who stand out. When you open the magazine you see that there are four main articles in each issue about current things, then there are four or five film reviews, then there are 25 small reviews, then there is a dossier, and then there are retrospective articles. But you can see clearly the line: what we champion, what we defend, by this kind of hierarchy within the structure of the magazine. Which is not as visible in Sight & Sound and Film Comment, which I find more eclectic. I mean, we are also eclectic but I mean eclectic in the sense that things are all put on the same level, except the cover perhaps. I don’t think there’s a huge difference. Not the scholarship, not the style, which are of equal quality.
Can you explain for the uninitiated the structure of Positif’s editorial board?
It’s rather unique. We don’t have any editor in chief. It’s an editorial board of 15 people. Because as I said earlier the magazine is made by people who love films but who don't aspire to become filmmakers, a lot of people remain. But a lot of young ones have joined us, so we have several generations juxtaposed. It is a constant exchange. We have a meeting every week, about two and a half hours from about 5 to 7:30 in the afternoon. We discuss the current films, we discuss the contents of the magazine, which dossier we are going to prepare for the next six months. Everything is voted on. We look at which film we are going to put on the cover, which film has only a long review or a short review. All is decided collectively, really. Of course in any group there are people who are more equal than others. But that’s part of the group dynamic. You know there are people who come every week, people who come once a month, and obviously those who are constantly active and looking at films and going to screenings, going to festivals are going to have more influence—I don’t want to be hypocritical!—they’re simply going to have more influence than people who love to write but who are not so much involved in looking at everything. So it’s a kind of balance. If 15 people were all extraordinarily active, it would be disastrous. It would be fights all over the place. More or less the many rely on half a dozen people who select the films and then they write about them. But if they are there on Sunday, they participate in the discussions.
In the editorial letter published in the very first issue of Positif—a mission statement for the magazine entitled “Why We Are Going to Fight”—it’s written, “WE WANT: Discoveries rather than rehashes, however subtle.” Nearly 60 years later, how does the editorial board now balance revisiting the past with making fresh discoveries? Is there a quota or a rough ratio you aim for, or does it develop more pragmatically from issue to issue?
It is both pragmatic and natural. For instance the new issue appearing next week will be about the New Belgian Cinema. When Taiwanese cinema arrived, when Romanian cinema arrived, when Mexican and Argentinian cinema arrived—like in the Sixties with Czech or Canadian cinema—we feel that the magazine must focus on these cinemas that are new, these absolutely striking but current things. But at the same time—I think this was commented on in Film Comment—we recently had a 26-page dossier on Richard Fleischer who has been totally forgotten, and now we have another one on Cecil B. DeMille. We had one before on Raoul Walsh and William Wellman and so on. The main body is dedicated to the new, but half the dossiers are dedicated to the old cinema. It’s an exchange between the present and the past. But mostly we don’t want to become a historical magazine—in either sense of the word!
That same manifesto, Why We Fight, opens with the line: “You’re going to say—not another film magazine!” As oversaturated as the market for cinephile journals may have been in postwar France, the amount of criticism available in the age of the Internet is exponentially greater. How do you think Web publishing will affect the field of film criticism? Does Positif have long-term plans to transition toward digital journalism?
[laughs] Myself, I am not a participant of online film culture. We don’t really have a website except to sell back issues. We recently put up some mostly recent issues for 7 Euros, which is what they cost at newsstands. And we’ve had about 300 or 400 people buy issues. It was very striking and we were very surprised. For us it’s a big number. 400 people who probably live in small towns and such where they don’t sell it. So probably it’s the same abroad—you can find it in Rome and London but not easily.
But yes, I don’t really know. We believe in paper. I hope we can survive. We had a 10 percent increase in subscriptions last year, which is unusual. I mean Cahiers lost 7 million Euros in five years. So we are fairly happy we increased our circulation. But it’s very fragile. So I can understand why, when most writers get kicked out of their magazines, start their own website, and I am happy that you can read what they write. They are sometimes very talented. Maybe they are fired because they are very talented. Because they refuse to write very vulgar or quick judgments and so on. But I don’t know how it will affect criticism in general. The problem is that there are so many, many things out there that you have to be an expert just to know where to go. The Internet—it’s a jungle.
