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Michel Ciment (French:[simɑ̃]; 26 May 1938 – 13 November 2023) was a French film critic and the editor of the cinema magazine Positif.
Ciment was born in Paris on 26 May 1938, the son of Alexander and Hélène Cziment.[a] His father, a Hungarian Jew, had settled in the French capital in the 1920s and narrowly escaped the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942, fleeing to Normandy where he was later joined by his son. Ciment's French mother was also Jewish, but kept this fact hidden until just before her death.[2][3] He attended the Lycée Condorcet, then enrolled in a Classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he was influenced by the teaching of philospher Gilles Deleuze. In 1958–59, he was a Fulbright scholar at Amherst College in the United States, where he gained a knowledge of American history.[4][5][6]
Ciment was noted for his love for American film, somewhat unusual in his French cultural environment. He credited his Americophilia to his memories of the liberation of Paris by American soldiers in 1944, when he was a child.[2]
Although Ciment had written about cinema in a student publication,[7] his first film review was published in Positif magazine in 1963, and he later became the periodical's chief editor.[8] In 1972, Cimemt became a film critic on the radio programme Le Masque et la Plume, to which he contributed until a few weeks before he died.[9][10] He wrote books on great film directors, which were based on extensive interviews with their subjects. An anthology of interviews, Film World, was published in English 2009.[2]
Ciment regarded cinema as a synthesis of all the arts, stating that he could not imagine being a film critic without a knowledge of theatre, literature, painting, and music. He preferred to know as little as possible about a film when viewing it for the first time, and avoided reading press releases in advance.[1]
