Alain Bergala

Claire Simon’s The Competition (Le Concours) begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of the Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son, or, as it’s more popularly known, La Fémis. One of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals, every year La Fémis attracts hundreds upon hundreds of applicants hoping to fill only forty annual slots. This new film by Simon, one of France’s premiere nonfiction filmmakers, offers a unique look into the process whereby those lucky forty are selected—a process involving examiners from the French film industry which is highly personal and idiosyncratic and subject to the vagaries of taste and personal prejudice.Read More »

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Jean-Luc Godard is cinema, its quintessence. Just turned 91, he has made more than 140 films. We hate him as much as we worship him. Where does his aura come from? From legendary films of course, but also from Godard himself. He is a public figure as much as a man shrouded in mystery. Everything and its opposite, he has taken all possible paths. It is not easy to seize such a legendary, enigmatic giant. Godard’s itinerary follows one direction only: a constant renewal of his art. He sees the creative act as a necessary act of criticism and deconstruction.” I always start from the negative. I am a positive man who starts from the negative”. The artist reinvents himself tirelessly, and inevitably destroys himself. This portrait wants to take us beyond the clichés of a myth that has sometimes become caricatural, to meet a man more sentimental than it seems, a man inhabited, sometimes surpassed, by his art. Because yes, Godard is human. Not just a machine who thinks and creates images.Read More »

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At the invitation of Limosin and Bergala, Kiyoshi Kurosawa rediscovers his own films, first during the shooting of his French film in Paris and then in Tokyo. From his first militant films in Super 8 to his undisputed masterpieces, the Japanese director confides his obsessions, his repulsions, his delightfully heterogeneous tastes as a cinephile, his pleasures and fears as a filmmaker.Read More »