A Must-Read: Rafaël Ouellet on Québécois Auteur Distribution

In a great Cinéastes invités blog post at 24 Images Rafaël Ouellet discusses his frustrations with the distribution of Québécois auteur films in Montréal.

 Gunning Down Everything That Moves...

"Here's a lot of question, with few answers. But the status quo doesn't work. I'm inviting those interested to respond, if they feel like it, here or elsewhere. This isn't a war but we just need to fix this system."

Now What Is Michel Ciment Doing Talking About Godard ?

Michel Ciment on Projection privée invites Zoé Bruneau (En attendant Godard), Chantal Pelletier (Et elles croyaient en Jean-Luc Godard), Olivier Séguret (Godard Vif) and Anne Wiazemsky (Un an après) to discuss Jean-Luc Godard. 

It's a strange subject for Ciment to tackle especially since Godard seems to be his sworn rival and enemy. 

But any chance to listen to Bruneau is an opportunity to rejoice!

Antoine de Baecque on Souleymane Cissé’s Baara

Antoine de Baecque would become canonized at Cahiers for writing its definitive history and then publishing exhaustive biographies on its key New Wave figures (so far there’s ones on Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer; and I’m sure that Chabrol and Rivette aren’t too far behind). Michel Cieutat quite nicely captures his reputation in La critique de Cinema en France (Ramsay Cinema). But before all of this, and before his violent rupture as chief editor in the late Nineties (Cf. Fissures at Cahiers), and before his lengthy tenure there just as a critic, he was just a young cinephile, who wanted to get published in Cahiers.

De Baecque’s first published critique in Cahiers dates from December 1984 and it’s on Souleymane Cissé’s Baara. As de Baecque describes it, “when Truffaut died, on the 21st of October 1984, everyone was shocked. So I sent my first review to Toubiana, to Cahiers, which was Truffaut’s house. I had to send something to Truffaut’s mailbox.”

After his entrance in the magazine, with his friend Stéphane Braunschweig (who, in his own right, would later become an important theater director), they would specialize in writing Entre deux films articles, which as the title suggest, are interviews with key Cahiers directors between projects. The first one of these would be with Jean-Claude Brisseau and then the others include Catherine Breillat, Lam Lê, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Luc Moullet, Alain Tanner and Souleymane Cissé. These articles capture these various directors at a particular time in their career and they provide insight on how the directors would stay afloat between projects (e.g. Brisseau would teach cinema classes) and also the difficulty that they can endure to make a film (e.g. Cissé describes natural disasters and deaths during the production of Yeelen).

This was the period where the Daney critics were slowly moving away from the magazine towards other projects and a new generation of younger ones were arriving. There was Michel Chion and Alain Philippon who both joined in 1981. But more precisely these new ‘Toubiana’ critics arrived a couple of years later with Marc Chevrie and Vincent Ostria (both 1983) and then Hervé Le Roux and Antoine de Baecque (both 1984). There would be more of them to join, as the decade would continue, but these four offer a representative sample of the way the new Cahiers critics would come to impose themselves at the magazine.

A lot of these writers would first start off by writing shorter Journal pieces or Notes critiques. And then slowly they would come to write more about the films and directors that are important to Cahiers. The team of writers is generally small and what makes Cahiers so unique, when it is run properly, is that the critics propose a unique approach to cinema, they propose a unique way to see a film. Cahiers then becomes a place, which is mixed with different generations of writers, and even though they might share different ideas, they still come together as a group, and what makes it exciting is to read how they respond to contemporary cinema and produce these dynamic film reviews, which compels one to go out and discover these films.

The previously mentioned Entre deux films articles is just one example of this. In the Journal section, aside from its journalistic role, these features allowed for experimentation with a new writing style and a place for De Baecque to discuss the directors of his predilection. De Baecque would place himself ‘between’ these Cahiers auteurs to then best impose them later on in Critiques.

De Baecque's writing style is both traditional and literary. His critiques seem to revolve around three key tenets: a Bazinien spirituality of the image, a theatrical understanding of an actor’s work and gestures, and an appreciation for space and natural landscapes. The latter two interests arise from his background in theater and nature walking (Cf. La traversée des Alpes), though his university background in history would not be clearly apparent. Instead of writing on the major Cahiers auteurs, de Baecque would find a place at the margins of the magazine at first by championing mostly African and Asian films, which are partly in the poetic-religious vein of Tarkovsky (though this connection is never made explicit).

Some of de Baecque’s early Critiques include: Shohei Imamura’s Why Not?, Michael Graham’s Aspern, George Miller’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth and King of the Children, Norman Jewison’s A Soldier’s Story, Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor, Luigi Comencini’s Cuore, Kiju Yoshida’s Wuthering Heights, Luc Moullet’s La Comédie du travail, Yoshishige Yoshida’s Promesse, Nikita Mikhalkov’s Dark Eyes, Pierre Étaix’s L'âge de Monsieur est avancé and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

De Baecque’s critique of Cissé’s Yeelen perhaps best illustrates his skills as a critic and how he was able to find a place for himself at Cahiers. After having reviewed the first Cissé film at Cahiers (e.g. Baara, see my translation below) and writing an Entre deux films on Cissé, in this review of Yeelen, after gracefully discussing Cissé’s mise-en-scène and highlighting the spirituality of its natural lighting and locations (aligning himself with a classical Bazinien philosophy), de Baecque concludes by announcing the birth of a new national cinema. This might even recall some of Godard’s statements on the potential of African cinema (Cf. Godard in Cahiers N.300)

In the review, Cela s’appellle l’aurore, de Baecque writes,

“After the traumatic, the cataclysm, the world renews itself in a calm and in a golden light. It is the sunlight that permits this miracle of the birth of a new world. This new light provides a soft clarity from a sun that renews and warms the beings under it and makes them hope in life. Yeelen is the film of this miracle.” 

De Baecque describes the film as both mythic and tragic, and on its unique tone, writes, “Yeelen is a film done with grace, it belongs to the divine, and there is a lightness to how it unfolds.” He concludes, “For Cissé, the last scene has a special importance, the light that shines is always auroral, simple yet tremendous, innocent and clear. To answer the question ‘What is light?’ Cissé wants to answer in terms of an aurora. This is where comes the film’s veritable birth: that of African cinema.”

But de Baecque isn’t the only important new writer in this period. Vincent Ostria, for example, stands out for having written the Critique of one of the best Canadian films of this period, Francis Mankiewicz’s Les Bons Débarras. (It regularly makes it on TIFF’s Top Canadian Films list and Jean-Marc Vallée cites it as a major influence). Ostria’s generous and thoughtful review, Terroriste d’amour, is in the December 1985 issue (N.378). In it he discusses the difficulty they have to see Quebecois films in Paris, “We haven’t really discussed Quebecois cinema since it has been trendy in the Sixties. Today, very few films actually arrive to France. Too few, actually… It took five years (!) for this film to come out normally in our halls, in a small Parisian circuit.” Ostria highlights the script by Réjean Ducharme and the exoticness of the Quebecois language, which is subtle in detail. He highlights its simple stories and the richness of its characters, and especially highlights the little girl, “The gaze of this girl (Charlotte Laurier, amazing in how she’s a polymorph, she eclipses all of the other actors) on the world and on objects is terrible.” And on Francis (the nephew of Joseph L.) Mankiewicz, which he compares to Cassavetes, “he puts into perspective with a great attention this authenticity and raw truth of these three characters.” For Ostria the film is about how, “Love, is war.”

While Hervé Le Roux stands out pretty early for an Événement he did on ‘Made In New York’ directors, a subject which is still being renewed at the magazine today. Jim Jarmusch, with his European gaze on American culture (which makes him similar to Wenders), would be an exciting discovery in this period. Le Roux gave him his first cover for Stranger than Paradise (N.366).

The way that Jarmusch would evolve at Cahiers is pretty impressive. Yann Lardeau, reviewed Permanent Vacations, which he really admires (“An intensity that is so particular, singular, and all encompassing”), Le Roux stars him in the Événement on New York independent films, along with Jackie Raynal (Hotel New York) and Bette Gordon (Variety). Le Roux describes all of these films as a jour, in touch with our times. Le Roux in his review En route vers l’est is subtly able to integrate Jarmusch into the Cahiers cannon by highlighting how his aesthetic fits the one of the magazine. He compares Jarmusch to Skolimowski (Moonlighting) and Polanski (Deux hommes et une valise). But what Jarmusch brings that is new is how his films are punk and his use of music. For Jarmusch there is a new freedom but, like with Leos Carax, it’s already lost. Le Roux writes, “Jarmusch, by his tact, by his minimalism (the black and white, the fade-outs, the refusal to be formalized, a taste for the small) joins him with Carax in another pursuit: to grasp, without loosing one's self, a little bit of fresh air." Iannis Katsahnias would go on to review Down by Law. He would be an important director to look out for in the period ahead.

***

Antoine de Baecque on Souleymane Cissé’s Baara.

Cahiers Critiques: Balla le pousseur, Balla l’ingénieur

(Cahiers du Cinéma, December 1984, N.366)

The Malian has a beautiful body. Long, thin, airy. He also knows how to use it. He moves around in elegance, slowly, as if he was in total control of his gestures. We sometimes have the impression that he naturally walks in slow motion, with a dignity that, to the European who is always busy, recalls an African prince.

Balla Diarra and Balla Traore, the main characters in Souleymane Cissé’s film Baara, possess an aerial dignity. From the first shot in the film, we notice Diarra’s body, his naked back while he’s sleeping. Then the two men slowly walk towards the front of the frame, towards a fire, which blurs our visibility – this brings the film into the realm of dreams where bodies escape it.

But with Cissé, there is a natural elegance that quickly takes place through the most quotidian work gestures. Balla Diarra is a worker. He pushes his chariot through Bamako, from the market to the factories and its residential neighborhoods.But, more often then not, he observes: he assists, passively but presently, to the disputes between the women in the market, he waits in front of the factory while waiting for passengers. It's slowness that characterizes his body, a slowness of the gesture, a gaze under heavy eyelids, a slowness, which, as always for him, has a use: to act, to gaze.

Balla Traore, is an engineer, who has just returned to the country after his studies in France, who wants to ‘reorganize’ the textile factory.

To reorganize, here again, is to impose a certain slowness: less frantic, less work hours, and a diminishing of work hours. To impose at the factory a function that’s European mixed with a slowness of the African gesture.

The two Ballas, the cart driver and the engineer, fortunately meet, by chance, while they are transporting bags of grain to his wife. The two men notice that they are similar: they share a sense of humor, which unites them. Their two families have bonds, and this goes back to their ancestors. They are so close that everything becomes possible, they even hurt each other: treating the other like a slave, for example. And this, contrary to what we would believe, doesn’t create a hierarchy between both men, it isn’t embarrassing, and it isn’t one of a master-slave relation. There is a hierarchy, but it’s not that of a family, it’s social.

Balla Traore is named responsible of the factory by its director, who is villainous, which comes out through his relationship with his wife (who cheats on him), more so than due to his actual work. Balla Traore profits from this to engage Balla Diarra into the world of the factory, a world which will use his body in a whole new way.

This mobile and light body is never stuck. It’s suddenly overcome by brisk irruptions of violence, like those of the Africans, which are overcome by frenetic fits, in Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous (1955). This is a madness that can lead to a ritual sacrifice. Cissé imprints these bodies with an attitude that is subtle, improvisational, and which can’t be ceased. This African attitude, just like slowness can also be, is principally intervened in the work of the women. It is the women in effect that, usually, provokes this violence. They laugh loudly, insult each other and fight, they make crude jokes, are obscene, and take lovers. This is an open violence that is always expressed with nonchalance. The acting of the women is theatrical to the extreme, but is ‘naturally’ theatrical: Cissé films women who act in front of a neutral camera, which is posed right in front of them. It’s only the women that have the right to scream or laugh briskly. This is a conjunction that’s essential for Cissé, and which give all of his films this freshness that’s close to a constant improvisation. There is a masterful lightness that becomes the most evident sign of love. It’s almost carnal, for both the camera and the actors.

Men also, sometimes, are able to let themselves go. But there, far from the noble violence (because its theatrical) of the women, it is ridicule: to satisfy a simple passion, the factory owner, strangles his wife and finally compromises all of his life. The man would naturally be calmer. He uses his body like a slow pendulum, and not like a rapid tool. And his slowness in which he acts, gives him a formidable sensibility to things. And these objects, which he touches, he feels them with his whole body, directly, without any intermediary: the African eats with his hands, without any utensils, and he likes to play with his food. It is the mediation which is strange, which is violent. The introduction of Diarra, who wants to Europeanize the textile factory, is marked by this, from the start, by the mediation of objects. The first shot of Diarra working in the factory is a close-up of his hand surrounded by rubber, which is just as free as when it’s playing with fruit. Diarra manipulates these products dangerously, which are sticky and sharp. The irruption of the object, is the violence: the product is estranged to the corporal universe of the Malian.

Diarra takes part in a painful learning process from the other urban world, from this work in factories. This work that breaks the body, which deconstructs the corporal primitive into pieces. The body, in the factory, changes. The workers tend to be really skinny (the machine kills those who are too weak) or full of muscle (the stronger ones tend to resist and become even stronger with the contact of the machines). The body looses its elegance and becomes disproportionate, whether really skinny or massive.

Through this enigma of the body, its ability to connect breaks up, its all of this practice of cohabitation, which isn’t good, that it is brought out to light and denounced (though Cissé is more just presenting it, then is he trying to fight it, which gives it its elegance and efficiency). There are two types of societies that are constantly mixing. In the city, first: beside the large offices, there are regular street people. In terms of fashion, then: there are two customs that constantly coexist: the African robe, which is both suggestive and modest, where the body is free, and then there is the European costume – though, which is profoundly marked by an African sensibility: it isn’t through their wardrobe that the rich style themselves, but with clothes from the big stores ‘Tati’, where products are sold in French supermarkets: there is a lag that marks the specificity of a culture which chooses what it wants from the European culture. This coexistence has never been better shown then in the scene where Djénéba, the wife of the factory owner, puts French makeup on, and then perfumes herself more traditionally.

And it’s in this ritual combat, which has itself become ritualized, between Europe and Africa, where we find our drama: Balla Traore, who has become responsible for the factory, brings with him his new methods: democracy and fraternization. These are methods that are quickly condemned by the director, who then no longer trusts Traore and gets rid of him, beating him to death. This awkward crime is discovered by the factory workers, who, in solidarity, desperately chase him (which is stopped by the intervention of the police). He’s forgiven by an old worker, who barely has any power. This presence reaffirms old traditional hierarchies of the senior, which is different then that of the one of the factory, where one must respect the boss.

The intrigue closes. Traore is dead, and the director is stopped (for the murder of his wife, more so than the one of the engineer), and Diarra returns to his first job. The intrigue progresses throughout the film in moments, simply and with evidence. This intrigue could have been guessed by all spectators, but which Cissé, still leaves room for subtlety. Because the story of this encounter between these two men was made possible by a skillful talent, one that is nearly incredible due to Souleymane Cissé. The elegance of the bodies, is the elegance of the filmmaking, first off. This filmmaking, which always surprises, the spectator and also the director. This game of playing, incessant ruptures that surprise the spectator and the actors, it is Cissé that provokes them, in his search for the improvisation on the faces and the bodies of his African actors (the long shot by the water is all the while innocent, suffocating, exhilarating, painful, and continues the rhythm of the film). The progression of the story owes everything to the good desire and the camera mobility of Souleymane Cissé.

Antoine de Baecque

Adieu Godard ?

Jean-Marc Vallée at RVCQ

My biggest disappointment so far this year is not having gone to this. 

Jean-Marc Vallée is one of the great directors. He's the eyes and ears of a Canadian cinephilia in the Hollywood machine.

 Read Marie-Josée Roy's coverage of his Leçon de cinéma. It's fantastic.

Extracts from an Interview with Antoine de Baecque

[…]

“Like said Serge Daney, or actually more like the opposite, cinema didn’t watch over my childhood. I wasn’t a cinephile, like were the other young writers at Cahiers from my generation. The cinema didn’t count for much during my childhood. I discovered it actually a little late when I was in hypokhâgne and khâgne. I was twenty years old. And the cinema that I discovered wasn’t necessarily the popular auteurs. My first shock was Andrei Tarkovsky. This wasn’t part of the Cahiers culture. It was something different. It was only after this that I experienced a catch-up effect. I had to discover all of the films that I missed through my adolescent. Notably when I joined Cahiers, and more precisely when I wrote the two volumes of its history. For that task I had to watch an enormous amount of films, notably all of the American films since the 1950s.

“I wasn’t born into a cinephilia, like are most people at Cahiers. I have a trajectory that is a little particular. My father, didn’t value cinema too highly. He was a man of the theater, which was initially also my culture. He was a playwright. Every week he would take me to see two or three plays. This is why in my adolescent my culture of theater was bigger than that of cinema. It’s paradoxical at Cahiers, where theater is generally disliked. This makes me pretty rare there for liking theater, which I continue to attend, and sometimes write about. I remember conversations with Daney, who would tell me, that theater bored him and he didn’t like how everyone spoke so loudly. The Cahiers cinephile culture was also historically build against the theater. The only strong to link to cinema in my biography was experienced through a director that my father worked with; otherwise he didn’t really work in cinema. But my father was actually the scriptwriter for the director Gérard Blain. I knew him well. My father actually wrote all of the scripts of Gérard Blain’s first films. So Gérard was a major figure in my childhood and adolescence. And it is like that that I first had contact with the cinema. To see my father work with him, to go onto the set, when I was only 12 or 13.

“After this, it was Tarkovsky that was a real shock. So afterwards I started to go see all of the new films by Godard and Truffaut when they came out. So now we are at the beginning of the Eighties. I was born in 1962 so I was 20 in 1982. So it is at this moment when I started to go a lot to the cinema. And really quickly my relationship with the cinema brought me towards criticism. I wrote about what I was watching. The films of Tarkovsky and I also really liked African cinema. I wrote just for myself on Passion, Prénom Carmen and the other films by Godard in this period. It was decisive.

“I think I’m one of the rare people at Cahiers that has a complete scholarly and academic background from the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. I studied literature, and at school I formed a group. We created a theater company and we started a literary magazine. I also created a film magazine, which exists today, and which is called Vertigo. It was really hand-made and artisanal. We are in 1984 and through this magazine we have a more active role in the cinephile culture. We went to both the Cannes and Venice film festival this year. It was still possible in this period to just attend these festivals as a cinephile and to be able to watch films. It’s at Cannes in 1984 where I met the guys at Cahiers like Toubiana and his team that was there. It’s a particular moment at Cahiers because a lot of people that are there are about to leave like Assayas, Tesson and Bergala. They were the pillars at Cahiers since the beginning of the Eighties and they helped return Cahiers towards the center of cinema. They are leaving to make films, or become distributors or producers. Leos Carax was part of this too.

[…]

“Daney was no longer at Cahiers. When I arrive it’s 1984 and he’s already at Libération.. I’ve been reading him at Libé, which has always been my newspaper. I’ve always read him with interest, but never knew him personally. I met him a little later. I remember that it was Nicolas Saada, one of the younger critics from my generation who arrived around the same time as I did, in the mid-Eighties, who one day during a projection, it must have been sometime between 1987 and ’87, he pointed Daney out to me, and told me that that was the greatest French film critic. I knew the name, but I wouldn’t have recognized him.

“So the chief editor of Cahiers that I met was Toubiana. It was Toubiana that managed Cahiers, and he was recruiting new critics. So this is how he was to be the first person that I met there. He was from the previous generation, he was older. But Serge was someone that was really attentive to the young. There was always a bit of a pedagogical vocation to him. There was something filial too, of being a mentor and having disciples. So he welcomed all of us who came to Cahiers, even though our paths were really different. There was Thierry Jouse, Nicolas Saada, Frédéric Strauss, Iannis Katsahnias, and Frédéric Sabouraud. This is a kind of the group that arrives at Cahiers at the same time. So Toubiana would have a relationship that is kind of paternal towards us, in the good sense of the term. There is a filiation. We were like his first children. Because before this people would come to visit Cahiers to see Daney actually. It was Daney who was more the paternal figure of the generation before us, like for Assayas and Bergala. So we are his first generation, the children of Toubiana. So there is a strong relationship with him.

“But Toubiana wasn’t really a critic. He didn’t write much, nor was he that impressive as a critic. Daney was impressive as a critic. It isn’t something either that he would describe himself as. The force of Serge is the encounter. That is to say that he’s a great interviewer. He gets people to talk, and he listens to them. So for us, he listened to us, and we talked to him. We could dialogue with Serge. He did a great job at animating the team at Cahiers. He had a lot of ideas. But he wasn’t really someone that was impressive as a critic. My relationship with Toubiana was one of friendship, and of filitation. He guided Cahiers. It’s something that is important to understand Toubiana and Cahiers in this period. It became a small cinephile enterprise, and he was its director, the boss. Toubiana, as I would define him, is more of a creator of a press group. He’s from a certain generation of those who created journals. There was also Serge July who created Libération. So Toubiana in a certain way recreated Cahiers like a press enterprise. And Serge was really attentive in regards to this. He had his ideas about cinema, but what counted for him was less the way we wrote our reviews, than it was how to invest Cahiers into the cinema. To go out to report on filmmaking sets, to look into areas worth exploring. So to fill the Journal des Cahiers, which was his invention. This was at the heart of Cahiers since 1980. The Journal proposed news regarding the profession, but seen through the perspective of Cahiers. It was journalism more than it was criticism. So Toubiana was more of a journalist than a critic, in a certain way. He was also the one who was responsible for the finances of Cahiers. He was able to transform this moribund magazine into a lucrative magazine. It was prosperous. The quantity of issues went from 2 to 3 thousand to nearly 50,000. This was Toubiana. To transform this little gauchiste magazine into a real enterprise of press. He animated the group. He transformed our ideas into articles, into journalism, and into books. It was he who created the Éditions de l'Étoile. He ccreated these cinephile events like the ciné-club and special projections. It’s the professional aspect of the magazine. He was able to reinstall Cahiers within the heart of the cinema profession. This was Toubiana, and it was really his force. Toubiana was more the boss of a press group, an entrepreneur, while Daney was more a critic, and a voyager, who closely analyzed the material of cinema.

[…]

“So my first text in Cahiers, I wrote it in the fall of 1984. It’s on an African film by Souleymane Cissé, Baara. I sent my review to Cahiers. I actually frequented its critics and the office, but I never dared show them my writing, to say that I would write on such and such film. I was really impressed by those who were writing there. And then, when Truffaut died, on the 21^st of October 1984, everyone was shocked. So I sent my first review to Toubiana, to Cahiers, which was Truffaut’s house. I had to send something to Truffaut’s mailbox. Serge published this review in the December 1984 issue. It’s my first text in Cahiers, this critique of Cissé’s Baara. So after that, I was now part of Cahiers. I wrote my first text and which was published as a Critique, and this felt great.

“I have an anguished memory of this period. Because I could now go to Cahiers and propose things to write, but I was anxious because I felt like an imposter, because my cinematographic culture wasn’t that big. And those who worked with the new critics – it wasn’t Toubiana, who you only saw us at the beginning – in the machine which was Cahiers, those who put together each issue, were Claudine Paquot, with two other young critics, who were actually a bit older than me, and those were Marc Chevrie and Hervé Le Roux. They were really the pillars at Cahiers when I arrived. They were the ones who I saw when I went to the Cahiers office, which was near the Bastille on the Passage de la Boule-Blanche. So I go there and I see them, and I bring them my reviews, I propose them pieces, and I have a lot of anxiety about this. We never know if a piece is going to be accepted. I still remember the sensation from hearing the phone ring when they called. Sometimes it worked well, and other times not. This ringing noise was like a nightmare. We were nervous about this part of the job. Cahiers was like a temple.

“I realized that I had to find a place for myself there. But it was complicated. I wasn’t the most legitimate writer there. I hardly knew American cinema. Horror films made me too scared. So I tried to bring something else, something to carve my own niche.  I started out writing about African films. But also on Tarkovsky. These are two combats that really brought me into the magazine. My first cover film review was for a Critique of another Souleymane Cissé film, Yeelen. It’s a magnificent African film. So this is in 1987. The title of the piece was ‘Cela s’appelle l’aurore’.

“This was what I was bringing to Cahiers. The other big fight for me was Tarkovsky, who wasn’t at all liked at Cahiers. It was a cinema of the imagination, dreams and of spirituality. This wasn’t what Cahiers was interested in. So with Michel Chion, we would change this. So in 1986 we would make a dossier on Tarkovsky. This contributes to my legitimacy at Cahiers. So I grew up there through what I could bring to it, whether it was African cinema or directors that were a little to its margins, like Tarkovsky or Manoel de Oliveira, who would also be someone really important to me. I would make myself a place there by being the specialist on this kind of thing.

“So everything that was central to the magazine, like French or American cinema, I wouldn’t bother to touch because I didn’t know it that well, and there were others who knew it better than I did. The great specialist on American cinema of my generation was Iannis Katsahnias and Nicolas Saada. They wrote on Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma and Cronenberg. It was their thing, since they had a knowledge on that culture, which I didn’t have.

[…]

“When you arrive like I did in 1984, you are really far from writing cover reviews. We arrive by writing short pieces. I remember the first group meeting that I went to. We talked about all of the new films, but that which concerned the new critics were the little films, that nobody else wanted to write about. We were really far from being able to write a cover review. My first memory of a cover review was really important. It was on Yeelen in 1987, and this is three years after I got there.

“At the beginning you participate more in the concrete creation of an issue. And since Cahiers has to talk about a lot of films, then there are also the bad ones. So we wrote little capsule reviews in the Notes sur d’autres film section. And slowly you grow there, and you get to write more lines, and slowly you earn being able to write more about the films that are important to the magazine.

“What I remember the most about the covers, which are important to a magazine, is more what was going on at the end of the Eighties, more so than the beginning. So we discuss what film will get the cover. There is a committee of writers who, at the time, would meet pretty frequently, though it varied. Toubiana really liked these meetings, because he really liked to talk. They took place every 15 days or 3 weeks. There we discussed what would make the cover. First thing that needs to be said was there was no interference, or pressure – or at least we didn’t experience it, maybe Toubiana did – from the distributors of the films. Because sometimes people say that distributors purchase the right to be featured on a cover, but this wasn’t the case at Cahiers in the Eighties. But I would find out that in the Fifties this wasn’t the case. In that period the covers would not reflect the magazine’s editorial choices.

            “So we discuss, and what’s important, is that we pick a good cover. It should be a film that regroups all of us critics, but also the readers. The covers are something that a reader can see himself in a magazine, and which motivates them to buy it. It’s commercially important too. I would find this out ten years later when I become the chief editor of Cahiers. The difference in a cover can affect 50% of your sales. It’s incredible. On this matter, Toubiana was really smart, so he should be the one to discuss this further. So there were no covers in the Eighties that the Cahiers team didn’t decide on. This wouldn’t have been possible. Everyone had to agree.

“Another important thing regarding the covers is the surprise effect. There should be a provocation. I have strong memories, first of my Yeelen cover, and then the one with Tim Burton’s Batman. Because it was a true choice by us critics, of this new generation of critics that I was a part of. Toubiana didn’t really like it. He thought it was too much Hollywood commerce, too many tricks. There was a critic Iannis Katsahnias, who sadly died of AIDS at a too young age, who was really important regarding this, since he was the one who wrote about, and was one of the top explorers of American cinema. He was really important in regards to the Cahiers relationship with American cinema in this period. He was the one who discovered Tim Burton, with Nicolas Saada. They watched Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, and they decided that Burton was a really important director.

“So Tim Burton’s first cover at Cahiers on Batman created a real scandal at Cahiers. Because some readers refused the cover. For them, it was the worst of Hollywood, commerce, and special effects. I don’t know if the archive is still at Cahiers, but we got a lot of people who unsubscribed after it. There were insulting letters, people telling us that we betrayed them, that we sold out. It was all this one cover. But the thing is, which is evident today, is that Cahiers was right. The discovery of Tim Burton as an auteur has been proven, and this passage on the cover of Cahiers was part of his initiation. The critic imposed on the reader this prophetic vision. This is the future of American cinema. This young man in his thirties, who made Batman, an important film, is an artist.

“Batman made me realize that Burton was important. I’ve seen all of his films, I interviewed him, I got him to talk. I became the specialist on Burton at Cahiers. He’s my first American object at Cahiers, and my first object at the heart of Cahiers, and it’s important for me at Cahier to have Tim Burton. To seize Tim Burton. I actually stole Burton from Katsahnias and Saada. Still, Nicolas, when I see him, who no longer likes Burton, still tells me that I was wrong for picking Burton, who he thinks is no longer interesting. We laugh about it. After the Batman cover, we have him. And for his next film, Edward Scissorhands, everyone agrees that it’s a great film. I was marked at Cahiers by Tim Burton.

“A cover like this which is provocative is something typical at Cahiers. I experienced two moments like this at Cahiers of provocative covers. The other great cover is on Spielberg’s E.T., with a review by Jean Narboni in 1984. This cover also had the same effect. Cahiers said Spielberg was important and its readers disagreed. It was fundamental to reinstall at Cahiers the Hollywood cinema. There are covers like this that are important to the history of Cahiers and its relationship with American cinema. Batman was essential.

“With the Batman cover, Cahiers re-found its historical mission, to impose a love for Hollywood cinema in France. This is the work Truffaut did with Hitchcock. It’s the same kind of provocation. When Chabrol, Truffaut, and Rivette made a special issue on Hitchcock in 1954, it’s the same thing as giving Batman a cover in 1989. It’s the same operation. We’re saying that inside the Hollywood commercial system, that there can be something important. It’s not because he’s commercial that we like him, but because he’s a great artist and director. And this is what we have to love in cinema. In the Eighties there is a return towards this mission, which is practically the founding mission of the magazine, that at the center of American cinema that there are auteurs. And where it is the most explicit is in Hollywood. Cahiers re-finds its historical role at this moment, it renews something that was lost in the Sixties and Seventies.

Making-Of: Tu Dors Nicole