French producer Anatole Dauman, in SA for a festival of his films, is one of a kind: an entrepreneur with artistic vision. He spoke to ANDREW WORSDALE
ANATOLE DAUMAN, one of the leading figures in European auteur cinema, wastes no time on pleasantries. No sooner were we introduced than this legendary French producer burst into a two-hour diatribe on the banality and money-grabbing idiocy of Hollywood.
It’s a subject understandably close to his heart. Born in Warsaw in 1925, Dauman founded Argos Film in 1951, in partnership with Philippe Lifchitz, and proceeded to finance such ground-breaking French films as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima, Mon Amour ; Robert Bresson’s Mouchette; several of Jean Luc Godard’s and Volker Schlndorff’s pictures; and one of the greatest films of all time: Chris Marker’s La Jete. Since the Seventies Argos has also financed projects further afield, including Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, The State of Things and Until the End of the World.
With such illustrious art films behind him, it’s no wonder Dauman describes today’s mainstream cinema as “an indiscriminate, value-neutral, profit-driven, non-stop flow of banal images”. It’s pretty much an obsession with him: the moment he arrives, his battered briefcase (bought at the Berlin Film Festival 30 years ago) is unzipped and he produces documents including an article he wrote for France’s leading film journal, lambasting the French industry’s covert co-operation with Hollywood.
There is also an open letter to Jack Valenti, the notoriously partisan chairman of Hollywood’s greedy tradepost, The Motion Picture Association of America. “Would you be willing,” Dauman taunts Valenti, “to join representatives of the motion- picture industry from around the world in an ‘International Declaration of Interdependence’, which would call attention to the threatened existence of many national film industries … and oppose the uncontrolled growth of monopolistic practices in order to prevent the total domination by communications’ industry conglomerates of the global distribution networks for images and films?”
Needless to say, Valenti didn’t reply — and snubbed Dauman by cancelling their public debate at the Los Angeles International Film Festival in November last year. He’s “a pig”, says Dauman, “the chief of the racket”.
Even France’s ex-president received a tongue-lashing from Dauman. “The Americans said they wanted to help French cinema, but they chose the most commercial French farces and then went and dubbed them. Mitterand was the head of this conspiracy — after all, he gave Sharon Stone the Legion d’Honour.”
Then it’s the turn of Claude Lelouch, head of France’s Director’s Guild: “He was trying to debate the quota system with the US , telling us we have to talk to the Americans, then he went behind our backs and sold his entire back catalogue to Warner Bros.”
Last month, Dauman publicly accused the French film industry of hypocrisy: while they go on about French cinema retaining a sense of its own identity, they are actually in bed with the Americans. “The minister of culture has actually said that the theatre or multiplex is more important than the movie.”
The establishment, he asserts, is helping to cultivate an era of shopping-mall movies, where catching some celluloid is as easy as ordering a Big Mac or a Kentucky Rounder.
Dauman thunders forth with all the passion, romantic idealism and sheer bloody-mindedness that one suspects enabled him to finance and produce some of the greatest art films of our time. He doesn’t hate America — the carton of Marlboro cigarettes in his battered suitcase speaks of some affinity for Yankee taste — it’s just that “I don’t like a one-way street. It was Coppola who said that cinema has become a victim of Wall Street.” Film plays second fiddle to marketing and market forces these days.
As irony would have it, it is our local conglomerate-controlled film distributor, Ster- Kinekor, that has joined up with the ever- resourceful French Institute to present a mini- season of Dauman’s films — first at Grahamstown and now at the Rosebank Mall in Johannesburg. Best of all, the programme includes a number of short films — a format we rarely, if ever, get to see on the big screen here.
Among the features on offer is Dauman’s personal favourite, Coup de Grace, Schlndorff’s eerily detached tale of a gay/straight love triangle, surrounded by the echoes of World War I. It features a stunning performance from Margarethe von Trotta, herself an accomplished director. Then there’s Resnais’s melancholy distillation of personal relationships and world calamities, Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, a visionary tale of a man determined to stave off the apocalypse; and Godard’s Masculin/Feminin, an inventive take on Paris 1968 and the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.
The short films are Henri Gruel’s Palm D’or-winning La Joconde, a witty observation of that most famous of paintings, The Mona Lisa; Le Desordre Vingt Ans by Jacques Baratier, a chronicle of the Left Bank with appearances by Antonin Artaud, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Duke Ellington and Jean Paul Sartre; Resnais’s devastating study of the Holocaust, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog); and, last but not least, Marker’s La Jete, a meditative photo-roman with one moving image that makes for a stunning epiphany.
Marker, probably cinema’s greatest essayist, is now in his fifth year of production for Dauman of Level Five, a computer-generated piece about a man who dies, and the reconstitution of his archive by his lover. Dauman is obviously proud of his association with this most publicity shy, yet universally venerated, film-maker.
“He’s completely obsessed,” says Dauman. “He wants all the latest computer equipment — in June I bought him a PC worth 20 000.” He smiles like a father in charge of a talented, self-willed brat. “All my relationships with directors have been neurotic. They see a father substitute in me. It’s an ambiguous relationship, something akin to love and murder.”