Michel Ciment Dies: French Film Critic & Historian Was 85
deadline.comFrench film critic and historian Michel Ciment, the long-time publishing director of film magazine Positif, has died at the age of 85, French media reported on Monday evening.
Ciment first started writing for the Lyon-based magazine in 1963, when he contributed a piece about the cinema of Orson Welles.
The magazine was launched in 1952 shortly after Les Cahiers du Cinéma by Bernard Chardère, who also died this year. In a talk at Paris’s Forum Des Images in 2022, marking Positif’s 70th anniversary, Ciment recounted how he started reading the magazine in the 1950s as a teenager, while hanging around the Le Minotaure bookshop in the Paris quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Près. “It was an amazing place where you’d bump into other cinephiles like Jean-Claude Romer, who went on to create [the cinema magazine] Midi Minuit Fantastique,” recounted Ciment. “There were a lot of people from Les Cahiers and Positif… You couldn’t find the cinema revues in kiosks then.
I’d go there once a week to buy Sight and Sound, Positif or the Les Cahiers.” Ciment rose to be one of France’s best-known critics.
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