At the crossroads of perspectives, 50 years of American cinema
When the lights come back on, the images persist. The illusion of movement in 24 frames per second worked. We must therefore never lose sight of the fact that cinema is above all a game of gaze, where the eye of the filmmaker comes to meet that of the spectator. Lionel Chouchan and André Halimi wanted to extend this dialogue of silent eyes further to America, a major player in the 7th Art, whose pre-eminence continues to be denied more than a century after the infancy of Hollywood. Supported in the mid-1970s by the mayor of Deauville Michel d’Ornano and Lucien Barrière, founder of the group that bears his name, in 1975 they launched the Deauville American Film Festival, a cultural event without any comparison for the time, where the works landed from Uncle Sam’s country were offered on the Normandy coast a privileged place of conversation with the French public. Fifty years later, their ambition remains intact. If the outsiders of yesteryear, faces of the New Hollywood, have become the revered masters of today, their visions of yesteryear accompany the new eyes of filmmakers ever more eager to shake up perspectives again and again. In Deauville, eyes remain constantly open to prolong the dialogue.
