April 16, 2003

By Johnny Ray Huston

THE SAN FRANCISCO International Film Festival takes place about one month before the Cannes Film Festival – or eleven months later. Both chronologies have their truths. As perhaps the last major fest before (or should I say after?) Cannes, the SFIFF is at a particular remove from that event's brand-new-and-ballyhooed premieres. But Cannes and the SFIFF share two major themes that are especially charged this year: France seen through the eyes of the United States and the United States seen through the eyes of France.

These connections aren't lost on Michel Ciment, who since 1966 has been an editor and writer at Positif magazine. Each spring Positif devotes the majority of one issue to Cannes coverage. And this year Ciment has also been selected as the guest programmer at the SFIFF.

"Cinema in France has always played a central role in the intellectual life of the country," Ciment declares during a recent phone interview. "American and British criticism doesn't seem as involved in discovery and intellectual debates. Of course, there's the famous Andrew Sarris versus Pauline Kael controversy" – itself an extension of French auteur theory – "but that's a rarity. On the other hand, talking about the quality of style and analysis, I would certainly say that many American film critics are in fact better than French critics. Since my youth I have read a number of people: Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, and James Agee."

Coedited by Ciment and Laurence Kardish, the recently published collection Positif 50 Years provides an overview of Positif's brand of film criticism. The fab-u-lashed right eye of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange glares from its cover – a wordless expression of Ciment's preferences (he's authored a Stanley Kubrick study) and an iconic symbol of British cinema, often viewed as a scourge by Positif's arch rival, Cahiers du cinéma.

"I think Cahiers du cinéma for most of its history and Positif for all of its history are distinguished from [English-language] magazines like Film Comment and Sight and Sound," Ciment claims, when asked about those publications, which – unlike Positif – are extensions of larger arts institutions (Film Society of Lincoln Center and the British Film Institute, respectively). "They are film-buff, historical magazines with very good reviewing and articles about the past. But they don't have the commitment of Cahiers and Positif, who have really participated in fights about world cinema, in arguments about aesthetics and politics."

Evidence of the early skirmishes between Cahiers and Positif can be found in Jean Douchet's lavishly illustrated book French New Wave. Without a doubt, the new wave-era Cahiers representative whom Positif most loved to hate was Jean-Luc Godard. A Positif review dismisses the jump cuts of Breathless as "lapses in continuity," and by the arrival of 1961's A Woman Is a Woman, the attacks have become personal: Raymond Borde calls Godard "a pretentious idiot," adding that if Orson Welles considered Hollywood an electric train then Godard is stuck in the "rattle stage."

One could say such attacks are symptoms of auteur envy; Positif's masthead hasn't been populated by as many, or as many renowned, directors as that of Cahiers'. Nonetheless, the magazine's resistance to dogma, and its own artistic links – in particular to the surrealist movement – have allowed certain freedoms, especially an approach to genre that isn't strictly auteur-driven, and thus is more attuned to, say, horror's and comedy's imaginative possibilities. Positif 50 Years includes a major souvenir of France's love affair with Jerry Lewis, and incisive (if solemn) pieces on Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Interdisciplinary rigor is another Positif trait; in the collection, Ciment's essay on Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven doubles as a study of photography and American literature.

Such depth is difficult to achieve, let alone sustain, in short-review formats – which can all too easily feel like a rote, dancing-bear approach to movie analysis. Over the past decade, even the once-mighty Cahiers – no longer modeling what Ciment witheringly deems "Maoist or Stalinist trends" – has become consumer-driven in appearance. "The problem with going mainstream is that you may lose your identity and not catch a larger audience," Ciment says. "That's not my problem, though – I'm at Positif."

Indeed, the consistently leftist-anarchist Positif has only expanded its essayistic approach, including a 26-page dossier devoted to a particular subject in each issue. "It was obvious from the first films of Tsai Ming-liang and Takeshi Kitano that these people were extraordinary directors," Ciment notes when I mention Positif's large number of dossiers devoted to contemporary Asian cinema. Then he makes another distinction: "I am not as keen as some of my colleagues in Cahiers or other French newspapers on Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike. I would not put them on the level of Hou Hsiao-hsien or Wong Kar-wai – the great world directors."

As the "great world directors" (including Wong Kar-wai, possibly) descend on Cannes in May, at least one French auteur will have partially relocated to the state that contains Hollywood. In 29 Palms, Bruno Dumont – whose films have thus far been set in or near his hometown region of Bailleul – turns his murderously investigative gaze to Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. While 29 Palms is vying to be one of the four French entries in the Official Competition at Cannes, here in S.F., Ciment has selected twice that amount for a noncompetitive showcase. "By picking French films I was in a better position to choose something original," he explains.

The eight features in Ciment's Contemporary French Cinema program at the SFIFF include a trilogy by Lucas Belvaux and His Brother, the latest mortality excavation by Patrice Chéreau. He's also picked In My Skin, the directorial debut of Marina de Van, who has coauthored four of enfant terrible François Ozon's films and who played the dead-eyed drifter in Ozon's notorious See the Sea. "[In My Skin] is very tough," Ciment says. "It's not graphically gory, but it is about a gory subject; the imagination of the audience is solicited quite a lot, and it can become unbearable for some people – it's about the masochism of the central character."

Ciment's SFIFF catalog notes on In My Skin mention Georges Franju, who took a scalpel to identity – and viewer's expectations – long before the media started sleeping over at Neverland Ranch. This recognition of influence is important. "We think there are two plagues to modern journalism," says Ciment, when referring to Positif's core philosophy. "One is amnesia, and the other is an obsession with being attuned to whatever is new. The two are in fact linked – a dizzying approach to current events makes people obsessed."

It may be one month before May, before Cannes, or eleven months after it. Regardless, Ciment wants his SFIFF programming to fight the blind sight of eyes without a past.