ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Jean-Louis Comolli’s shift from editor of Cahiers du Cinéma to director of fiction and, predominantly, documentary films is followed. After early forays in filmmaking in the late 1960s, his first significant project was La Cecilia in 1976, a fictionalized account of an anarchist commune in Brazil. But the bulk of his cinematic output since the 1980s has been in documentary cinema, the highlight of which has been the multi-part series focusing on electoral politics in the southern French city of Marseilles from the 1980s to the present day, dubbed Marseille contre Marseille. As well as practicing documentary filmmaking, Comolli has also continued to develop his theoretical views on the cinema, resulting in a combination of film theory and practice that has few equivalents in the contemporary era.
