Perhaps because of the warm, broadcaster-like voice on the other end of the cellphone, you expect him to be tall and composed. As it turns out, Peter Scarlet has a different dimension altogether. There’s a spring to his step when he walks into the Cinémathèque Française via the garden entrance, with a bag on his shoulder. In fact, he's constantly in motion, as if he were on camera. So, it comes as no surprise that the Cinémathèque's now officially installed Director General uses his hands a lot when he talks...
Meeting with members of Paris’ Anglo-American Press Association in an auditorium generally used for public film screenings, Scarlet ad libs instantly, his eyes shining through his spectacles. Like a magician yanking a white rabbit out of a hat, he informs his audience that they’ll be watching a — very short — silent movie. The focus of the story is an Indian young girl who has a brief romantic interlude with a soldier. As it happens, Peter Scarlet wants to drive a point home... This piece of fiction is an invaluable resource because it shows — if truth be said, somewhat obscurely — that the cinema had already started to pay attention to the plight of Native Americans, way before the 1940s. “The fact is — if you don’t preserve documents like these, you can’t corroborate that kind of hunch.” And that, folks — is the Cinémathèque's raison d’être.
The lights come back on... In the front row, there’s the New York Times’ European cultural correspondent, Alan Riding, plus Cathy Nolan of People magazine and The Guardian’s bureau chief, Jon Henley. Further back, another bureau chief, Charles Masters of The Hollywood Reporter, is clearly in his element... Basically, they’re all dying to know why an “American in Paris” has been asked to lead an institution inhabited by “The Phantom of Henri Langlois” into the new millennium.
First, Scarlet swiftly nips that hackneyed “Gene Kelly” — American in Paris — reference in the bud, saying “Whatever you do, don’t use that headline, I’ve read it so many times, I feel I should be paying rights...”. An ex-New Yorker, this former university lecturer took charge of the San Francisco film fest in 1988. A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, he’s familiar with the French movie crowd as he came here on a sabbatical in the mid-’60s and has since immersed himself in the Festival de Cannes’ brouhaha on many occasions.
In a full page interview published in Newsweek earlier this year, Scarlet established a parallel between McDonald’s and Hollywood — “it’s cheap and... you always know what you’re going to get” — adding that “we'‘re risking losing the richness and diversity of world culture to homogenization.” He joked saying “I’m probably the least American American they could find” and made offhand comments like “I think that with things like Universal Vivendi, the French industry feels like it needs to do more English-language productions, which is pretty controversial. It’s a tough struggle... If you go to damn near any other country you can think of, with the single exception I know of being Iran, American films are about all you can see.”
In six months time, Peter Scarlet will be able to tell us which of his cultural leaps was the most daunting... New York to California. Or, North America to Europe.
