Entering a life of cinema

The French Union of Film Critics was founded in 1946. How quickly we seem to have moved from the first century of cinema into its second! And here we are, already celebrating our 80th anniversary. At this age, we hold our heads high. We look back, proud of what we have accomplished since the beginning, and we look far ahead, moved by the unrelenting drive that carries us towards screens and films. 

When our collective created La Semaine de la Critique in 1962, it set out to explore new writers, to champion the formative stages that are short films, as well as first and second feature films. The Artistic Director and her committees pursue this task with rigour, seeking out and showcasing a double selection of 11 feature and 13 short films by filmmakers from around the world.  They make a bold and welcoming choice of first-time authors – figures of a new cinematic wave that we, as film critics, are determined to root in the ongoing movement of an art shaped by currents, sustained by continuities, and energised by ruptures. Cinema does not need inventing; rather, it is constantly reinvented, recreated, and redefined through forms, ideas, visions, and imaginations to open up new perspectives and raise new stakes. 

Each Semaine de la Critique rests on this axiom: criticism is intrinsic to cinema and attuned to its power of invention and freedom. Criticism chooses. It defends. Our committees champion the films in their selection with force, with the same devotion we feel for our friends and loved ones. 

Film criticism has become an actual struggle. It is subjected to increasingly strained economic conditions. Yet, fair wages remain an essential condition for critics to provide powerful and independent, intellectual and analytical work. 

Freedom to criticise is particularly fragile and under threat. Increasingly harsh commercial strategies are conditioning access to films, controlling the dialogue with their authors, and seeking to turn anyone engaged in the discourse about works into a subservient voice of praise. But we, as critics, are not subordinate advertisers. And we refuse to see the works sold reduced to mere commodities, promoted through influence-driven marketing as part of a system conceived as purely competitive. A film is neither a detergent nor an anti-wrinkle cream. We refuse to debase cinema to an everyday consumer product: we approach films as works of art and insist on engaging with them as such. 

The art of cinema calls for the art of loving, which filmmaker and critic Jean Douchet (1929-2019) held so dear. Critics are seekers of images, tirelessly exhibiting their discoveries, bringing them into light, to the fore, fully. Constantly questioning, with watchful clarity, the value of filmmakers and their films. According to Jean Douchet, criticism is an act of creation in its own right, a noble art that engages the viewer with the film and with the world. We aspire to this standard of artistic and critical resolve.