A conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum
A Life Examined Through Images and Sounds
No life worthy of the name can do without a conscious companion through which the beliefs that define it and their practical consequences are examined. In the case of Jonathan Rosenbaum, this vital and rational exercise of Platonic-Socratic genealogy was mediated by cinema and writing: through films he understood the world and his own passage through it. This description is evident in Travels in the Cities of Cinema, but also in all his books, which have been essential in the formation of film critics, filmmakers and cinephiles around the world. Film criticism, as writer Ricardo Piglia once noted, is a post-Freudian form of autobiography, yet this peculiar work that unfolds between the written word, the cinematic image and consciousness has nothing to do with narcissism, but rather with knowledge through the first person.
Jonathan Rosenbaum has published nearly twenty books throughout his career, as well as hundreds of reviews and articles in journals such as Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Trafic, Cahiers du Cinéma, and newspapers such as The Village Voiceand Chicago Reader. Jean-Luc Godard once remarked that the lucidity that had shone in André Bazin lived again in Rosenbaum’s own texts. Over the course of his career, Rosenbaum has analysed disparate traditions such as American and Iranian cinema, as well as the work of filmmakers as original and diverse as Béla Tarr and Raúl Ruiz, among many others to whom he devoted hundreds of pages. He has taught classes and seminars around the world and has also served on juries at major film festivals over the last four decades.
Moderated by Roger Koza
A conversation with Cyril Neyrat
Beyond the Schengen Zone, or Films Without a Visa
Film festivals constitute a system of visibility. They have their rules, their (not so) secret codes, even their explicit preferences, which can be discerned by analysing each year’s programming, as well as their unacknowledged taboos, which are more difficult to identify because doing so requires formulating hypotheses based on recurring absences within aesthetic proposals. Given the influence of some of the major festivals, and the fear of distancing oneself from the cinematic canon that has formed around them, very few festivals take risks and select films that do not have a “visa” granting access to the festivals’ European “Schengen” area. FidMarseille has been a notable exception in recent decades: a tradition of disobedience emerged during the era of Jean-Pierre Rehm, and after his departure from the festival some years ago, that unruly position has persisted and even taken new directions in relation to our own time, which has changed dramatically over the past five years. What is the secret of the people of Marseille? Why does the programming of FidMarseille differ so much from that of so many other festivals?
Cyril Neyrat is a film critic and artistic director of FidMarseille. He is the author of Au pied du mont Tabou: Le cinéma de Miguel Gomes (2012) and has published books based on conversations with contemporary filmmakers such as Pedro Costa, Jean-Claude Rousseau, Albert Serra and Pierre Creton. For years he worked as a film critic at Cahiers du Cinémaand Vertigo. As a lecturer, he has taught at Paris 3, Paris 7 and HEAD-Geneva, and his teaching runs parallel to his curatorial work.
Moderated by Roger Koza
A conversation with Rita Azevedo Gomes
On the Unpredictable Poetics of a Portuguese Filmmaker
She made her first film in 1990, and by 2001 she had already left her mark on film history: Frágil Como o Mundo is a small event, a story of adolescent love that is also a chronicle of the light of the world in matter. What came after that indelible film? Rita’s cinema is unusual for its variety: the material of her films may be letters, conceptual essays or journeys, as in the remarkable Fuck de Polis. One never knows what the next film will be like, but something can always be expected: there will be a meticulous composition of the frame, philosophical speculation will not be absent, a chosen place will be rediscovered by the camera, and there will be deviations and innovations in relation to her previous films. Perhaps she will be accompanied by her usual collaborators, perhaps she will be alone, but cinema will breathe and be free, because when she is behind the camera, cinema constantly reinvents itself.
Rita Azevedo Gomes has made ten feature films over the course of her career. Her encounter with Manoel de Oliveira was decisive in her biography as a filmmaker, although the influence of the master did not determine her search for her own path, as can be seen in her filmography, always in dialogue with different literary and cinematic traditions. In 2023, the Portuguese filmmaker was awarded the Mikeldi Prize.
Moderated by Roger Koza