The Letter’s editorials

At the 44^th Annual 2019 César Awards ceremony, it was possible to moon Robert Redford or to have a César awarded to the box-office champion by one’s own father, but it was impossible to voice a number of important questions regarding French cinema without being interrupted by a little tune…

Wednesday, 7 November 2018, 9^th Arrondissement of Paris, 19:30
Ceremony Honoring Jean-Pierre Beauviala with a Special Award
 by the President of the ASC, Kees van Oostrum, with some AFC members in attendance. Aaton, Beauviala, these two names are inseparable from one another, a magic spell, a password on every continent and part of the vocabulary of all men and women who have chosen to make images their profession.

Dear Thierry Frémeaux, Dear Pierre Lescure, I wish to personally thank you for having made a little bit of room for me on the steps of your immense red carpet during a time of the year when Cannes becomes many peoples’ centre of gravity. Thierry, I hope that I didn’t ruffle your feathers when you mentioned Lyon’s football team to me at the top of the steps. Although I hail from Lyon, I have been a supporter of Saint-Etienne for years now and began supporting them even before I’d noticed that the colour of their jerseys was the same colour regularly used in the Seventh Art for chroma keying.

Sunday, November 26^th. Back to Paris. Cold but sunny weather. Through the window I see trees loosing their leaves. Still fresh from Camerimage, I will get on the writing of the editorial of the monthly AFC Letter. The phone is ringing. A call from Rémy Chevrin. It’s a terrible and inconceivable news: our friend Matthieu Poirot-Delpech left us, taken from us brutally. I cannot believe it.

I just ended reading the balance sheet of the CNC (National Administration Center of Cinema) for 2016. The news is pretty good. French cinema reached an all-time record of 213 million admissions. It is also a world-wide industry with a production level of 283 films in 2016.

I have just heard of the death of Jeanne Moreau. I encountered her, when I was A.C on the set of Joseph Losey’s Mr Klein. I had great admiration for her, she the heroine of the French New Wave that has so much influenced my generation.

In the dog days of parisian summer, as it is in the current situation, we can hide in a movie theater, it is a privileged place where, with other "film buffs", we can share a good (or less-good) movie and little freshness. This is a moment of pleasure, we can even sometimes enrich with a chocolate ice cream, and repeat over and over all day long, as I have used to do it since my earliest childhood.

May began well. We escaped the b“rown swine” and its national / barbed wires Kulture. What, our friend Kees Van Oostrum, President of the ASC, immediately greeted by a strong: “Vive la France, congratulations! Let’s destroy populism”.

During its Annual General Assembly on Saturday, 11 March 2017, the AFC elected Richard Andry as its President. He will carry out his duties alongside his two co-presidents, Laurent Chalet and Vincent Mathias. Here, you can read Richard Andry’s first editorial, which was published in May’s AFC Newsletter.

When I was a camera assistant, I remember watching the dailies at the end of a day of shooting. I would take my scooter or my car, go to Epinay, go up the stairs that led to the screening room, where I would wait with a knot in my stomach for the room to go dark and see the raw images, with no sound, where I would see the scenes we had shot the previous day, and my relief when we had gotten it right, and the desire to melt into the darkness when we hadn’t. Those are my first memories of Éclair.

The setting seems unchanging. A long hallway in a Parisian building at one end of which stands a photocopier. This hallway leads to a few offices on either side. This is generally where we come into contact with the team preparing the film.

For the past few months, we - the officers and initiators of "active dialogues" - have been struck by the accuracy and depth of the contributions to these " active dialogues" between members of the AFC. We now choose to give room to one of them, whose distance from us, both in terms of experience and geography, allows him to understand that our concerns should push us to share tirelessly, in order to build a future for our profession.

Following is an excerpt contributed by Philippe Rousselot, AFC, ASC to these " active dialogues".

As it does each year, the Cannes Film Festival will make the film planet go round at 300 miles per hour. There are no speed limits in Cannes... Films of great directors and other unknown ones will be screened in the best possible conditions (which is not true of all the festivals), films whose modes of production techniques are increasingly hybrid : both photochemical and digital, as much in production as in post.

As Veronique Cayla (director of the French National Cinema Center) pointed out during her 2009 new year greeting, there is still as much money for film as ever.
But today the "sources" where producers seek funding for their films have multiplied: TV channels, regions, Sofica, tax credits, etc. This brings together non-converging co-producers, each protecting their own investment and the film can easily deviate from its original draft. But in no way does this multiplication imply a lack of money.
How is it then that our work tools have become so degraded?