Revisiting the Cinema of Anne-Marie Miéville

Over at the Sight & Sound blog, the BFI has just published an insightful and exhaustive article by Albertine Fox about the brilliant career of Anne-Marie Miéville, the Swiss-born multimedia artist and director of several acclaimed features, including: My Dear Subject,Lou n'a pas dit non, We’re Still Here, and After the Reconciliation.

Miéville’s film career began after she met her future companion, Jean-Luc Godard, in Switzerland in the early 1970s. The two grew close while Godard was convalescing from a motorbike accident, and after Miéville worked as a stills photographer on his 1972 film Tout va bien, they formed a prolific filmmaking partnership that has endured for more than forty years. Miéville cowrote the screenplay for Godard’s 1975 film Numéro Deux, and she collaborated with him on the writing, directing, and editing of many of his subsequent films of the 1970s and ’80s. Upon leaving Paris in the mid-’70s (first for Grenoble, then for Rolle, Switzerland), the couple formed the studio Sonimage and began creating work that sought to investigate, explore, and deconstruct the medium of cinema.

Describing Miéville’s cinematic production as “insistent, undaunted, and keenly perceptive,” Fox notes that Miéville’s films “demonstrate a great aptitude for creating unnerving moments of tension while offering audio-visual experiences that are amusing, quirky and deeply moving.” With her “sustained concern with sexual difference, the couple, family relations, loneliness and the everyday,” Fox adds, “Anne-Marie Miéville is anything but Jean-luc Godard's quiet companion. Indeed, it is her intense interest in communication, its possibility and its failure, that has shaped and continually reignited the long-lasting bond between them.” For more insights about Miéville and her partnership with Godard, read the full article on Sight & Sound’s site.