Gérard Brach

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gérard Brach (born July 23, 1927 in Montrouge , Hauts-de-Seine , † September 9, 2006 in Paris ) was a French screenwriter and director. In his five-decade career he wrote the film scripts for more than fifty feature films, for both dramas and comedies and thrillers in French, Italian and English-language cinema. He worked for many years with Roman Polański , Jean-Jacques Annaud and Claude Berri . With La Maison and Le bateau sur l'herbe , he made two of his own films in the early 1970s.

Life

Childhood and acquaintance with Roman Polański

Gérard Brach came from a Breton family. After finishing school, the Second World War followed , before he fell ill with tuberculosis at the age of 18 and spent five years in a sanatorium. There he became enthusiastic about literature and met Benjamin Péret , who introduced him to André Breton . Brach was enthusiastic about surrealism and made unsuccessful drawings to which he was inspired by Comte de Lautréamont's Die Gesänge des Maldoror . In the 1950s he became a film production assistant. From 1959 to 1962 he worked in Paris as a publicist for the American production company 20th Century Fox . In 1962 (according to other sources, 1959 or 1963) he was sent to Poland to oversee the shooting of love ketches that the young Andrzej Wajda had been entrusted with. in Łódź he made the acquaintance of the young Roman Polanski, who had studied at the local film school .

After Polanski moved to Paris in 1963, Brach quit his job at 20th Century Fox and devoted himself to writing. Polanski's and his first collaboration was Jean Léon's crime comedy Jungfrau richly garnished (1964), for which Polanski wrote the script while Brach took care of the dialogue. In the same year, both were involved in the script for Polanski's La Rivière de Diamants , which was included in the episode film Women are to blame for everything . Both had a love for surrealism, a pessimistic view of life and absurd humor. Most of the time Brach was responsible for the writing. “We talked about it and he wrote it down. Then he came back to me and we changed it together, ” says Polanski.

Successful scripts for Polański

In 1965 the British film company Compton-Tekli , which had specialized in the production of soft porn, bought Polanski as a cheap director. He should make an equally inexpensive horror film. Then the script for the dark psychological thriller Ekel with the French actress Catherine Deneuve in the leading role was created in collaboration with Brach . The film, which tells the story of an attractive, extremely unstable and delusional young woman, won an award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1966 and paved Polanski's way into European and American cinema.

After the success of Ekel , Polanski turned to the feature film When Katelbach Comes ... (1966). He and Brach had already written the story of a couple (played by Françoise Dorléac and Donald Pleasence ) who were disturbed by two injured gangsters in an old castle on the southern English coast in 1962/63. The film studio Compton Films had again made itself available as a donor. The "model study of the emergence and reversal of power relations" won the 1966 Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

After Polanski broke up with Compton Films , they both went to a movie theater in Paris to witness how a horror film provoked salmon volleys among the audience. Based on this, Brach and Polanski wrote the script for the vampire comedy Tanz der Vampire (1967) with Jack MacGowran , Sharon Tate , Ferdy Mayne , Iain Quarrier and Polanski himself in the leading roles. Polanski's "Satire on the tragicomic endeavors of bourgeois-enlightening honest men" was a success in Europe, while the film was not well received in the USA. Producer Marty Ransohoff could not understand Polanski's subtle humor and had the film shortened, voices dubbed and replaced with the film soundtrack for the US market, which horrified the director.

Directing debut and collaboration with Annaud and Berri

Brach and Polanski went their separate ways after Dance of the Vampires . Together with Claude Berri, the French wrote the screenplay for his drama The Old Man and the Child (1967), in which Michel Simon is seen as an anti-Jewish farmer who unwittingly takes a Jewish child into his own family during the German occupation in France.

In the early 1970s, Brach tried his hand at directing and the result was the comedy Das Haus (1970) with Michel Simon and Patti D'Arbanville about a cranky scientist who is freed from his loneliness with the help of several hippies . A year later followed with the participation of Polanski Brach's second feature film Le bateau sur l'herbe (1971) in which Claude Jade divided the two different friends Jean-Pierre Cassel and John McEnery . The film competed unsuccessfully for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for best film in 1971 , but became a respectable success.

After the experience behind the camera, Brach retired from directing and returned to work as a screenwriter. He wrote the scripts for Polanski's horror film The Tenant (1976) and the multiple Oscar-winning literary film adaptation Tess (1979) with Nastassja Kinski in the title role. The Frenchman worked several times with well-known directors such as Marco Ferreri ( Affentraum , 1978; Mein Asyl , 1979) and Moshé Mizrahi ( Dear Unknowns , 1980). Success was brach with the script for Jean-Jacques Annaud's feature film In the Beginning was the Fire (1981). The story of the struggle for survival of a Stone Age tribe , for which the language expert and science fiction author Anthony Burgess had designed an original language consisting of around 100 sounds, won France's national film award César and the Oscar, while Brach received a César nomination for his screenplay adaptation.

Brach worked again with Annaud on the bestseller adaptation The Name of the Rose (1986), The Bear (1988), The Lover (1992), while he worked with Polanski on the script for his adventure film Pirates (1986), the thriller Frantic (1988) and the drama Bitter Moon (1992) created. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner played the leading role in each of the last two films mentioned . Brach's greatest success came with the film script for Claude Berri's homeland film Jean Florette (1986), in which the title hero Gérard Depardieu and his family settled on a small mountain farm in Provence in the 1920s and against the climatic conditions and the resentment and greed of his neighbors. The film quickly became a box-office success in France, winning the César and bringing Brach the British BAFTA Award for its film script.

Private life

From the early 1970s, Gérard Brach suffered from agoraphobia and only occasionally left his Paris apartment. The mystical seclusion that surrounded him should also be reflected in his scripts. Brach continued to work as a screenwriter until his death. He died of cancer in a Paris hospital in 2006 at the age of 79. After Brach's death, Jean-Jacques Annaud filmed His Majesty the Pig (2007), a script by the screenwriter. Annaud adored his late compatriot as a poet: “His tender and strange universe, soaked in surrealism and ancient history, made him one of the most inspiring screenwriters of the 1st century of cinema,” says Annaud.

Filmography

Screenplay (selection)

Director

Awards

literature

  • Christian Salé: Les scenaristes au travail. Entretiens avec Jean Aurenche, Gérard Brach, Jean-Claude Carrière, Nina Companeez etc. Hatier et al., Paris et al. 1981, ISBN 2-218-05505-8 ( Bibliothèque du cinéma ).
  • L 'avant-scène. Le Journal du Théâtre - Cinéma . No. 110, janvier 1971, ISSN  0045-1150 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Annaud et Polanski perdent un ami . In: Le Temps , September 12, 2006, Culture
  2. ↑ a b c d Bergan, Ronald: Gerard Brach . In: The Guardian , September 19, 2006, p. 34
  3. ↑ Douin, Jean-Luc Gérard Brach . In: Le Monde , September 13, 2006, p. 29
  4. ↑ a b Nesselson, Lisa: Gerard Brach . In: Daily Variety , September 20, 2006, p. 15
  5. ↑ Biography in the All Movie Guide (English; accessed August 25, 2009)
  6. ↑ disgust . In: The large TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006. - ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
  7. ↑ When Katelbach comes… . In: The large TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006. - ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
  8. ^ Criticism in film-dienst 46/1966
  9. ↑ Keppler, Stefan (ed.): The vampire film: classics of the genre in individual interpretations . Königshausen & Neumann, 2006 (film - medium - discourse; 14). - ISBN 3-8260-3157-1 . P. 104
  10. ↑ Critique in film-dienst 01/1968
  11. Jump up ↑ Dance of the Vampires . In: The large TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006. - ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
  12. ↑ In the beginning there was fire . In: The large TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006. - ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
  13. ↑ French movie screenwriter Gerard Brach dead at 79 . Associated Press Worldstream, Sep 11, 2006 3:12 PM GMT, Paris.
personal data
SURNAME Brach, Gerard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Broke, Gerard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French screenwriter and director
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Montrouge , Hauts-de-Seine department
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 2006
Place of death Paris