{"id":28056,"date":"2013-11-05T05:21:42","date_gmt":"2013-11-05T12:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=28056"},"modified":"2013-11-06T23:32:33","modified_gmt":"2013-11-07T06:32:33","slug":"serge-toubiana-and-the-cinematheque-francaise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=28056","title":{"rendered":"Serge Toubiana and the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a repository for the rich history of film, the Cinematheque is an important institution. But ought one be worried about their continued relevance in the modern age, where betwixt the distractions of digital technology and the instantaneity \u2013 and transience \u2013 of social networks, the significance of history and tradition feel under threat? Serge Toubiana, director of Paris\u2019s Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise, sees the changes as positives. \u201cTen years ago, we had the opportunity to move to a beautiful building, designed by Frank Gehry, in a beautiful area of Paris,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought at the time that the building gives us the opportunity to have all our missions in one place: to program movies, to have educative programs, to have a library because we have a huge archive of films, to have a museum of cinema and to have a space for exhibitions.\u201d And the existence of this space, where audiences can engage with, even discover, the breadth and depth and context of cinema across the ages, this is an important thing? Absolutely, Toubiana replies. He reels off a few of the successful exhibitions and events convened by the Cinematheque in recent years: a joint exhibition of Renoir pere et fils, Pierre-Auguste Renoir the painter and Jean the filmmaker; the fiftieth anniversary restoration of Jean Cocteau\u2019s La Belle et la B\u00eate; a retrospective of American director Tim Burton, which ran for four months last year and sold more than 300 thousand tickets. \u201cPeople come because they remain curious,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"Serge<\/a>
Serge Toubiana, Director General of the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise at the home of the French Ambassador to Israel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Toubiana was in Israel last week, a guest of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, currently celebrating its 40th anniversary. The Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise contributed to festivities with a specially curated series of French cinema<\/a>, including Maurice Pialat\u2019s Van Gogh and Marcel Carne\u2019s noir classic Quai des Brumes. He also attended the presentation by the French ambassador to Israel, Patrick Maisonnave, of the Legion d\u2019Honneur to Lia Van Leer, the grande dame of Israeli cinema and founder \u2013 along with her late husband, Wim \u2013 of the Haifa and Jerusalem Cinematheques, the Israel Film Archive and the Jerusalem International Film Festival. Toubiana has also been on the other side of the film business, in a manner of speaking: from the late 1970s and through the 1980s, he was editor of Cahiers du Cinema, the pre-eminent journal of film criticism in the world.<\/p>\n

It might be, though, that thinking of critics as belonging to \u201cthe other side\u201d may not be the most conducive summation of their role in the ecosystem of cinema. Toubiana, interestingly, does not think that the role of the film critic has been diminished by democratisation of the role via film blogs and the internet. He confesses to being more concerned about who critics perceive as their primary audience. \u201cThe language of the film critic has to change,\u201d he suggests. \u201cIt has to be more simple, more educative.\u201d Part of the problem, he suggests, is that critics take the importance of film for granted, something that cannot be presumed as a given in the modern age. \u201cThe biggest difficult is that the young generation are totally absorbed by machines, computers,\u201d he suggests. \u201cWe have to open their minds, to tell them why they have to come back to enjoy cinema of the big screen.\u201d But the problem, he posits, starts with critics who talk and write for the benefit of each other. \u201cSometimes, when you read a particular newspaper or magazine, it is bizarre. You don\u2019t understand what they say. It is too\u2026meta-language!\u201d<\/p>\n

Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise was founded in 1936 by Henry Langlois, an archivist and cinephile who was a key influence on the auteurs who founded the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) of French Cinema. Langois\u2019 true legacy, Toubiana observes, was to be one of the first to recognise the importance of preserving the heritage of cinema for future generations. \u201cIt is our job to present to memory of cinema, and we only have the elements to do so thanks to Langois,\u201d In this respect, new technology is certainly a friend rather than a threat to the work of the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que. \u201cWe restore movies with digital technology, we will digitalise our entire collection, and we will put it on the internet, to make it accessible for students, journalists, producers\u2026\u201d It is nice to hear about the work of the film preservation and education described in such democratic terms.<\/p>\n

Toubiana has more than a passing engagement with Israeli cinema. He has written a monograph on the Israeli auteur Amos Gitai, and sat on the jury of 2007\u2019s DocAviv Film Festival in Tel Aviv. As someone with knowledge of Israeli cinema but not a part of the local industry, how does he perceive its development in recent years, particularly its reception by international audiences? Toubiana is complimentary. \u201cThere is a new generation, of courageous men and women who speak about the reality, show the reality in Israel. They have no problems to talk about the difficulties of the country, about Palestinian people, about the Arab citizens of Israel.\u201d The key is the honesty, discomfiting as it might sometimes be, which filmmakers are bringing to their work. \u201cAnd now in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Berlin, everyone who knows about cinema knows that there is a new Israeli cinema now, and we have to take care of it because it is important. We have to take care of it because it is very good news for cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a repository for the rich history of film, the Cinematheque is an important institution. But ought one be worried about their continued relevance in the modern age, where betwixt the distractions of digital technology and the instantaneity \u2013 and transience \u2013 of social networks, the significance of history and tradition feel under threat? Serge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}