Adelaide Film Festival 2009 – Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema
A cult figure amongst film critics and the few cinephiles who are connected with the film industry or the festival circuit, Pierre Rissient is one of those legendary behind-the-scenes operatives whom people in the know love to claim to know.
The 73 year-old Parisian has been many things over his 45-year career in the film industry: a film critic, a cinema programmer, a publicist, a director, an editor and, perhaps most importantly, a kingmaker, bringing many new talents to the attention of prestigious festivals, most notably Cannes. Man of Cinema is Variety film critic Todd McCarthy’s love letter to Rissient, a documentary portrait of someone who embodies a form of cinephilia which has all but disappeared today.
The film is made up primarily of film clips and interviews with Rissient and his admirers, from Oliver Stone to Clint Eastwood, from Rolf de Heer to Sydney Pollack, not to mention the omnipresent Quentin Tarantino. A consensus is reached on Rissient’s impeccable taste, crediting him with championing and in some cases “discovering” what are now considered masters of world cinema: Clint Eastwood (the director), Sydney Pollack, Bob Rafelson, Jane Campion or Rolf de Heer in the West, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Lino Brocka and King Hu in the East.
Despite having an ego the size of the Arc de Triomphe and wielding the kind of nepotistic power which gives the industry a bad name, Rissient doesn’t seem to have any detractors, let alone enemies. Or perhaps McCarthy, blinded by his admiration, had failed to locate them. That’s one of the problems with this biased exercise in hero worship.
The other problem is its limits as a film. There’s no doubt the subject is an interesting one, but as far as documentaries go, this one is severely lacking. Beyond its technical limitations – some of the footage seems to have been shot on a VHS camera circa 1987 – the film suffers from the notion that such a portrait cannot be written and that is enough to gather together a few talking heads. Attempts at background fall disastrously short, especially a long-winded pilgrimage to the man’s childhood home in the country (the point being?) and no larger insights are gleaned into the current state of film criticism or cinephilia.
Largely problematic in this respect is the editing. Each point is made in exactly the same way, by getting as many people as possible to repeat, in sequence, the exact same thing about Pierre Rissient: he is a great discoverer of talent, he is a womanizer, he is passionate about film, etc. Twenty minutes could have been cut out of what is a rather long film without sacrificing a single idea. Even colourful anecdotes - Rissient taking Fritz Lang to Deep Throat for example, or his attempts to get John Ford to sober up - are stretched over long minutes until all the juice is sucked out of them.
This could have been a great opportunity to spread the virus of cinephilia with film festival audiences and DVD viewers, to encourage film lovers to take film criticism seriously again. But if you’re not instantly familiar with names like Michel Ciment, Thierry Fremaux or Derek Elley, Man of Cinema might be lost on you: if you’re lucky the names of the people interviewed will appear on screen, but you won’t get much more in the way of context.
It’s a shame, really, because Rissient is a fascinating dinosaur from a long lost era, one when filmmakers were worshipped for their talent, critics were really activists and film knowledge was the ultimate social currency. There’s a t-shirt which has been making the rounds since Telluride Film Festival a few years back, which features a famous Rissient quote which sums the man up quite well: “It’s not enough to like a film, you have to like it for the right reasons”.
People interested not just in the history of film but in that of film criticism will find much to relish, such as the story of the rivalry between Les Cahiers (Hitchcock! Wells! Eisenstein!) and the cine-club of the McMahon Cinema led by Rissient and friends (Losey! Walsh! Preminger!). In other priceless scenes Rissient makes bold claims, for example that the jump cut, invented by Godard with A Bout De Souffle (on which Rissient was 1st A.D.), was an editing room quick fix to hide bad lighting or actors mistakes and not, as some would have us believe, an act of premeditated genius.
A man who is so effusive about cinema listeners often fear he might have a heart attack, Rissient firmly believes that there is one absolute truth about film and that anyone who disagreed with a great critic such as himself is unforgivably wrong. In many ways he was a passionate bully. This belief empowers the critic to undertake an arduous quest for cinematic truth which has gone out of fashion. Today, when it seems everyone is a critic (take blogs such as the one you’re reading now for example), we would do well to ponder the old school approach, its discipline, its literacy, the importance it places on understanding the medium, and take a page out of Rissient’s book, starting with his unquenchable thirst for undiscovered talents in world cinema.
Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema is currently screening at the 2009 Adelaide Film Festival
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