Lisa Nesselson is an American film critic living in Paris since 1978 and is has a weekly program reviewing current films on France 24.
Where were you born and where did you grow up?
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio but consider myself to be a Chicagoan. I lived there from the middle of third grade through college, before coming to France at the tail end of 1978.
Do you remember what the first film you ever saw was, and what kind of impression did it leave on you?
I have a very strong memory around age 3 or 4 of a Soviet Russian animated version of ‘The Snow Queen’ which scared me but in a good, artistic way. It was restored and re-released in French cinemas maybe 7 or 8 years ago and it STILL scared me in a good, artistic way. I remember really liking ‘The Sword in the Stone’ and I also recall an early expedition to see ‘Island of the Blue Dolphins’ — although for that one I remember the magnificent vertical marquee of the theater more than I remember the film itself. I really loved animated cartoons and my way of describing dreams at an early age was to announce “I have cartoons in my eyes!”
What films affected you most growing up and was there one in particular that made you want to be a film critic?
Something that living in Paris allows me to do is to see, projected, so many of the films from the 1960s and ‘70s I first saw as a young person. You rarely know you’re living through a special era when you’re living through it — Mary Astor wrote that none of the cast had the slightest idea they were making a classic when they were shooting “The Maltese Falcon” — but damn, there were so many outstanding films when I was forming my taste and my sense of filmic storytelling. I’m so grateful to have discovered “2001” and “Last Tango in Paris” and “The Mother and the Whore” in real time. Anything by Woody Allen, anything by Robert Altman, anything by Luis Bunuel. Bliss. The audience freaking out at “The Exorcist” after waiting 3 hours to get in.
I had no idea I wanted to be a film critic, but that hey-wait-a-minute moment hit me in a cramped hotel room during a family car trip to, I think, Florida. I couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9. A movie was on the TV set and there was a man face down in a swimming pool but he was talking — he was narrating the story. And I remember thinking: But he’s DEAD. Isn’t being dead a major impediment to talking? It was, of course, “Sunset Boulevard” which I usually still cite as my favorite movie of all time.
I never cease to marvel at how brilliantly Billy Wilder captured the essence of American life and American characters in what was a second or third language. The richness of the screen classics by directors who could just as easily have fallen prey to the Nazis never fails to send chills down my spine. I can’t imagine a world without Ernst Lubitsch’s “Ninotchka” or “To Be or Not to Be,” or without at least half a dozen gems from Wilder.
I don’t understand how people get to the point where they make sweeping statements about “hating Jews.” Is that so? Then I guess you don’t like “The Twilight Zone” or the Theme from the Twilight Zone? Two Jewish guys: Rod Serling and Bernard Herrmann.
You don’t like Kirk Douglas? You don’t like all the classic early pop-rock written by Neil Sedaka, Carole King, Lieber and Stoller, Neil Diamond? You hate the classic comic book characters invented by Stan Lee? You hate the character of Black Panther — written and drawn by white Jewish guys? The list goes on and on.
‘Peter Pan’ starring Mary Martin was on TV every year and my parents say that when I was maybe 4 years old I demanded to know “What was Captain Hook’s name before he lost his hand?” Well…think about it. What’s the statistical likelihood that his last name was ALREADY Hook before that crocodile got the upper hand, so to speak?
“The Wizard of Oz” also holds a special place in my heart. I was lucky to grow up watching — on stage or at the movies or on TV — musicals with catchy lyrics and worthwhile melodies. Any car full of kids being driven somewhere or any band of friends walking home from school could sing all the songs from “Fiddler on the Roof” or “Mary Poppins” or “The Sound of Music” among others. It wasn’t exactly the same as memorizing the Iliad or the Odyssey but it WAS a good foundation for a certain kind of popular taste.
Everybody had the phonograph record of “My Fair Lady” — I think it’s salutary for a 10 year old to absorb the deadpan humor of a song like “Ascot Opening Day.” Everybody could sing “
Several outstanding directors had mothers who took them to the movies — all kinds of movies — from an early age. Oliver Stone’s mom — who was French — took him to the movies. Quentin Tarantino’s mom took him to the movies. My mom took me to see such films as “The Pawnbroker” and “The Trip.” Very serious fare destined for adults. Apparently I turned out ok. When I interviewed Jack Valenti, who was instrumental in putting the studio rating system in place, I told him some of the movies I saw as a youngster and he said, “Now, Lisa, I am certain your parents did not take you to see ‘The Pawnbroker.’” Oh, yeah? Then who did take me — space aliens?
Did you study film in school and university?
I attended Northwestern University’s School of Speech in the Department of Radio, TV and Film. I thought I wanted to MAKE movies but figured out that I don’t have what it takes to marshal an army of techies and actors and bend everybody to my artistic vision. Radio is probably my first love — you can do so much with so little.
All of my filmmaking and sound recording skills are strictly analogue. You load the film into the camera, you have to make sure the lens is focused and the light levels are viable to get a proper exposure, you think hard before you put your finger on the trigger because celluloid costs a lot, developing and printing it costs a lot and you don’t know whether you got what you wanted until it comes back from the lab.
I started making movies in Super-8 in the Young Artists Studios of the Art Institute of Chicago the summer I was 13: 1969. I’m grateful that my parents always let me go Downtown by myself on public transportation and that our teachers set us loose with Super-8 cameras. Oh look — hippies! Oh, look — Hare Krishnas. Oh look, a concert in Grant Park turning into a bit of a riot. We had the run of one of the world’s great Art Museums and one of the world’s great cities.
The Art Institute owns an awful lot of great Impressionist paintings — I swooned regularly over Seurat’s ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” from a very early age, although, come to think of it, I’ve never visited the real location! Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” During my brief stint as a jeune fille au pair in 1980 I took my two young charges, age 9 and 10, to the Pompidou Center. They behaved like unhinged banshees. When I told their parents, the mother said, “Oh, they’ve never been to an art museum! We’re waiting until they’re old enough to appreciate it.”
I made movies in 16mm at NU. I did an internship in the audio-visual department of the San Francisco Public Library in 1976. Editing on reel-to-reel video was nerve-wracking. If you got the timing wrong on a segment you had to go back and re-do everything that went before. But it seemed miraculous to have synch sound already paired up with the images.
I spent WEEKS and lots of money at the lab trying to do pretty elementary special effects on an optical printer in 16mm — stuff a 3 year old with an iPhone could do now in a matter of minutes. There’s something to be said for ease-of-use but there’s definitely something to be said for the tactile side of analogue media.
Before I ever got to college, in high school, the visionary short film “Why Man Creates” made an indelible impression on me. And I don’t know if the City of Chicago paid for them or they were a gift from the distributor but I remember being given free tickets to see restored Chaplin films in a movie theater on the Near North side. The Filmotheque here in Paris just ran 10 restored Chaplin films for about a month and I was so so so happy to see parents bring young children. Take your kids to “Modern Times” instead of “Frozen II” is my advice. The kids laughed and enjoyed themselves. French kids still have attention spans and they know how to behave in a movie theater.
What was the first film you reviewed and what was the review of?
I dabbled in reviewing current films on French radio starting in 1981 (in English). I think my first review for The Paris Free Voice — a monthly give-away tabloid I wrote for for 14 years — was David Byrne’s “True Stories” in 1986.
It took a long time to get French publicists to give me the time of day, so I was often writing about films after they’d been in theaters for a while. To this day I’d much rather see a movie with regular folks but I’m frequently obliged to go to press screenings to offer an opinion on release day.
When and why did you move to Paris?
I thought I was coming for 3 weeks to visit my boyfriend — now my husband, also from Chicago — who was conducting research for a biography of Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinematheque Francaise. The book was published, in French, in 1986. I translated it into English in 1995 (Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema). In retrospect I can’t really explain why, but we just stayed. I was an illegal alien for the better part of 3 years. When Francois Mitterand was elected president in 1981 he decreed an amnesty for illegals who could prove they had a job, we fit the criteria and I like to think we’ve contributed to French society in our own modest way.
How does film culture differ in France than the USA?
+ There’s a fairly endless reply to that question. The short-ish version is that the cinema is an integral component of French society. Movies are understood to be an art form as well as commercial objects. You can earn your high school diploma — your baccalaureat — with a specialization in cinema and some years, I assure you, the essay questions are so sophisticated and complex I’m not entirely sure that I would pass.
Something that jumped out at me when the Yellow Vest protests began in late 2018 was that in interviews — be they in French or English-language publications — when describing their hardships, protestors kept telling reporters “We don’t even have the money to go out to the movies” or “We don’t have the money to take our kids to a movie.” The cinema is seen as part of the roster of things that define a life worth living: food, shelter, a job, trips to the movie theater.
I suspect a low income American would complain about not being able to buy gas or pay their cell phone bill or their cable bill. But ordinary working class French folks with jobs and families were saying the government should do something so they could go out to a movie now and then. And nobody said, “How frivolous, everybody knows movies are optional!”
I get into verbal jousts with English-speaking colleagues who have been insisting for years that “movie theaters are over with, streaming is the future of movie-going.” All I can say is that brick and mortar cinemas are most definitely NOT “over with” in France. Twenty-five percent of the movie theaters in EUROPE are here in France. In smaller communities, the government will step in to rescue a struggling cinema because it’s understood that citizens should have access to movies. To put it bluntly, the American attitude is “If it’s not a sustainable business then it deserves to die. If a movie theater becomes a supermarket or a parking lot, what’s the big deal? Just stay home and watch movies there.” That attitude seems shockingly craven and stupid to the average French person.
Since after WWII the French have counted the number of tickets sold, not the amount of money taken in. So it’s very very easy to generate extremely accurate statistics (I wrote for “Variety” for 17 years and it was a losing battle to convert box office receipts from francs into dollars because the exchange rate changed all the time.) And in terms of people leaving their homes and going out to the movies, 2019 was the second best year since 1966! There were 306 French film released in theaters and almost 400 films from other countries. About a third of those were American but the range of countries represented is simply breathtaking. Last year 4 million people bought tickets to see restored older films on the big screen — the market for classic films in theaters has been growing for 20 years. Paris, especially, still has dozens of art houses and quite a few rep houses.
They can turn on a dime. Anna Karina died and the next week all of the films she made with Jean-Luc Godard were in art houses anew, along with the film she directed in the early 1970s. Sue Lyon died on December 26th and the next week you could go see “Lolita” and “Seven Women” and “The Night of the Iguana.”
I am heartened to see everybody from college students to people pushing 80 line up every time “Manhattan” or “Annie Hall” is programmed. Woody Allen’s “A Rainy Day in New York” came out on September 18th on 27 screens in Paris, the same number as “Ad Astra” and almost as many as films like “The Lion King” and “Star Wars.” It’s still playing on one screen as of January 29th. A film that is considered un-releasable in the U.S. has been playing for 4 and a half months in France. One out of every 10 Parisians has bought a ticket.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Film-going is a part of life, like food and sex. French people ARE subscribing to streaming services but they’re still buying DVDs and they’re still going out to the movies.
If you could invite three people in the film industry-living or dead- to dinner, who would they be and what would you serve?
Billy Wilder, Anita Loos, Georges Melies.
I know Wilder loved hamburgers but sushi would be kind of hilarious for this trio. “Mr. Melies, have some cold raw fish wrapped in seaweed.”
Do you find that commercial French films are now similar to American films?
Not really. If a French hit comes across as formulaic it’s unlikely that the filmmakers were TRYING to follow a formula. So far as I know, a fair amount of market research goes into creating TV shows but most movies are still a question of somebody wanting to tell a story and somebody else agreeing to produce it. Most French movies don’t cost that much in the first place. I think the average budget is around 4 million euros — I doubt that would even cover the catering budget on something like “Star Wars.”
Most years the top-grossing French films are dumb comedies. This past year was exceptional in that of the 16 films that sold over 1 million tickets — many of them a LOT more than that but that’s the benchmark — almost all of them were about serious topics: tensions in lower class suburbs (Les Miserables), the Dreyfus Affair(J’accuse/ An Officer and a Spy), mentally challenged people (Hors normes), the damage wrought by a pedophile priest in Lyon (Grace a Dieu). There is unquestionably an audience for “tough” subject matter. French film-goers still have wide-ranging tastes and a sense of adventure.
Americans are more likely to be in “consumer mode” when it comes to choosing a movie. The average potential movie-goer in the U.S. wants to make sure they’ll like the movie before plunking down the price fo a ticket which is part of why American movie trailers show so much.
The typical French film-goer is way more willing to branch out, to take a chance. It helps that for a decade now the major chains have been offering all-you-can-watch subscription cards. For less than $25 a month you can buy a card — you have to make a year-long commitment — that gets you in to hundreds of cinemas at no additional cost, except a few euros for 3-D glasses. It’s like a monthly transit pass, only for movies. So far, American experiments along those lines have failed. It helps that in France the government keeps tabs on every ticket sold and makes certain that the percentages that should be distributed to the producers, the exhibitors, the filmmakers, etc. reach their proper destinations. Hollywood studios are kind of famous for telling people who worked on massive hits that, sorry, there aren’t really any profits. Yeah, right.
It seems as though almost every French film in recent years feature American pop songs, whether in the films or in their trailers. Do you know why or have a theory why that is?
+ It’s an odd phenomenon, I agree. It’s not like soundtrack albums are a going concern. Decades ago, France instituted rules about the percentage of music on radio or public places that had to be French-language. The first generation of pillbox pay toilets had piped in music and it used to crack me up that if you spent enough time in one you’d hear, say, a Beach Boys song followed by Edith Piaf followed by Bruce Springstein followed by Charles Aznavour. The quota even applied to pay toilets! My understanding is that that protectionist gesture rescued the local music industry. Because French material was required, it started getting played.
What are your favorite movie theaters in Paris?
I love the hole-in-the-wall vintage cinemas in the Latin Quarter. They still show 35mm prints during retrospectives and I get misty-eyed when I hear the sound of film running through a projector. The main auditorium at the Grand Rex is unbeatably majestic. I believe they have the largest screen in Europe. The Max Linder has superb sound and a huge screen.
The Publicis on the Champs-Elysees near the Arc de Triomphe is terrific — super comfortable, great sight-lines. I have great affection for the Studio Galande, a rep house with, I think, 72 seats, that has been showing “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” on Friday and Saturday nights for decades.
I’m sure you have already been asked this but I’m going to ask anyway. What were your favorite French films of 2019? Do you have Cesar award predictions?
+ If one agrees to fall into the trap of comparing apples and oranges, the “best” French film of the year, hands down, is Roman Polanski’s “J’accuse.” Polanski is an absolute master of every aspect of filmmaking, he works with the best actors and technicians — which means they are eager to work with HIM — and the result is an incredibly important film that’s also thrilling to watch.
I’m typing this on Jan 29th — the Cesar nominations were announced today and “J’accuse” leads with 12 nominations. That means that a majority of the 4,313 members of the Cesars Academy are in the mood to champion excellence. Whatever you think of Polanski himself and his confirmed and alleged bad behavior in decades past, it’s impossible to deny that “J’accuse” is outstanding. I see no rationale that holds up to scrutiny for contending that he shouldn’t have been given the money to make it in the first place or that it shouldn’t be shown. The hypocrisy makes me ill. It has been a matter of public record since 1977 that Polanski raped then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer and now, all of a sudden, mostly young (but not exclusively) protestors are vandalizing the areas around theaters to write “Polanski is a Rapist” and “Theaters Are Complicit With a Rapist” on buildings and the street. The City has to remove that stuff — it costs money.
For some useful perspective, I urge everybody to read Geimer’s excellent autobiography “The Girl” from 2013. She’s very smart, very funny, very self-aware and she was delighted when Polanski won the Oscar for “The Pianist” in 2003. Hey, protestors — that was 17 years ago! They’re hardly pals but the only person he owed an apology to was her — not us, not society, not people so ignorant that they think “Somebody else could have made that film.” Geimer was delighted when “J’accuse” won the Silver Lion in Venice in September 2019 — “Joker” won the Golden Lion. We’re told that we must listen to women but hardly anybody cares to “listen” to Geimer — who is in her 50s and (understandably!) hates being frozen in time as a 13 year old to feed other peoples’ misplaced outrage. When she says that it’s pointless to protest or boycott Polanski and to please take your outrage elsewhere where it might do some good and make the world a better place, the but-but-but-he-raped-you-and-
I think she’s a role model for overcoming the fallout from sexual assault but hardly anybody wants to view her that way. By the transitive power of faulty reasoning, an awful lot of people think Polanski shouldn’t make movies and if he does, you certainly shouldn’t go see them.
I’m the president of l’Academie des Lumieres de la Presse Internationale — currently 130 foreign journalists from 41 countries in an organization that has been honoring French films for 25 years. We have 13 categories and we nominated “J’accuse” in 5 of them. At our awards ceremony on Jan 27th, Polanski won Best Director. I just watched the video of the show and director Arnaud Desplechin leapt to his feet to applaud. He was competing in the same category and was overjoyed that Polanski won. High ranking film professionals came up to me afterwords to say how happy they were that we had had “the intelligence” to recognize Polanski’s accomplishment and to add that they hoped the Cesars would follow our example. It certainly could have gone either way, but 12 nominations for a film by an 86 year old master at the height of his powers gives me renewed faith in French discernment.
That doesn’t mean the film will WIN in any of the categories in which it has been nominated. But I don’t see how self-respecting film professionals could ignore so much artistry assembled in one gorgeous, disturbing, painfully pertinent 2-hour package.
French filmgoers have turned out in large numbers and “J’accuse” has been a success in each of the countries where it has been released so far. (It was sold to 27 territories and it pains me that none of them are English-speaking.) In Spain they had to add theaters when it came out — it was the only movie in their Top 20 besides the new Star Wars to sell over 500 tickets per showing.
People are INTERESTED in the topic — the shameful judicial error that tore France apart for 12 years in a morass of raison d’etat and anti-Semitism, from the point of view of the military official (played by Jean Dujardin) who didn’t care for Dreyfus but had proof that he was innocent.
I am a huge Snoopy fan. I read that you played Lucy in a production of You are a Good Man Charlie Brown. Was that in Paris and was it in French or English? Is there going to be a film version with you in it?
I played Lucy during a 6 month run in the 1980s at the now-defunct Galerie 55 at 55 Rue de Seine, an adorable little theater with a storied history that used to put on English-language plays. It was a minor dream come true. As an adolescent and teenager I had probably MEMORIZED most of the Peanuts strips to date. I bought every paperback anthology and enjoyed reading them cover to cover. I still have the unopened commemorative Snoopy coin for the moon landing. And some Peanuts sweatshirts I outgrew in my 20s — wonderfully thick cotton. I had the cast album and was thrilled to meet Bob Balaban who originated the role of Snoopy in the original New York production, when he came to Deauville for the American Film Festival. Talk about great songs! I had exactly the right luxuriant curly hair to look the part. I can’t imagining anybody NOT enjoying that show if the cast is reasonably competent.
What do you prefer about Paris?
Access to movies, outstanding public transportation (aside from strikes, of course). The fact that it’s extremely safe for a major city. In 41 years I’ve only had 2 scary experiences (being trapped in a phone booth by a homeless person, being chased though the Montparnasse Metro station and making it onto the last Metro in a split second before the guy caught up with me.) When the internet hookup isn’t working at home and I absolutely must send a script or article, I’ve often ended up sitting on a bench at 1 in the morning — even as late as 2, when some of the street lights click off — to swipe a WiFi signal. I wouldn’t sit on a bench by myself at that hour with an expensive laptop in Chicago or NY and expect to hang on to my status as a sane person. In central Paris I really don’t give it a second thought. The energy I’ve saved not having to be hyper-alert to my personal safety pro-rated over 4 decades adds up to a lot!
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Such an interesting woman. I hope she's right in saying cinema is not dead. Seeing a movie on the big screen is the only way to view it. Thanks for posting this. I really enjoyed reading this.
Posted by: Cheryl | January 30, 2020 at 05:09 PM
Wonderful interview, I learned so much. Thank you both.
Posted by: Jean(ne) in Minnesota | February 02, 2020 at 07:33 PM