Serge Bourguignon

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Serge Bourguignon (born September 3, 1928 in Maignelay , Oise ) is a French film director and screenwriter .

Life

Training and first short films

Serge Bourguignon grew up in the French provinces and originally wanted to be a painter and sculptor. He attended the École des Beaux-Arts and came to film through painting. From 1948 to 1950 he attended the renowned Parisian film school IDHEC , whose successful graduates included Louis Malle , Alain Resnais and Claude Sautet . After his training, which familiarized him with camera work, production design and editing , Bourguignon briefly apprenticed as an assistant director to Jean-Pierre Melville ( The Terrible Children , 1950), where he met with the cameraman Henri Decaë , among others befriended. A little later he accompanied André Zwoboda to the shooting of the war drama Desert Fort Bo Mokri (1951) in Morocco . It was there that his first short films were made , including Le Rhin Fleuve International (1952), which he made together with Zwoboda. "I preferred to make short films my own way instead of making films and following the producer's instructions," Bourguignon said in a 1963 interview with the British newspaper The Times .

After his stay in Morocco, Serge Bourguignon joined an oceanographic research trip to Greenland , which was followed by further stays abroad with his camera in the Far East . These provided him with script drafts for other film projects. He took part in an expedition to Bali and Borneo , where he completed the short film Démons et Merveilles (1954). He then visited the Himalayan and Tibet regions, where Bourguignon was employed as Chef de la Mission Cinémathèque in northern India in 1955 . There he was inspired to write his illustrated book Le Langage du Sourire and the short film Sikkim Terre secrète (1956). A year later he shot the short film Jeune Patriarche in China , a kind of poem in pictures, which won him a first prize at the Florence Film Festival . Further trips to Mexico and Asia , as well as three script drafts followed, which the French filmmaker did not realize. When, with the successes of François Truffauts, they kissed and they beat him and Louis Malles Hiroshima, mon amour, the doors opened for young French directors in Paris in 1959, Bourguignon could not use this to his advantage, as he was back in Tibet at that time found. He turned down offers for film projects over the next four years because Bourguignon either did not like them or the production budget seemed too low to him. A broad international audience was he as a short film director in 1960 at the Film Festival of Cannes known as he prepares for the 21-minute film Le Sourire the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film and the Prix de la Jeunesse won.

Success with "Sundays with Sybill"

After his breakthrough in Cannes, Serge Bourguignon began shooting his feature film debut Sunday with Sybill in 1962 , for which he was able to win over his friend and Nouvelle Vague photographer Henri Decaë, among others . The 34-year-old filmmaker almost abandoned the filming of a novel by Bernard Eschasseriaux . Only after the producers had given him an additional week of shooting, in which he excluded his donors from the set, he was able to finish the film. At the center of the drama, which is set in a Paris suburb, is the former fighter pilot Pierre (played by German actor Hardy Krüger ), who lost his memory after a crash over Indochina . The semi-invalid makes the acquaintance of the twelve-year-old boarding school student Sybill ( Patricia Gozzi ), who frees him from his isolation. The tender friendship, which leads to common Sunday walks, is broken by the lack of understanding of the environment. Sundays with Sybill , whom Bourguignon stylized as a fairytale story of friendship, without the Lolita motifs present in the novel , was a great success with viewers and critics. The production also reached enthusiastic audiences in the United States. The New York Times praised the film as a "masterpiece" and in 1963, along with many other prizes, the Oscar for best foreign language film followed . A year later, Bourguignon and co-writer Antoine Tudal received another Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay . But both had to admit defeat to the British John Osborne ( Tom Jones - Between Bed and Gallows ).

Bourguignon's hit film showed him the way to Hollywood three years later , where he worked with Max von Sydow , Yvette Mimieux and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in 1965 . turned off the modern western seven riding to hell . The substance is a suspected child killer, who failed by a handful alive men followed by the Mexican mountain desert was but little success, even if it the filmdienst in its contemporary critics as "scenic adventure ballad with an elegiac mood" described . The Brigitte Bardot vehicle Two Weeks in September (1967), which was filmed on location in London and Scotland , was also considered a disappointment . The love film, a French-English co-production, was regarded as beautifully photographed like all of Bourguignon's feature films, but was rated as an “unbelievable, psychologically only superficially motivated triangle story” . In addition, the shooting was overshadowed by an alleged affair between the married leading actress and fellow player Michael Sarne .

Most of the scenes from his last American feature film, The Picasso Summer (1969), again starring Yvette Mimieux and Albert Finney , were re-shot by Bourguignon. However, the drama was never released in cinemas, and the French director was subsequently denied engagements in major film productions. In 1978 he wrote the screenplay and directed the documentary Mon Royaume pour un Cheval , while in 2003 he took part in an exhibition on Hardy Krüger's 75th birthday at the Berlin Film Museum , for which a film series started with Sundays with Sybill in the Arsenal cinema in Berlin . Bourguignon was last discussed in 2005 as a director for the Indian project Smell , the film adaptation of a novel by Radhika Jha.

Filmography (selection)

Direction and script

  • 1952: Le Rhin Fleuve International (short film)
  • 1953: Médecin des Sols (short film)
  • 1954: Démons et Merveilles (short film)
  • 1956: Sikkim Terre secrète (documentary film)
  • 1957: Jeune Patriarche (short film)
  • 1958: Marie Lumière (short film)
  • 1960: Le Montreur d'Ombres (short film)
  • 1960: Étoile de Mer (short film)
  • 1960: Escale (short film)
  • 1960: Le Sourire (short film)
  • 1961: Le Rançon (short film)
  • 1962: Sundays with Sybill ( Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray )
  • 1965: Seven Ride to Hell ( The Reward )
  • 1967: Two weeks in September ( À coeur joie )
  • 1978: Mon Royaume pour un Cheval (documentary)

literature

  • Nouveau dictionnaire national des contemporains . Paris: Robin, 1961–1968
  • Jean-Loup Passek: Dictionnaire du cinéma français . Paris: Larousse, 1987. - ISBN 2-03-720031-5
  • René Prédal: 900 cinéastes français d'aujourd'hui . Charenton-le-Pont: Cerf, 1988. - ISBN 2-204-02892-4
  • Georges Sadoul : Dictionnaire des cinéastes . Paris: Seuil, 1990. - ISBN 2-02-010904-2
  • Ephraim Katz: The Macmillan international film encyclopedia . New York, NY: Macmillan, 1994.- ISBN 0-333-61601-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e cf. Serge Bourguignon on his Career as a Film Director . In: The Times, Jan. 1, 1963, p. 13
  2. ↑ a b c cf. Nouveau dictionnaire national des contemporains . Paris: Robin, 1961–1968
  3. ↑ cf. Katz, Ephraim: The Macmillan international film encyclopedia . New York, NY: Macmillan, 1994.- ISBN 0-333-61601-4
  4. ↑ cf. Thevenet, René: Annuaire biographique du cinéma et de la télévision en France, en Belgique et en Afrique du Nord . Paris: Contact, 1957
  5. ↑ cf. Sundays with Sibyl . In: Lexicon of International Film 2000/2001 (CD-ROM)
  6. ↑ cf. Film review by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, November 13, 1962
  7. ↑ cf. Seven ride to hell . In: Lexicon of International Film 2000/2001 (CD-ROM)
  8. ↑ cf. Two weeks in September . In: Lexicon of International Film 2000/2001 (CD-ROM)
  9. ↑ cf. Two weeks in September . In: The large TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006. - ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
  10. ↑ cf. Today's Movies . In: Herald, May 7, 1990. p. 11
  11. ↑ cf. Schröder, Christian: One guy goes around the world: the good German; Homage to Hardy Krüger in the Berlin Film Museum. In: Der Tagesspiegel, December 11, 2003, p. 29
  12. ↑ cf. On the World's Movie Map . In: India Today, Aug. 8, 2005, p. 74
personal data
SURNAME Bourguignon, Serge
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French film director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH September 3, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Maignelay , Oise