Robert Benayoun

Robert Benayoun (12 December 1926 – 20 October 1996) was a French film critic, author, and film director. A member of the surrealist movement from 1948, he was a key figure at Positif for over three decades, where he waged a sustained polemic against Cahiers du cinéma and the French New Wave. He would later direct two feature films. Benayoun was born on 12 December 1926 in Port-Lyautey (now Kénitra), Morocco. After abandoning his initial studies in law, he relocated to Paris, where he regularly frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française. In the late 1940s, he integrated into the inner circle of André Breton and formally aligned himself with the surrealist movement. He remained an active participant in the group's activities for nearly two decades, contributing essays, poetry, and plastic collages to its successive official journals, including Médium, Le Surréalisme, même, La Brèche, and L'Archibras. Highly engaged in political anti-colonialism, Benayoun was a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121 in September 1960, an open letter defending the right to insubordination during the Algerian War. In March 1951, Benayoun co-founded the avant-garde surrealist film journal L'Âge du cinéma, serving as its editor-in-chief alongside Ado Kyrou, Gérard Legrand, and Georges Goldfayn. Following the magazine's closure in 1952, its core editorial group transitioned to Positif, whose editorial board Benayoun officially joined in 1954.