Francis Lacassin (a great friend of Il Cinema Ritrovato) died in 2008. He was a man of great erudition. He knew everything. He had seen everything and read everything. His research into the history of film, much like his literary research, focused on counterculture, popular or despised forms, the so-called impure cinema. He loved nothing better than to occupy a world of dreams and fantasy, where unbridled imagination meets a poetics of the absurd and the surreal. This research generated major, illuminating books that remain unrivalled to this day: Pour une contre-histoire du cinéma (1972); Louis Feuillade, maître des lions et des vampires (1995); Alfred Machin, de la jungle à l’écran (2002); À la recherche de Jean Durand (2004). It is not surprising therefore that Lacassin was also the first person to publish a historical investigation (1970) into the merits of Musidora as a female filmmaker.

Laurent Mannoni