RIP Pierre Schoendoerffer

Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928-2012), director, screenwriter, documentarist, novelist, made one of my favorite movies of all time, Le Crabe-Tambour (The Drummer-Crab), based on his own novel, in 1977. As a dramatic tale of the sea, it's up there with Moby Dick, and I'm not exaggerating one iota. Godard's frequent collaborator Raoul Coutard was responsible for the breathtaking nautical cinematography. Although this is the only Schoendoerffer film I have been lucky enough to see, he was by no means a one-hit wonder; he won best screenplay at Cannes in 1965 for The 317th Platoon, and an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 1967 for The Anderson Platoon (which is about the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, an obsessive subject for him; he was at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and later made an epic about it).

Schoendoerffer worked with or adapted other great French writers: Joseph Kessel (the author of the novels that Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows and Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour are based on); Jean Larteguy (author of the acclaimed war novel The Centurions); Jorge Semprun (author of the screenplays for Costa-Gavras's Z and The Confession, and Alain Resnais's La guerre est finie and Stavisky); Pierre Loti (two of whose neglected novels he made into films). John Milius made Schoendoerffer's own novel Farewell to the King into a movie with Nick Nolte in 1989.

I suspect that Schoendoerffer's entire creative output, always valued in France (where he served as President of the Academie des Beaux-Arts), will at some point receive a thorough (and deserved) international assessment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9144269/Pierre-Schoendoerffer.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schoendoerffer

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006954/