[Frameworks] Bérénice Reynaud has left us

[Adam Hyman]

Bérénice Reynaud,  professor, curator, scholar, Los Angeles Filmforum board member for over 20 years, passed away early on September 17, 2023 after a multi-year battle with cancer.

 

We know that many of you knew Bérénice personally, that you are her students, friends, colleagues, and her audience. It is difficult to synthesize the tremendous scope of Bérénice’s contributions to cinema. She was a champion of filmmakers in all stages of their careers and from countries around the world, a passionate advocate for her students, a sharp, incisive voice during discussions, a dedicated scholar, and the most committed presence at screenings throughout Southern California.  She had written and curated since the 1970s, previously working, among many roles, as a correspondent for Cahiers du Cinema, a regular contributor to Senses of Cinema, and currently as a Professor at CalArts and Curator of Film/Video at REDCAT. 

 

As Abigail Severance wrote for a GoFundMe campaign early in Bérénice’s fight against lymphoma from 2017: “IF YOU KNOW BÉRÉNICE, YOU KNOW A UNICORN. She is fiercely intelligent, loving and dedicated. She’s also a fighter, most often as an advocate for the filmmakers, students, activists and rebels that make up her global family. Born and raised in France, Bérénice has lived, studied, taught and curated in New York and Los Angeles, been faculty at the CalArts School of Film/Video for over two decades, and traveled extensively in the U.S., Europe and Asia in service of her vision for a radical independent cinema. She is a force of nature and a treasure to our communities.”  (https://www.gofundme.com/f/forberenice )

 

Bérénice Reynaud was a remarkable, vital, strong-willed, stubborn, brilliant and thoroughly alive woman who touched the lives of thousands of students and filmmakers. Her loss is a profound one for the entire independent film world.  We’ll miss her deeply.

 

Memorials to be announced at a later date at Cal Arts and elsewhere.

 

Her bio (slightly edited) from Cal Arts:

 https://filmvideo.calarts.edu/programs/film-and-video/program-faculty/b233r233nice-reynaud

Born and raised in France, Bérénice Reynaud studied philosophy at Paris I-Sorbonne, Cinema Studies at New York University and was a Helena Rubenstein fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program. Meanwhile she was curating radio programs of New American Music for Radio France and writing articles for the French film monthly Cahiers du cinéma – and was a member of Aprés-Coup, a New York-based group of scholars and psychoanalysts led by Lacanian psychoanalyst Paula Mieli. In the late 1980s, she developed an interest in Chinese cinema and is a pioneer of the introduction of Chinese video art and video documentary in both the United States and France.

 

As a critic, her main areas of expertise have been American independent/experimental film/video; films and video by women; Chinese cinema and video; African cinema; gender and feminist film theory. She was a regular collaborator of Cahiers du cinéma (France) from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, and was a regular contributor of Senses of Cinema (www,sensesofcinema.com) (Australia). She has published essays in Sight & Sound, Screen (UK); Film Comment, Afterimage, The Independent (USA); Le Monde diplomatique, Libération, CinémAction (France); Meteor, Springerin (Austria); Nosferatu (Spain) and Cinemaya, the Asian Film Quarterly (India), among others - as well as in a number of scholarly publications, encyclopedias and catalogue articles in the US, the UK, France, Austria and Italy. She is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinemas (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1999) and Hou Hsiao-hsien's "A City of Sadness" (London: BFI, 2002, and has co-edited a collection of texts on feminist film criticism, Vingt ans de théories féministes sur le cinéma - Grande-Bretagne et États-Unis (Paris: CinemAction, 1993).

 

As a curator, she has organized film and video exhibitions for Artists Space, The Collective for Living Cinema, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Moving Image (New York); the UCLA Film & Television Archives (Los Angeles); The Cinémathèque française, The Festival d'Automne and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris). Since the opening of REDCAT in November 2003, Reynaud shared curatorial responsibilities for the Jack Skirball Film/Video screening series with former School of Film/Video Dean Steve Anker. She was a correspondent for the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain: www.sansebastianfestival.com) since 1993 and the Viennale (Austria/Europe: www.viennale.at) since 2000, as well as Curatorial Adviser and member of the Programming Committee for the China Onscreen Biennial since 2014.   She organized a program of Chinese cinema the Kerala International Film Festival (India: http://iffk.in/) in 2015. She was one of the main organizers of “Against Oblivion,” the Chantal Akerman retrospective that took place in several Los Angeles venues and at New York’s BAM in the Spring 2016. She curated a major retrospective about contemporary Chinese cinema 2000-2016 for the Cinémathèque française in Jan-Feb 2017.  She lectured on a variety of subjects from gender theory to Asian cinema/video to experimental film throughout the United States, France, Belgium, Austria, The Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

 

Her essays at Senses of Cinema:

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/author/berenice-reynaud/

 

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