02  Winter 2025

In 1970 Jean-Marie Straub argued: ‘I think the cinema will only begin when the film industry is dead.’ ^[1] In 1979 Biette presented, in a text on R. W. Fassbinder’s Wildwechsel (1972), the idea of ‘filmed cinema’: ^[2] a type of cinema dependent on already established rhetoric, with a nostalgic gaze towards an idealized past shared between cineastes, producers and distributors alike, making for a return to a cinema of ‘qualité’. A cinema that already knows before it is made that it is ‘Cinema’ with a capital ‘C’, that it is ‘poetry’ and ‘art’. In an interview in 1974, Rossellini had declared: ‘One must be absolutely spontaneous and nothing else, because if you start to think in terms such as, “I am an artist”, you are immediately a son of a bitch.’ ^[3] By the end of the decade, the cinema had been invaded by sons of bitches.

In 1979, Woody Allen’s Manhattan was released, and such was the disgust that it provoked in Biette that he decided to answer Allen and his ‘filmed cinema’ with a film of his own. ^[4] Thus, the Manhattan referenced in Loin de Manhattan is not to be identified simply with the island and cultural center of the contemporary world — which is certainly ‘far away’ from the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville — but also with the Manhattan articulated by Allen. The seventies also saw the standardization of cinema, as a risk-averse attitude took over the financing and funding of films, along with the rise of the ‘franchises’ and their profit-obsessed machinery — toys, merchandise, etc. Frank Yablans, the studio executive at Paramount from 1969 to 1974 and the chief officer of what later became MGM/UA, put it: ‘The commercial prospect of the film is the primary prerequisite as to whether it's going to be made. The studio system today basically is a financial banking apparatus.’

In a conversation with Fernando Ganzo for Lumière, Pierre Léon summarised the film landscape at the time Loin de Manhattan was made:

That’s what happened for the first time in the early eighties with the industrialisation of cinema. ‘Cinema is an industry’, big words from Jack Lang (the socialist minister of culture). I will never forget that he was the first one to say such a thing. It was the epic arrival of the ‘Nouveau Qualité Française’, the films of Tavernier, the epoch of Coup de Torchon (1981)... We should never forget this, let’s keep this in mind: this was the moment when the cinema of the author entered the ministries. All of that sidelined and rejected experimentation: what was possible in ’71, Out 1, was no longer possible in ’81. ^[5]

In January 1982, Loin de Manhattan was released.

The film breathes between the sutures that lace together the shots. The relationships between them are of an extraordinarily creative nature, and are moreover not solely based on continuity, which is sometimes completely disregarded. An example is a shot/reverse-shot between Sonia Saviange and Jean-Christophe Bouvet, both of them framed in high-angle shots. Bouvet stares upwards, and we presume he is looking at a standing Saviange, but when the cut arrives we find that she’s already on the floor picking up the halves of a cup she has just thrown. As with Straub–Huillet, with whom Biette worked as an actor in Othon (1970), only the ‘shot’ and the ‘cut’ exist. ^[6] Both maintain a certain totality, that is to say, they don’t play the part of ‘covering’ the scene.

The quintessential Biettian element is found in his relationship with the cut, in his particular sense and manipulation of the tempo of a sequence. Sometimes he cuts later than convention dictates, such as in the dinner scene between Ernie Naud, Christian and his mother, where he takes his time to cut to a two-shot that isolates Naud and Christian from the group ‘three-shot’. Sometimes he maintains or holds a shot and avoids the cut. This latter technique is especially evident in dialogue scenes which would usually resort to a schematic shot/reverse-shot. In Le Théâtre des matières (1977), a dialogue exchange is held on a beautiful close-up of Brigitte Jacques-Wajeman. We find the same technique in Loin de Manhattan, in a shot of Piotr Stanislas during a dialogue with his lover/friend, which again eschews the reverse-shot and holds the shot, fixed on Stanislas’s face. Why does Biette do this? It is in the shot’s composition that all the contradictions, ambiguities and the pure idea of what he wants to project are reflected. The face of an actor who is currently without work, upset with the ‘cosiness and resignation’ adopted by the French, which he even defines as their ‘motto’. His lover reproaches him: has he forgotten about May ’68? Stanislas smiles: ‘Nice history’. Behind him, framed on the right side of the shot, in the distance, is the Panthéon, that monument considered the ‘temple of the people’ during the French Revolution. In this shot, between the components that form its imaginary and the words uttered by Stanislas, Biette presents his ‘portrait’ of French society after the failure of May ’68.

Once, criticism was on the side of production. It was in favor of producing new ideas, new avenues for cinema. Godard said: ‘Bazin was a cineaste who didn’t make films, but made cinema in talking, like a peddler.’ ^[7] The same could be said of Serge Daney, Miguel Marías, Adriano Aprà or P. Adams Sitney. The same also goes for the young critics that ended up making films of their own: Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, Biette, Erice, Antonioni and Mekas, for instance. ‘For all of them, to write on cinema was a way to make films or, at the very least, to think about them.’ ^[8] Loin de Manhattan is a perfect example: before becoming a film, Biette worked through and developed its ideas in a series of texts — such as his text on Orson Welles (‘Cinema=Theatre’), whose name appears in the film’s dedication, and the one on Fassbinder’s film. We have to make it very clear that ‘filmed cinema’ does not only belong to cineastes, producers and distributors. It is also sponsored by a cohort of critics who defend it. Who speak in clichés and spend a lot of time describing plots, but do not articulate a thought of their own. Who qualify themselves not according to the vision they give of things, but by their ‘taste’. Critics on the side of ‘distribution’ and ‘curation’. Critics under the protection of culture and not of art. The Guy Zigfams and the Ernie Nauds. To these ‘sons of bitches’ Biette dedicates this film, comic and cruel, a film of leeches that play the posturing critic. This ‘filmed cinema’ must be fought not only with cinema ‘in-the-making’, but also with criticism written from the same ethical position. This point was already memorably made two decades earlier, in the editorial of the summer 1961 issue of Film Culture:

Cahiers du cinéma is a film-maker’s magazine. Much of the misunderstanding of the Cahiers’ position stems from this simple fact. S[ight] & S[ound] and F[ilm] Q[uarterly] are critics’ and audiences’ publications. Their aim is to evaluate films. We side with Cahiers in our interest in making films and in our search for a living cinema, a cinema in action. ^[9]