Hommage to Marcel Mazé - Living Memory
Thursday March 15th 2012, 20h
Cinéma La Clef, 34 rue Daubenton, 75005 Paris

The ones that have met Marcel Mazé were immediaiatly seduced by his personality, his enthusiasm and magnetised by his militant energy. He enjoyed sharing his passion for the so called experimental and, more broadly, different cinema. One was very quickly invited to rally the Collectif Jeune Cinéma. It did not matter whether you were a film maker or not. You were always an “experimental one”, in the making, or a “different” person as  he liked to designate CJC’s members. His federative presence as a cooperator was annihilating all elitist aspirations from film makers. Everyone could take part and invest oneself at CJC’s life. To rally such collective was and always is rethinking another way of making cinema and to reinvest it from its own practice. Such implications were necessarily personal and brought with them constantly evolving colorations  within infitnite possibilities. Theoretical debates and polymorphous creations were collapsing together to give rise to a permanent emergence of critical gestures  (critical in the romantic and libertarian sense). This collective was born in the legacy of May 68 when we liked to think that the collective would contribute to the ongoing renewal of that time. Thanks to Marcel Mazé, the CJC always kept such exponential desire for enabling emancipation. There must be something unreasonable to promote minor and disturbing forms of  cinematography but affects and sensations are inevitably mixing up with reason.

Marcel Mazé was commited to search, gather and nourish a young cinema at Hyères in the 70’s and until today in Paris . He was doing so with a rebellious spirit both optimistic and curious. Such eternal “young cinema” keeps regenerating itself at the margins of industrial cinema. Similar to a giant rhizome, it questions and influences the most dominant forms of cinema since its origins.

His acute dedication was key to discover and transmit for more than 40 years such an ongoing renewal of young cinematorgraphies calling into questions prejudices and assumptions. He was the figure that operated at the heart of CJC and that relentlessly shared his singular discoveries with others. He was fully inhabiting the film coop he founded with his art of uniting a large range of filmakers’ independent practices. His unifying presence enabled experimental and different cinema to radiate above any historiacal or dogmatic limits and to be still defended and animated by its own makers.

Marcel Mazé was a photographer, a director and an actor all together and performed for filmmakers such as Stéphane Marti. The first part of this evening will atempt to bring into light his essential federative role as a programmer and creator. The screening will start with Focalises (1980) and will carry on with works by filmakers that were close to Marcel Mazé and went along with him as“travelling companions”.  We are borrowing this image from Raphaël Bassan who is the co-founder of the CJC and with whom this special screening is organised.

Laurence Rebouillon & Gabrielle Reiner