DOMINIQUE RESTAURANT RUSSE, RUE BREA, PARIS

(Editor’s Note from the original post on Blog Film Alert 101: This is the first collection of tributes to my friend a great man of Cinema Pierre Rissient. Coming right in the middle of our very own Cinema Reborn event somehow seems like a good time to go. Pierre was as passionate about retrieving the cinema’s past as he was about discovering the cinema’s future. He will be missed. Vale Pierre Rissient with Tributes from his friends ...)

With the world’s most emblematic film festival about to start, we all each have our story and memory about he who left us last night, who’s been a fixture in Cannes and many other festivals all around the globe ... what else can be added indeed? As I search in my mind though, the words that come to mind associated with memory of PR are ‘loyalty’ and the French sense of ‘tendresse’ ... they talk about his amazing work, his indefatigable passion for cinema, his associations with many iconic directors in the field, but I think about someone who’s loyal in his friendship and affections for over 40 years, who was unwavering in his ‘tendresse’ about his cinematic friends once he had gathered them into his world of friends, who’d remember each of their films that made a mark with him be them ever so small or indie or whatever, who’d always hold a place of affection in conversation and thought to the freddie and the geoff and the mary and the lino in the same breath he’d be talking about his last conversation with clint and the other anecdote about fritz. In his legendary bursts of temper, seemingly overbearing personality there was a true shyness; in his surface manner of name-dropping (he didn’t drop them, they were really part of his daily bread after all) there was loyal kindness. I will always remember a question he asked during my twenties, newbie to the city of Paris and the notoriously difficult way she makes newbies bleed before she integrates them, “whom do you talk to if you are in trouble in Paris?” ... that is when, even young soul that I was then, I caught sight of the very shy but the very loyal side of someone who had never faltered in his loyalty, whether to the other pierre or an eric in real-action situations or in recognition of early works no matter how big or small we were, never hesitating to introduce me talking about my first film which impressed him which hardly anybody has ever seen or another time, flooring everyone, at a hilltop hotel overlooking Locarno, he singles out a Canadian director and talks about his first film and how it impressed him, decades earlier. I hear the anecdote years ago about some obscure ciné club or small festival somewhere in the heart of western Canada and there would be the little hat on PR’s head in their midst, impatient to discover a perhaps-gem. (An anecdote told by another departed passionate soul, our sheila) ... many are put off by his words, shouts, tempers, I must be a bit dim-witted, yes I think of ‘loyalty’ and ‘tendresse’. Bonne nuit, cher et loyal ami. (From Facebook)

(first published May 6, 2018 in https://filmalert101.blogspot.com/2018/05/vale-pierre-rissient-tributes-from-mary.html)