The film buffs of yesteryear
 

Posted on 20.10.2023

The inventive Mark Cousins follows the career of a British cinephile and producer, Lynda Myles, reflecting on an era blessed with theories and practices…

Portrait of a cinephile

Scotland's Lynda Myles, born in 1947, has worn many hats. She was the first female director of an international film festival, resurrecting the ailing Edinburgh festival in the early 1970s, thanks to her eclectic and discerning taste, which ranged from avant-garde cinema to New Hollywood auteurs (incidentally, the book Movie Brats, dedicated to the latter, was co-written by Myles). She went on to produce movies by Stephen Frears and Alan Parker, before helming the rich archives of the University of Berkeley, one of the west coast's leading film libraries. A passion for cinema: from contemplation to action...

Cinema Has Been My True Love: The Work and Times of Lynda Myles, 2023 © DR

The film

Mark Cousins is a hyperactive documentary filmmaker (he has recently made unique films on Hitchcock and on the March on Rome, the fascist demonstration and coup d’état), but he couldn't be satisfied with a classic interview film, a parade of "talking heads", as they say in his country. So he turned his subject into a strange heroine, somewhere between a Hitchcock blonde and remnants of Brigitte Lin in Chungking Express, emotionally contemplating the stages of her life as she recounts them in voice-over. Film extracts and archive photos are superimposed on this very intimate confession, the assessment of a journey…


Highlights

More than a mere highlight, there is an underlying theme: Lynda Myles' brilliant career is the story of moments of cinephilia, when the legacy of pioneers such as Henri Langlois, whom she met at the Cinémathèque française, is enriched by theoretical knowledge of film studies, particularly through contact with the semiologist Peter Wollen and feminist researcher Laura Mulvey. In the course of her encounters (with Douglas Sirk, in particular) and visits to institutions, she recalls a vibrant era when cinema was more an aesthetic utopia than a cultural industry.

A. F.

SCREENING

Cinema Has Been My True Love: The Work and Times of Lynda Myles by Mark Cousins (Documentary, 2023, 1h16)
Institut Lumière (Villa) – Friday, 20 October at 2.30pm