René Clair
Born
11 November 1898 (127)
Place of Birth
Paris, France
Also known as
Rene Clair, René Chomette
Biography
René Clair was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier yea...
René Clair was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960. Clair's best known films include The Italian Straw Hat (1928), Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), I Married a Witch (1942), and And Then There Were None (1945). In 1924, while Clair was working on Ciné-sketch for the theatre with France Picabia, he first met a young actress, Bronja Perlmutter, who subsequently appeared in his film Le Voyage imaginaire (1926) premiered at the newly opened Studio des Ursulines. They married in 1926, and their son, Jean-François, was born in 1927. René Clair died at home on 15 March 1981, and he was buried privately at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. Clair's reputation as a film-maker underwent a considerable reevaluation during the course of his own lifetime: in the 1930s he was widely seen as one of France's greatest directors, alongside Renoir and Carné, but thereafter his work's artifice and detachment from the realities of life fell increasingly from favour. The avant-gardism of his first films, and especially Entr'acte, had given him a temporary notoriety, and a grounding in surrealism continued to underlie much of his comedy work. It was however the imaginative manner in which he overcame his initial scepticism about the arrival of sound which established his originality, and his first four sound films brought him international fame. Clair's years of working in the UK and USA made him still more widely known but did not show any marked development in his style or thematic concerns. It was in the post-war films that he made on his return to France that some critics have observed a new maturity and emotional depth, accompanied by a prevailing sense of melancholy but still framed by the elegance and wit that characterised his earlier work. However, in the 1950s the critics who heralded the arrival of the French New Wave, especially those associated with Cahiers du Cinéma, found Clair's work old-fashioned and academic. The paradox of Clair's reputation has been further heightened by those commentators who have seen François Truffaut as the French cinema's true successor to Clair, notwithstanding the occasions of their mutual disdain.
Filmography (37)
René Clair, tout entre nous n'était qu'un jeu
2021
Les Trésors de Marcel Pagnol
2019
Cinéastes de notre temps : Erich von Stroheim
2012
À la recherche de Jean Grémillon
1969
Civilisation: L'homme et les images
1967
The Lace Wars
1965
Laugh with Max Linder
1963
The Four Truths
1962
All the Gold in the World
1961
Love and the Frenchwoman
1960
The Gates of Paris
1957
The Grand Manoeuvre
1955
Beauties of the Night
1952
The Beauty of the Devil
1950
Silence Is Golden
1947
And Then There Were None
1945
It Happened Tomorrow
1944
Forever and a Day
1943
I Married a Witch
1942
The Flame of New Orleans
1941
Break the News
1938
The Ghost Goes West
1935
The Last Billionaire
1934
July 14
1933
À Nous la Liberté
1931
Le Million
1931
Under the Roofs of Paris
1930
Two Timid Souls
1928
The Italian Straw Hat
1928
La Tour
1928
The Prey of the Wind
1927
The Imaginary Voyage
1926
The Phantom of the Moulin-Rouge
1925
The Crazy Ray
1925
Entr'acte
1924
Parisette
1921
Lily of Life
1920