When it comes to filmed interviews, Mamoulian is one of the well-documented giants of classical Hollywood. His eloquence and wisdom can be heard in interviews shot for documentaries about his friends (George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey) or horror cinema (The Horror of It All). There are films exclusively about him such as Patrick Cazals’s Rouben Mamoulian, l’âge d’or de Broadway et Hollywood (2007), which also features brief clips of interviews that Iranian director of Armenian origin, Arby Ovanessian (a guest of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022) conducted with Mamoulian. Television networks, too, since the revival of his films in the 1960s, have interviewed him, for instance BBC’s Film Extra (1973). However, this French television interview, by one of the fathering figures of television documentaries on cinema, André S. Labarthe, was lost for decades until retrieved and incorporated into the Rouben Mamoulian – Lost and Found. This is the most detailed career interview Mamoulian ever gave on film.
The setting is Mamoulian’s Beverly Hills house in September 1965, only a couple of weeks after the Watts riots. No signs of the social upheaval in the house or in the courteous manner of gentle and elegant 68-year-old man who answers interviewer Hubert Knapp’s questions in mellifluous French, reminiscing about his colourful life from Tbilisi to Holly-ood. He talks at length about musicals on stage and screen and prides himself on the early sound experiments he made, such as mixing sound for impressionistic effect in Applause. He rejects style as mannerism, proposing instead that style is the point of view of the artist on the world, so that it is possible to interpret his breezy camera movements, incisive editing and effervescent narrative as a particular vision of humanity.

Ehsan Khoshbakht