Raphaël Bassan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1948-08-26)26 August 1948 (age 76) |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation(s) | Film critic,journalist,filmmaker |
Raphaël Bassan (born 1948) is a Frenchfilm critic andjournalist, who has specialized inexperimental film and the history of cinema. He has also made three short movies.
Bassan was born inBurgas,Bulgaria, of French nationality, in 1948. His family moved to Paris in 1949. He has been interested in all forms of cinema from childhood. He has been a poet since 1964. He was one of the founders with Hubert Haddad of the magazine,Le Point d'Être (which only published three issues). Feeling that he was locked into a post-surrealist form, he chose to write in a "more modern" style as a critic. After writing reviews in specialized magazines, his first "professional" job was for the magazinePolitique Hebdo when it was founded in 1970. He co-founded theCollectif Jeune Cinéma [fr] in 1971, the first French co-op of experimental cinema, and collaborated with a large number of magazines and various publications, notably the cinema magazines:Téléciné (1972–1976),Écran (1976–1980),Cinéma différent (1976–1980),La Revue du cinéma (1980–1992),Le Mensuel du cinéma (1992–1994), and the fine arts magazines:Canal (1978–1988),L'Art vivant (second formula: beginning of the 1980s), and the French national daily newspaper,Libération (1985–1991) andSenses of Cinema.[1]
As well as supporting cinema d’auteurs (Jean-Luc Godard,Jacques Rivette,Jim Jarmusch,Manoel de Oliveira,Raoul Ruiz,Roman Polanski, orAndrei Tarkovsky) and writing about current productions, Bassan wrote about and encouraged experimental cinema. He was able to follow the evolution this cinema genre more attentively when it enjoyed a resurgence at the end of the 1990s, and write about its young artists. He has written inBref, a magazine dedicated to short films in which experimental cinema occupies an important part, from its first publication in 1989, His article,Experimental or simply filmmakers? An interview with Stéphane du Mesnildot,Johanna Vaude, David Matarasso and Othello Vilgard, inaugurated this series inBref number 47 (November–December 2000). He has written the film column forEurope since 1984, forBref, since its founding in 1989, for theEncyclopædia Universalis since 1995 and forZeuxis since 2005.
In 1980, he coordinated the numbers 10-11 of the magazineCinémAction with Guy Hennebelle:Avant-garde cinema (experimental and militant). He has participated in theDictionnaire du cinéma (Larousse, 1986 coordinated by Jean-Loup Passek), in theDictionnaire du cinéma mondial (published by Les Éditions du Rocher, 1994 and coordinated by Alain and Odette Virmaux), inL'Art du mouvement (Cinema Collection of the National Museum of Modern Art,Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996, coordinated byJean-Michel Bouhours), inJeune, dure et pure ! Une histoire du cinéma d'avant-garde et expérimental français (under the direction ofNicole Brenez andChristian Lebrat, published byCinémathèque Française/Mazzotta, 2001) and inUne Encyclopédie du court métrage (coordinated by Jacky Evrard and Jacques Kermabon, Yellow Now, Côté Court, Pantin, 2004). Raphaël Bassan has been published in threeCahiers de Paris expérimental: number 17,Norman McLaren: Le Silence de Prométhée; number 20,Les 20 ans de Paris expérimental (in collaboration with Daphné Le Sergent and Marc Sautereau) and number 25:Cinéma et abstraction: des croisements (2007). In 2014, he brought together some of his articles on avant-garde films for a book, "Cinéma experimental. Abécédaire pour une contre-culture" (Published by Yellow Now, Belgium). For the first time in that kind of publication, the reader can find a large number of articles about French Filmmakers - from the twenties to the present - they're there with international artists of the genre such as Hans Richter and Michael Snow.[2]He have collaborated with Collectif Jeune Cinema from 1971 until today (2018) and defended experimental cinema in all kind of supports and practices[3]In 2021, he organized, with Frederic Tachou, Laurence Rebouillon and Théo Delyannis the celebration of the 50 th birthday of Collectif Jeune Cinema.[4]
He coined, in 1989, the theory ofcinema du look,[5] in a study about the films ofJean-Jacques Beineix,Luc Besson andLeos Carax, published byLa Revue du Cinéma. These directors were said to favor style over substance, spectacle over narrative; they mixedhigh culture and pop culture.,[6][7]
He has been on numerous radio programs and held a small role inLe Prestige de la mort (2006) byLuc Moullet.Some of his poems were republished in the volume:Rites et rituels (Europe/Poésie 2001).[8] He has also made three short films.
This films was published in 2017 under the titleRaphaël Bassan, le critique filmeur by the label Re : Voir Vidéo directed by the filmmakerPip Chodorov [fr].[13]
