“Spectators!” by Arnaud Desplechin, story on cinematographic initiation – rts.ch

“The wonderful thing about cinema is that you don’t know who is coming to see your films. You desperately hope that there is a fourteen-year-old girl who sees the film and that it is of some use to her ( …) I like to be a bit of a smuggler, that is to say to remember and transmit little bursts of beauty that I have seen”, indicates Arnaud Desplechin in the Vertigo show on 14 January.

Combining archive images, collected testimonies and fiction, “Spectators!” follows the journey of Paul Dédalus (played in particular by Mathieu Amalric), fictional double of the French director Arnaud Desplechin, hero of his autobiographical work begun in 1996 with “How I argued… my sexual life” and continued years later with “Three memories from my youth”. In this fifteenth feature film, he returns to his character’s childhood, and tells the story of how he got introduced to cinema: first as a spectator, then a film buff and finally a director.

A discovery of cinema

“Spectators!” mixes several genres: the documentary and the fictional learning novel, but rather takes the form of an essay. The film looks back on the birth of Arnaud Desplechin’s cinephilia. Initially, “Spectators!” is a commissioned film. It was the producer Charles Gillibert who asked the director for a documentary on cinema. But Arnaud Desplechin does not make documentaries, so the producer suggests that he do something else around cinemas.

Even if “Spectators!” praises the cinema spectator from the autobiographical point of view of the director, it is through his alter ego that Arnaud Desplechin transmits this story: an alter ego who allows more freedom and who is “a better spectator than me because he’s someone who loves to admire.”

Moviegoers of yesterday and today

“Spectators!” is an ode to those who watch films, who go to cinemas, and love cinema. It’s also a way for Arnaud Desplechin to look back on his discovery of cinema and perhaps create bridges with the way we perceive it today.

“The forms of cinephilia are diversifying. Young people have a much sharper cinephilia than mine. Because for me, it was enough to see 200 films and you had seen all the cinema. Today, it’s no longer 200, it’s It’s 20,000, because with film restorations, the internet, new prints, etc., the corpus has grown. Young moviegoers have an agility that forces me. admiration,” explains the director.

Comments collected by Rafael Wolf

Adaptation web: ld

“Spectators!” by Arnaud Desplechin, with Mathieu Amalric, Françoise Lebrun and Shoshana Felman. To be seen in French-speaking cinemas since January 15, 2025.