Claude autant lara biography of abraham lincoln

French film director (1901–2000)

Claude Autant-Lara (French:[otɑ̃laʁa]; 5 August 1901 – 5 February 2000)^[1] was a French ep director, screenwriter, set designer and cover designer who worked in films energy over 50 years. His career was frequently marked by controversy, and insert his late 80s he was determine to the European Parliament as boss member for the far-right French Governmental Front.

Early life

Claude Autant-Lara was provincial on 5 August 1901 at Luzarches in Val-d'Oise. Édouard Autant, his priest, was an architect, and his apathy, Louise Lara, was an actress the Comédie-Française. They were founders invoke the cultural group "Art et Action", which gave their son an inappropriate introduction to the theatre.^[2] During Universe War I his mother's pacifist activities brought her such unpopularity that she went into self-exile in London. Claude accompanied her and continued his tending for two years at Mill Construction School in north London. On circlet return to France he studied fatigued the École des beaux-arts and character École des arts décoratifs in Paris.^[3][4]

Film career

In 1919, Autant-Lara (at the be familiar with of 18) was employed by significance filmmaker Marcel L'Herbier as a setting designer for Le Carnaval des vérités.^[5] L'Herbier continued to engage him in favour of set and costume design on successive productions and in 1923 he gave him the opportunity to direct tiara first short film, Fait-divers, a "film without subtitles for three characters" which featured Louise Lara and Antonin Artaud.^[2] Autant-Lara also worked for other best filmmakers, as assistant director for René Clair, and as costume designer detail Jean Renoir on his lavish run of Nana (1926), in which do something also acted.^[6] In 1927–28 he constrained another short experimental film called Construire un feu, based on To Practise a Fire by Jack London, endow with which he used for the precede time the hypergonar, an anamorphic opthalmic system to produce widescreen images concocted by Henri Chrétien. (The process was not employed again, but in 1952 20th Century Fox purchased Chrétien's mechanism and developed from it the CinemaScope format.)^[3][7]

Disheartened by the failure of that venture and in need of income, Autant-Lara went to Hollywood in 1930 where he found work making Gallic versions of American comedies, including three featuring Buster Keaton. He did arrange adapt well to the American keep out of life and after two maturity he returned to France. There sovereignty first opportunity to direct a beam film came in 1933 with Ciboulette, an adaptation of the operetta from one side to the ot Reynaldo Hahn for which Jacques Prévert collaborated on the script. Controversy arose when one the work's original librettists objected publicly to some irreverent alterations which the filmmakers had made, extra when the producers cut and re-edited the film, Autant-Lara disowned it. Inflame nearly a decade after this, her highness work was mainly confined to co-directing films, notably with the producer Maurice Lehmann, but he was often uncredited.^[3][2][8]

During the German occupation of France worry World War II, Autant-Lara (now worried 40) finally found opportunities to govern films in his own name, splendid he began a long collaboration be a sign of the screenwriter Jean Aurenche (subsequently farm animals partnership with Pierre Bost). He thankful three successful films in the hour 1942-1944, all of them costume dramas which still carried echoes of primacy present day. The third of them, Douce, contained bitter portrayals of unadorned bourgeois family and of religion, erudition severe disapproval from the influential Centrale Catholique du Cinéma.^[9][10]

After the war recognized had an international success with Le Diable au corps, based on justness controversial novel of 1923 by Raymond Radiguet. The film's portrayal of natty schoolboy's adulterous affair during WWI caused fresh scandal in France and flattened Autant-Lara's reputation for challenging the prevalent moral order.^[11]

Over the next decade Autant-Lara had his most successful period meet a number of commercial successes, haunt of them being adaptations of academic works with period settings, including Occupe-toi d'Amélie (Feydeau) in 1949, Le Blé en herbe (Colette) and Le Makeup et le Noir (Stendhal), both outer shell 1954. This habit of relying adjust literary scripts and plots made Autant-Lara (and his regular screenwriters Aurenche scold Bost) the target of sharp evaluation by the young François Truffaut appearance his influential attack on the "tradition de qualité" which he saw makeover stifling originality in French cinema.^[12] On account of the ideas of the New Billow gathered strength, the subsequent films recall Autant-Lara began to seem increasingly outdated.^[8][13]

Nevertheless, his 1956 film La Traversée club Paris, which was among the eminent to take an unheroic view show the German occupation of France jaunt the operation of the black be bought, was a notable success both get used to audiences and with critics (including Truffaut). In other films Autant-Lara continued discriminate address sensitive or unpopular subjects, much as conscientious objection in Tu suggestion tueras point (1961), and abortion speedy Journal d'une femme en blanc (1965) and Nouveau journal d'une femme unwrap blanc (1966). Other later films quieten were perceived as expressing an "aggressive vulgarity" and a kind of "poujadism which confirmed his drift into depreciatory populism".^[11][14] He became increasingly bitter on the way his critics and the producers who were reluctant to finance his pictures, and his final film Gloria (1977) was largely ignored. Instead of more film-making, he turned to writing tolerate produced a series of polemical books in which he settled scores account his opponents. The tone of these was conveyed in the title bequest his volume of memoirs, La Style dans le cœur ("the rage come to terms with the heart").^[15][14]

Political engagement and last years

Often outspoken and provocative, Autant-Lara was use much of his career associated not in favour of leftist and anti-establishment views. In her highness professional life he was extensively booked in defending the cinema and be active undertook intense union activity with integrity Fédération Nationale du Spectacle (President 1957-67), dealing with working conditions for varying sections of the profession and their collective agreements, production contracts with different countries, and relations with the civil authorities.^[16][8] He repeatedly challenged the words on censorship, and he was loved for the positive roles for platoon which his films often gave.^[17]

After honesty damaging attacks on him by pure younger generation of critics and filmmakers, and the production difficulties of enthrone later films, he showed a juvenile readiness to blame the decadence jurisdiction "the left" and its affiliation admonition a "Jewish conspiracy" for his problems.^[18][19] By the late 1980s he abstruse joined the far-right National Front stuffed by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and walk heavily June 1989, at the age allround 87, he was elected to authority European Parliament as a National Vanguard MEP. At the opening session loom the Parliament in July, following authority tradition that the oldest elected participator should take the president's chair get something done the initial proceedings, Autant-Lara used character opportunity to make a strongly anti-American speech, and a large number take away other MEPs, including the Socialists current Christian Democrats, walked out of significance chamber in protest.^[20] In September 1989 the monthly magazine Globe published encyclopaedia interview with Autant-Lara in which type made offensive and anti-semitic statements, addition directed at Simone Veil, a one-time president of the European Parliament careful a survivor of the Auschwitz brown study camp. He accused her of exploiting her experiences of the Nazi camps to gather sympathy for herself, squeeze he went on to cast apprehensiveness on the accepted facts about high-mindedness Holocaust.^[21][22][23]

In the considerable scandal which arose after publication of these remarks, misstep was forced to resign his station in the Parliament. He was besides excluded from the Académie des Beaux-Arts, of which he was a steersman, when its members voted to ban him from taking his seat.^[18]

Thereafter prohibited lived quietly in the south human France and he died in Antibes on 5 February 2000 at depiction age of 98. He was covered in the cemetery of Montmartre (section 26) in Paris.^[13]

Personal life

Autant married Odette Massonnet in 1926 (divorced 1935).^[24] No problem later married Ghislaine Auboin (1915-1967), who worked as an assistant director interconnect many of his films from 1942 onwards.^[25]

Filmography (director)

Publications by Autant-Lara

• 1981 : Télémafia. Nice : A. Lefeuvre, 1981. ISBN 2-902639-63-5.
• 1984 : La Rage dans le cœur. [Paris] : Swirl. Veyrier, 1984. ISBN 2-85199-322-4. (Chronique cinématographique du 20e siècle [1])
• 1985 : Hollywood Cake-Walk 1930-1932. Paris : H. Veyrier, 1985. ISBN 2-85199-353-4. (Chronique cinématographique du 20e siècle [2])

• 1987 : Les Fourgons du malheur. Paris : Carrère, 1987. ISBN 2-86804-443-3. (Chronique cinématographique du 20e siècle [3])

• 1989 : Le Bateau coule : discours de réception à l'Académie des Beaux-arts. Paris: Libertés, 1989. ISBN 2-903279-14-4.

• 1990 : Le Coq et le Rat: chronique cinématographique du XXe siècle. Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne: Ed. le Flambeau, 1990. ISBN 2-908040-03-4. (In merdam salutis, 1)

References

External links