01  SUMMER 2025

Why did I become a cinephile? It’s the marginality of cinema that attracted me to it. Let me explain. When I was a high school student, literature was of course part of the syllabus. I had to write essays, memorize speeches, improvise commentaries on texts. Theater and novels were of the order of obligation, with sanctions for shortcomings or iconoclastic deviations. So I quickly came to hate literature.

Painting and music were also on the menu. But there, there were no sanctions. Unlike in French, you didn’t have to sit a make-up exam in September if you scored below the passing grade in these two ‘minor subjects’. And I had decided to take revenge for the extra work imposed on me in the major subjects by sabotaging their two poor relations. During the hour of art class, I always managed to swing it so that I would go into the courtyard to fetch water for the brushes of my thirty classmates. That way I didn’t have time to paint, so I avoided the multicolored deluge that would inevitably have soaked through my Canson paper and irreparably stained my trousers, a risk that increased as my trousers got longer. My mom would have given me hell. One year, I even managed to skip the first session of each of the two dreaded courses. I was off the register, then, and I could make ten full circuits of the vast Lycée Henri IV during those critical hours. The trick was only discovered six months later…

Cinema, on the other hand, wasn’t taught. I had the impression that by choosing it over everything else, I was performing an act that expressed me totally and came only from me, as if I had made all the films myself... I’m a great defender of film teaching (it makes me money), but I wonder if its insertion into the rigid frameworks of high school and university won’t create in students blocks similar to those that made me reject the arts taught back then, especially if the teachers are mediocre. I made such a distinction between the cinema and high school, between God and Satan, that I always carefully avoided the high school film club, even if the films shown were of interest to me a priori, and were offered free of charge. I was even afraid that they’d show good films (that I would inevitably have missed), which would have brought cinema down to a very low level: let’s not mix the wheat with the chaff.

This cinephilia started from a very early age, well before I was eleven, the age at which I saw Scarface, Potemkin, Boudu, Henry V. I was born at eight months, and the too-sudden removal from the womb must have brought about in me a need for movie theaters, as well as a taste for tunnels. Sometimes I say to myself, if I was born prematurely, wasn’t it because I was impatient to see Bringing Up Baby, whose gestation happened at the same time as my own?

And then, of course, cinema was better than its rivals. It was the only art that could contain all the others: theater (Guitry), poetry (Gance), novels (Griffith), painting (Renoir), music (Vidor), dance (Kelly), architecture (Lang), sculpture (Riefenstahl). It could show everything. The others often had to settle for suggesting. That’s why I chose to make films, and, until I had the means to make them, why I went to see and criticized them. ^[1]

Over the last few years, I’ve come to realize that I’d been completely wrong in my calculations. Cinema, often for lack of money, can’t show everything, and gets lost when it tries to cover all terrains. It is especially great for its minimalism, when cinema achieves everything with nothing (Lubitsch, Debord, Rohmer, Hanoun, Hartley, Go Fish, etc.). Modern filmmakers fall down when they bite off more than they can chew (Greenaway, Blier, Carax, Stone, etc.). Natural Born Killers put me to sleep. But Syberberg’s Fräulein Else moved me deeply. It’s simply a reading of Schnitzler by Edith Clever, text in hand and in the frame, in twenty static shots. Conversely, the novel disappoints me because it can practically show everything, more than cinema: it costs nothing. I couldn’t finish Jodorowsky’s book, Where the Bird Sings Best, an uninterrupted stream of brilliant ideas, without peaks or troughs, which quickly becomes monotonous. Yet I admire his film The Holy Mountain because there his creativity is tempered, rhythmic, and humanized, thanks to the constraints imposed by shooting and budget. My entire journey as a cinephile, critic, and cineaste — the three overlapping ‘c’s — therefore rests on an enormous mistake at the outset.

Two contradictory elements favor the (my) vocation of a cinephile: the availability of films and... their unavailability.

Their availability because it is easier — in our hurried age — to watch a film that lasts an hour and a half than to read a novel, which takes an average of eight hours, and even forty hours in some cases (War and Peace, The Golden Bowl). By contrast, the standard brevity of a film reflects a supreme politeness towards the consumer. This, of course, was before the flamboyant horde of impudent greats, like Rivette, Kramer or Marcel Ophuls, with their four-hour rule. And when I was born into the cinema, there were still not that many films — only fifty years of production and a lot lost. A single person could know almost everything and, even more easily, know everything about an individual filmmaker. I could (or so I thought) see all of Hawks and all of Hitchcock, whereas it would have been impossible to read all of Balzac (or all of Voltaire or Hugo). Even they couldn’t manage it. They didn’t always have the time to re-read their own work. It might be possible to read everything by less prolific authors. But I’m sure I would never have had the desire to read all of Shakespeare (or all of Faulkner) if I hadn’t gone through the phase of cinephilic encyclopedism.

Unavailability creates urgency, forcing us to see films as soon as they are shown. I fought to see Autant-Lara’s Lucien Leuwen (quite disappointing, by the way), because I knew this TV film might never be shown again, whereas I only read Stendhal’s remarkable Leuwen twenty years later, because I knew I could find it in the library at any time. Many were duped by a clever exhibitor, Jean-Louis Chéray, who put on his posters ‘for the last time in France’, justified by the temporary expiry of a film’s rights.

The theater schedules printed in the press used to be as difficult to interpret as the oracle of Delphi. Access to local, suburban, provincial or foreign theaters was perilous, as was the atmosphere in the theater, where I had the pleasant illusion of being the only one who understood the film. All these difficulties gave me the feeling of being a pioneer, an explorer, a daredevil, a hero. This victory over adversity created in me a naïve pleasure, equal to that of a conqueror of a virgin peak or pass, a specific pleasure that I also went looking for.

* * *

It’s been said that cinephilia was a man’s world. Indeed. We must not forget, among others, Suzanne Schiffman, Sylvie Pierre, the Palas sisters, Antonietta Pizzorno, etc. But there is a great deal of truth in it. The masculinity-cinephilia connection is logical: cinephilia offers a sort of purgatory for those who refuse to mature, wanting to remain in a state of childhood. Many cinephiles (notably Resnais) have long retained the face of an adolescent, and I still have the voice of one: it hasn’t changed. And it is the boys, and only the boys, who need this refuge, this alibi when they refuse to take romantic or professional initiative, since (according to a declining but nonetheless enduring tradition) it is up to them alone to take it. Women, on the other hand, do not need an escape if they refuse to take up the reins of life: it is quite normal.

Though it sometimes leads to a profession, cinephilia often hinders romantic and family life. It leads to solitude, the Rue Saint-Denis, ^[2] or recourse to an ignoble type of homosexuality, as a backup. As an old critic from this magazine once told me: ‘With guys, it’s easier, they say yes in five minutes, but with girls, it’s a struggle: they take months to say no.’ Moreover, you have to be a real tightrope walker to reconcile cinephilia and family life. I remember coming out of a Breillat (or a Bresson, I don’t remember) and meeting my wife at the door of the cinema to take her chest bag with our baby in it, before she went into the cinema herself. The only times I lie to her are when I go to the cinema surreptitiously, which she’d hold against me more than an intrusive mistress...

Cinephilia no longer exists among the young... Well, that’s easy to say. Antoine Desrosières, Saada, Vatrican, Ostria are cinephiles. In fact, cinephilia is less well-known because it no longer holds the power it did forty years ago. It is now less tied to the critic, who is reluctant to go and see a film. Some famous critics will only go if it’s not too far from home, or if a taxi is paid for and the film is being released within the next week. Bazin and the others, on the other hand, delighted in rushing off to the middle of nowhere to see a film precisely because it wasn’t getting a proper release. Today’s critics are more likely to come from journalism school than from cinephilia, which is more evident among aspiring filmmakers. These filmmakers no longer depend, as in the past, on the almost obligatory passage through the ranks of criticism. Their cinema-going leaves fewer immediately visible traces. Inevitably, cinephilia couldn’t recover this fundamental dialectic of availability and its opposite. A hundred years of cinema have created a much more abundant mass than when I started. The sheer volume is discouraging, just like the mass of literature. There’s no question of encyclopedism. And everything seems to be known about (except for some distant countries), everything is available in theaters, on TV, on videotapes. There’s no longer any exploratory work to be undertaken in neighborhood theaters, which have been destroyed. No more challenge, no more stakes.

The only availability-unavailability conglomerate that still functions is at the level of video. There’s the pleasure of finding a rare cassette at the back of a store. But buying it doesn’t necessarily mean watching it… And this stage already seems to be surpassed in America, where you can easily order, from a huge catalog, twelve Ulmer or thirty Hawks films.

Cahiers du cinéma, 497, December 1995, pp. 66–67.