Death of Michel Ciment, film critic and historian

Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credits: Laurent EMMANUEL / AFP 09:36 a.m., November 14, 2023

A reference among film critics. Michel Ciment, famous voice for more than half a century of the program "Le Masque et la Plume" of France Inter, died at the age of 85, announced Monday night the radio. This passionate about the seventh art had begun to write about cinema during his studies before collaborating from 1963 to the magazine "Positif", as a critic and then director of publication, recalled France Inter.

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President of the Critics' Union

Also a radio lover, Michel Ciment participated since 1970 as a critic in "Masque et la Plume" - the doyenne of the station's programs - and was also producer of "Projection privée", on France Culture, from 1990 to 2016. "It's the whole family of 'The Mask and the Feather' that loses one of its closest friends," said Jérôme Garcin, the show's producer. "He's perhaps the freest, most encyclopedic spirit that film criticism has ever produced," says the writer-journalist who has hosted the show for 34 years.

Michel Ciment, who had been president of the critics' union, took part in the show for the last time on September 24. He has contributed to several collective works and written books, collections of interviews and biographies, notably on Stanley Kubrick and American cinema with "The Conquerors of a New World". In 1994, he received the first Maurice Bessy Prize at Cannes, rewarding "a personality exercising his activity or talent in the fields of cinematographic writing". Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival, expressed his respect for the man who "was not only a great critic and internationally recognized historian, but a curious mind about cinema and art who fought all his life".