Cyril Neyrat

I have always lived in Paris, or in its banlieue. After switching to political science, I did a doctorate in cinema at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) on the work of Alain Resnais. Jean-Louis Leutrat made me love the films of Jean-Daniel Pollet, the subject of an unfinished doctoral thesis due to a lack of passion toward the career and the university environment. After several years of teaching in Parisian faculties, I now teach film history and aesthetics at the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design de Genève. Around 1999, Hervé Aubron invited me to publish my first text in “Vertigo,” a film magazine of which I am today, together with Marcos Uzal, co-editor-in-chief. Happy with the lasting friendship and shared work, founded on elective affinities. Other texts have been accepted in collective books and catalogs: on Pollet, Godard, the film essay, Pasolini, John Ford, Menschen am Sonntag , Warhol, Bob Dylan’s films, etc. Writing a book on François Truffaut taught me to love some of his films. In 2004 Emmanuel Burdeau invited me to join the editorial board of Cahiers du cinéma . For five years, the monthly writing of film criticism and the special focus on contemporary cinema has been a source of joys and intensities about which I cannot say for sure whether they have more involved or excited me. And like most good things, this one sees its end coming today — due to other rhythms, of life and writing. During these same years, the audacious and indefatigable Quentin Mével, general delegate of the esteemed Association des Cinémas de recherche d’Ile de France, had me scour the cinemas of the Parisian banlieue to bring you the critical word. Watching and showing, listening and talking – film criticism is also an oral pleasure, a public exercise. Among film festivals, those that try to break through outside the circuit of globalized authorial cinephilia are rare: gratitude and admiration go to Jean-PierreRehm (FID Marseille) and Hans Hursch (Viennale), for their freedom and convinced choice of minority, for their repeated invitations to show films and compose programs. Readings by Francis Ponge, Herman Melville and Heinrich von Kleist, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin et Aby Warburg (thanks to Georges Didi-Huberman), Serge Daney and Claude Ollier (his texts on cinema), were more decisive than others. Of films and directors, there would be too many. I often listen to the music of Franz Schubert, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Johnny Thunders and the Ramones. I am at Villa Medici with a desire to learn more about the work of Carmelo bene, and to find there the possibility of a book.