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Pierre Etaix is much on my mind, you could say, since I've just written about 9,000 words on him (to be trimmed down considerably, I assure you) for the forthcoming Criterion Collection box set of his cinematic works. Though his last film for the cinema (as director: he has continued to act in films such as Micmacs and Le Havre), Etaix had a brief burst of activity directing for TV in the 1980s, which included one feature, L'âge de Monsieur est avancé, a filmed play which bursts its bounds and includes the audience and stagehand in the drama. It looks delightful, but as my French is at the level of your average two-year-old (and not even a French two-year-old), I can't really write about it.

But See Rank Le cauchemar de Méliès (The Nightmare of Méliès), produced the next year for a TV compendium tribute to Georges Méliès (also featuring contributions...

Italian film critic Carlo Chatrian will replace Frenchman Olivier Père as artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival.

The Turinese journalist and film critic, aged 41, has published several books on film directors such as Errol Morris, Wong Kar Wai, Johan Van Der Keuken, Frederick Wiseman, Maurizio Nichetti, and Nicolas Philibert. As editor-in-chief of the Panoramiques magazine, he has often collaborated with the festival.

He was notably the curator for the Locarno retrospectives dedicated to Nanni Moretti, Manga Impact, Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli, and Otto Preminger. And he has also been a member of the event’s selection committee.

Chatrian’s nomination, made public only a few days after Olivier Père announced that he would take up the post as head of Arte France Cinéma, has caught most observers by surprise. It seems to predict a profound change in style, if not the radical transformation of the Swiss film festival.

Chatrian’s very cinephile,...