by Marc Guidoni , published on 8.09.2009

A few words to express how much enjoyment one can derive from reading “Plaidoyer pour l’avenir du cinema d’auteur” (“Defending the future of auteur filmmaking”) the latest book of interviews by Michel Reihac published by Editions Klincksieck. What a joy to see a description, with such clarity and pedagogy, of a militant commitment to a life of creation in general and of filmmaking in particular.

Michel Reilhac (blog) was the director of the Forum des Images, as well as a film producer and director. His comments and reflections in this book go beyond the frame of his present activities at ARTE, where he is the Head of Cinema. Having occupied these diverse positions, he’s one of the best connoisseurs involved in the making and financing of independent cinema throughout the world. He interviews Frédéric Sojcher, filmmaker and head of the Masters Program in Screenwriting, Directing and Production at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

What’s particularly heartening, in the theses he develops, is to see that, far from sticking to a historic, sacred, untouchable conception of how feature films are conceived and made, Michel is constantly explaining that cinema has never stopped adapting to its time. And in our epoch of numeric globalization, that is more than ever the case.

In this respect, and at the risk of being taken for an iconoclast by many of his colleagues and other “professionals of the industry”, Michel explains that the “film” object in no longer today a finished and final product, but rather “an element among others in a process, a step, a form among others that creates an imaginative and narrative resource for a myriad of possibilities and uses”. Furthermore, he explains that “the digital future will always encourage the inclusion of more “meta-data” around a piece, and that the film will become the key to access a particular universe or a network of information and experiences that is constantly evolving”. Michel also talks at length about the fact that the goal of a film is the communal process… Transmedia has really arrived…

It’s no coincidence that Michel was one of the first supporters of the Pocket Films Festival and himself a diligent user of tools like blogging and Twitter, or that he’s constantly fighting in festivals and international fairs to give a chance to the most audacious transmedia projects… The latest to date: “Him” by the American Lance Weiler, which Michel and ARTE supported passionately at the latest CineMart in February 2009 in Rotterdam. It’s the first transmedia work that has been awarded by this reference institution in the global cinema landscape.