Filmmakers' Autobiographies

These days, only hardcore cinephiles would probably recognize the name of Nell Shipman. But for a few short years in the early 1920s, the Canadian-born actress was one of the few female pioneers, along with Grace Cunard, Ida May Park and Lois Weber, able to work in Hollywood as screenwriter, director and producer.

“In old age, words escape me. If I wait patiently, they float up, and I recapture them (…) The quest for harmony of word and image has been my life.

Tokyo Story, Good Morning, Early Spring, Floating Weeds, Late Autumn, Equinox Flower, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice are just a few of the most movingly memorable films directed by Yasujirō Ozu.   Besides a legacy of many unsurpassed masterpieces, the prolific filmmaker also left 32 pocket agendas in which he diligently recorded facts and events of his daily life, from 1933 until a few months before his death in December 1963, at age sixty.

Jean-Jacques Annaud occupies a unique position. A rare French director with international stature and reputation.

Published in 1987, ten years after his death at age seventy-one, “Fragments d’une Autobiographie” is Roberto Rossellini’s fascinating self-portrait and literary testament. A slim volume written in French, (“the first language I learned growing up before being taught Italian, or rather the Roman dialect.

“I saw its birth, its golden era, and its declining years and I am convinced that Hollywood’s decline from glory is in no way the result of senility. On the contrary, it is a relapse (temporary, I hope), into the immaturity of adolescence.

Paris. Summer of 1928.

The Garden Court Apartments, at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard, are long gone, replaced by an ugly mini-mall with a drugstore, a fitness club, and a Fresh and Easy supermarket. Mack Sennett used to live there, just opposite the still standing Roosevelt Hotel when it was a fancy address.

Any cinephile and true movie fan can name at least one film made by French master of poetic realism Marcel Carné, most probably his 1945 masterpiece Children of Paradise. Other memorable ones include Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre), Daybreak, Port of Shadows, Hôtel du Nord, The Devil’s Envoys.

“I have lived a most wonderful life, being given an extremely rare privilege, a forty-five-year ride on the magical carpet of Film!” So writes Frank Capra in “The Name Above the Title”, his voluminous autobiography published in 1971, 20 years before his death at age 94. In it he reminds the reader that he “helped create the golden era of films,” along Hollywood filmmakers of the thirties and forties, “who thrilled the world with their own works, creative giants in love with their medium, fiercely proud of it, fiercely jealous of it.