After having directed the editorial staff of “Cahiers du Cinéma”, he had shot several films and documentaries, including a series on Marseille. Essayist and theoretician, he died on May 19, at the age of 80.
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From theory to practice, from film criticism to the production of films. His journey was not unique but was able to reflect all the concerns and questions of an era that won and a society that was questioning. Jean-Louis Comolli died on May 19 in Paris, at the age of 80. He was born on July 30, 1941, in Philippeville (today Skikda), Algeria.
Jean-Louis Comolli discovers cinema in the Algiers cinema-clubs, then in Paris. In the early 1960s, he attended, with his friend Jean Narboni, the circles of the most demanding Parisian cinephilia. He began to write to the Cahiers du Cinéma in 1962. He exalted the great artists of American cinema now at the end of his career, such as John Ford or Howard Hawks. In 1966, he defended, in a superb text, the film Line Rouge 7000, by Hawks, which is not, far from it, the object of critical unanimity.
This admiration of the great Hollywood authors nourished the new concepts that the human sciences, in full effervescence, would then generate. Comolli, faithful to a requirement that the review has imposed itself, is passionate about what are called “young cinemas”, the emergence, in the world, of new cinematographies, of an emerging generation of directors , far from the major industrial centers of film production.
critic and free-jazz
In addition to his activity as a cinematographic criticism, he collaborated on the journal Jazz Magazine, taking an interest in developments in what we called free-jazz, music that became more libertarian, more radical, in phase, Perhaps, at least that is how it was fantasized, with the social and racial movements of an era that was kissing.
Comolli became editor -in -chief of the Cahiers du Cinéma in 1966. He accompanied an increasingly theoretical turn of the journal. It is a deep era of questioning of a medium whose intrinsically political nature is questioned. In a series of texts grouped under the technical title and ideology, Comolli tries to reveal the historicity of the mechanisms and rhetorical figures in the cinematographic staging, denying any idea of an illusory neutrality of the technique.
He follows and accompanies the evolution of the cinema notebooks towards a Maoist line. It is the time of quarrels, repudiations, broken friendships too. In 1971, he co-written with Philippe Carles Free-Jazz Black Power (reissued in 2000 in Gallimard, “folio”), affirmation of the revolutionary nature of the new forms of black music opposed to an alleged conservative dimension of jazz called “classic” and of its structures (the great orchestras of the 1930s and 1940s). The book provoked many discussions in the amateur industry.
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