Michel Ciment, the esteemed French movie critic, historian, writer, radio producer and editor of the influential movie journal Positif, has died. He was 85.
His dying was reported Monday by the French radio channel France Inter, the house of his tradition program Le Masque et la Plume since 1970.
Ciment was “maybe the freest and most encyclopedic thoughts that movie criticism has ever produced,” Le Masque et la Plume producer Jérome Garcin in an announcement. He made what could be his final look on the present in September.
The Paris native additionally produced Projection privée on France Tradition radio from 1990-2016. He was “an immense critic and historian who devoted his complete life to passing on, in phrases and in writing, his erudition and his ardour for the seventh artwork,” an announcement from the channel stated.
Ciment joined Positif after sending in a narrative concerning the Orson Welles movie The Trial in 1963 and would change into its editor, organising the month-to-month publication as a rival to Cahiers du Cinéma.
Ciment wrote books on Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Francesco Rosi, Fritz Lang, Jane Campion and John Boorman, and his Passport to Hollywood, first revealed in 1987, included interviews with Billy Wilder, John Huston, Joseph Mankiewicz, Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Wim Wenders.
In a 2012 Sight & Sound critics’ ballot, he listed his favourite movie as Kubrick’s 2001: A Area Odyssey.
On X, former Cannes Movie Pageant president of the Gilles Jacob wrote that Ciment was “not solely an ideal critic and internationally famend historian, but additionally a curious spirit about cinema and artwork who had fought onerous all his life.”
He served as a juror at Cannes and at festivals in Venice, Berlin, Locarno, San Francisco and elsewhere over time and was a Chevalier of the Order of Benefit, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and Officer within the Order of Arts and Letters.
Survivors embrace his spouse, Evelyne, and son, Gilles.
“To say that Michel was passionate concerning the cinema was to do him an injustice. He lived and ate and dreamed cinema,” Boorman wrote. “I’m so sorry for his household but additionally for myself. I cherished him and admired him, he was an authentic.”
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