‘What interests me about cinema is its status as a moving, ghostly object’. Interview with Jérôme Prieur

Abstract

This interview was conducted with Jérôme Prieur at the opening of the study day on ‘Literary cinephilia’ organised by the Swiss Literary Archives of the Swiss National Library in Bern on 5 April 2023. As a man of words and images, Jérôme Prieur would seem to be the ideal person to talk about the issues raised by the now historically established notion of “cinephilia” and its relationship to literature. For the general public, his name is associated with landmark documentaries: On the history of the beginnings of Christianity, through a historical cycle of four series begun with Corpus Christi (1997-1998), co-directed with Gérard Mordillat, or finally on the period 1919-1945, including Les Sentinelles de l’oubli, a feature-length film on the sculptures on war memorials which won the Grand Prix at the Festival de l’Histoire de l’art in 2024.  He is also the author of more than thirty essays, on subjects that partly overlap with those of the documentaries: on Proust, on Gothic literature, on religion, on Nazi Germany and the Occupation. But there are also texts that evoke cinema more directly. These are the ones we focused on in this interview: Nuits blanches (1981), Séance de lanterne magique (1985), Le Spectateur nocturne (1993), La Moustache du soldat inconnu (2018). Jérôme Prieur was a columnist and film critic at the Cahiers du chemin and then at Georges Lambrichs’ NRF from 1976 to 1983.