LOUIS MALLE
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Louis Malle comes from a rare breed of French film directors who achieved unimaginable fame not just in France but also all over the world. He was not afraid to embrace a wide range of subjects, some notoriously controversial.
Malle was born in 1932 in Thumeries, near to Lille in northern France, into a comfortable bourgeois family which had made a fortune in sugar production dating back to the Napoleonic wars. In 1940, at the age of 12, he attended a Catholic boarding school near Paris which was sheltering Jewish pupils. The tragic events of this time are documented in Malle's poignant 1987 film, Au Revoir les Enfants.
After the war, Malle began a degree course in political science at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris but, against his parents' wishes, switched to a course on film studies at the Institut des Hautes ètudes Cinématographiques. Almost immediately after that, he was recruited as a camera operator for the famous underwater explorer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He worked as co-director on Costeau's celebrated documentary film, Le Monde du silence, which immediately won the Palme d'Or and Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1956, before working as an assistant for cult film director Robert Bresson.
The early 1960s was an exciting and turbulent time for French cinema, with a whole host of young new directors finding immediate fame. One of these New Wave directors was Louis Malle, who won instant recognition for his first solo film as a director, L'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958). Malle's next film, Les Amants, was an explicit depiction of a frustrated housewife's desire for an extra-marital affair. The film was both condemned and censored in the United States for its extended nude bedroom scenes, which were pretty daring for its time.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of Louis Malle's filmography is its variety, arising from the director's determination to never repeat his work. This is reflected most strongly in his next film, Zazie dans le métro (1960), which is a total contrast to his preceding films. The story is about a young girl who wreaks mayhem and havoc when her plan to travel on the Paris underground is thwarted by a strike.
Having made Les Voleurs in 1967, Malle admitted that he was tired of western film making and, in 1969, he travelled to India, where he made two uncompromising documentaries about the poverty he saw in that country, Calcutta and L'Inde Fantome. After his return to France, Malle again courted controversy with his next film, Le Souffle au Coeur. Malle's second film, Lacombe Lucien, was no less controversial for its depiction of collaboration and childhood corruption in war-time France during the Nazi occupation.
Louis Malle moved to the United States in the 1970s, where he would make half a dozen or so films, many of which won critical acclaim. These include Pretty Baby (1978), a story about a photographer and a pre-teenage prostitute and Atlantic City (1980), a curious romance involving a gangster and a younger woman. The pinnacle of his film making career followed his return to France with Au revoir les enfants (1987), an autobiographical and intensely moving account of his war-time schooldays which won two Oscar nominations. This was followed by a light-hearted satirical comedy, Milou en Mai (1989).
Malle's final film was Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), a modest, unusual screen adaptation of Chekov's play Uncle Vanya. He died the following year, on 23 November 1995 from a cancer-related illness. His film legacy shows a virtually unparallelled versatility which makes each one of his films unique, including entertaining comedies or thought-provoking dramas.
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