Rendez-vous with Sydney Pollack

Sydney Pollack holds a truly singular place in contemporary cinema. He is the youngest of the classics and the eldest of the modern. Heir of Zazan and Minnelli by his sense of the romantic and taste of aestheticism, he announces as well, throught his original genre work and sensitivity to contemporary problems, the generation of the Hollywoodian renaissance, that of Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg. 
In twenty films spanning some forty years of cinema, he has brilliantly illustrated the western (Jeremiah Johnson), the socially conscious film (They Shoot Horses, Don't They ?) the paranoiac thriller (Three Days of the Condor, Absense of Malice) the comedy (Toostie) as well as the melodrama (The Way We Were). Like many great American artists, he finds his roots in the history of his coutry, from the Great Depression to McCarthyism and modern capitalism, whilme opening up to the world from Havana to Bobby Deerfield and Out of Africa. His capacity to subtly treat emotions in great polyphonic frescoes is paralleled solely his talent to extract the best from his actors. He himself is a remarkable actor, as proved in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, or Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, as well under his own direction (Toostie). 
Remaining in the background of is brillant and varied work, Sydney Pollack continues to be a secretive man, like all his heroes, and individualits in love with freedom, both solitary and solidary. 

Text written by Michel Ciment