Family
Pierre Schoendoerffer was born in Chamalières of a French Alsatian Protestant family. As Alsace was a territory contested and annexed in the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries by both France and Germany leading to the Franco-Prussian War (1870) next the World War I (1914—18), his forefathers chose to remain French, even though they lost all their belongings.
His maternal grandfather, who was a 1870 veteran, volunteered in the French Army in 1914 at the age of 66 and the rank of Captain. He was killed during the Second Battle of the Aisne at Chemin des Dames. His father was the director of the Annecy hospital and died shortly after the end of the battle of France (1940) where he was injured.
He met his wife Patricia in Morocco (then a Spanish-French joint protectorate), she was a journalist for France-Soir. They had three children, actor and screenwriter Frédéric Schoendoerffer, director and producer Ludovic Schoendoerffer and actress Amélie Schoendoerffer.
Early life (1942—1947)
During WWII, Schoendoerffer lost his father and was not doing well with his studies at Annecy's school. In winter 1942—1943, he read Joseph Kessel's epic adventure novel Fortune Carrée (1932) who changed his mind, he wanted to become a mariner and travel the world
In 1946, he spent his summer job as a fisherman aboard a small fishing trawler in the Bourgneuf-en-Retz bay, near Pornic, Pays de la Loire (close to Brittany). From this experience he would later direct Than the Fisher shot in Vietnam, and Iceland Fisherman.
The following year he went back to the Pays de la Loire region and embarked a Swedish cargo ship at Boulogne.
From mariner to war cameraman (1947—54)
In 1947, on board the merchant navy coaster, he sailed for two years in the Baltic Sea and North Sea. This sailor experience would later find echoes in Seven Days at Sea, The Drummer-Crab and even in Above the Clouds.
From 1949 to 1950 he left the navy to fulfill the mandatory military service in the Alpine infantry's 13e Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins ("13th Alpine Chasers Battalion", 13e BCA) based in Chambéry and Modane, Rhône-Alpes. The Alpine infantry would later become the title character's corps in The Honor of a Captain.
Young Schoendoerffer had realized he was not born to be a mariner, but he did not want to be a soldier either, thinking he would be wasting his time. What he wanted to do was filmmaking. As he failed to enter the television and cinema industries, he began photography instead. One day as he read a Le Figaro article about KIA war cameraman Georges Kowal during the First Indochina War, he decide to try his luck in the Service Cinématographique des Armées ("Armies' Cinematographic Service", SCA, now ECPAD).
Thus in late 1951, he volunteered to become a war cameraman for the French army and was sent to Saigon, in French Indochina. There Corporal Schoendoerffer met and befriended with Service Presse Information ("Information Press Service", SPI) war photograph Sergeant-Chief Jean Péraud, who took him as his protégé.
Schoendoerffer's first SCA production would be a 9-minute short documentary First Indochina War Rushes (1952) that would surface thirty years later on screen in The Honor of a Captain.
In 1954, his friend and superior Sergeant-Chief Péraud asked him by telegram to join him at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and he dropped with the 5th Vietnamese Parachutist Battalion (5e BPVN aka 5e BAWOUAN). As a result, upranked Corporal-Chief Schoendoerffer "celebrated" his 26th birthday in the midst of the 57 days siege. He filmed the entire battle for the SCA but after the French ceasefire and the defeat, just as the other soldiers destroyed their equipment so it would not be captured by the Viet Minh, Schoendoerffer destroyed his films and camera. This event was later depicted on screen by his own son, Frédéric, in Pierre Schoendoerffer's 1992 docudrama Dien Bien Phu recreating the battle.
By the end of the battle in 1954, he saved and secretly hid six SCA 1-minute reels which ended in Roman Karmen's hands.
From prisoner of war to war correspondent (1954—56)
After the battle, on 7 May 1954, he was captured and sent to a Viet Minh reeducation camp. During the march to the camp, following Jean Péraud, he tried to escape with paratroopers commander Marcel Bigeard, but he was caught. Péraud vanished though and has since been Missing in action.
In prison, his life was spared in the insistence of Roman Karmen, the Soviet propagandist who directed all the worldwide famous sequences illustrating the battle, from the Viet Minh raising the Red flag over General de Castries's bunker staged a few weeks after the siege, to the French Union POWs column marching from Dien Bien Phu to the re-education camp (a crane was used for the shooting), that are featured in ??????? ("Vietnam", 1955). During his jail time, Karmen had some friendly meetings with Schoendoerffer, they spoke about their job, and he revealed to the French prisoner he had found his reels and had watched them. Karmen kept the reels though, as a result the only footage covering the battle is from the Viet Minh's perspective. His own work has been watched all around the world and has even been used in the western media. As an example, Peter Batty's 1980 The Battle for Den Bien Phu documentary is largely based on the footage from Vietnam.
Schoendoerffer was released by the Viet Minh four months later on 1 September 1954. On the battle's tenth anniversary, in Paris, Schoendoerffer was invited with Bigeard to comment on the Viet Minh footage, including segments from Vietnam, which were broadcast on the French public channel ORTF (Cinq colonnes à la une show) for the first time.
After the First Indochina War Schoendoerffer left the French army and became a war reporter-photograph in South Vietnam for French and American news magazines: Paris Match, Paris-Presse, Time, Life, Look.
In April 1955 he left South Vietnam to return to France, stopping off along the way in Hong Kong, Taipei, Japan, Hawaii and San Francisco.
In Hong Kong, through the AFP news agency he met Joseph Kessel, the adventurer, famous Free French, WWI and WWII aviator, war correspondent, reporter, and novelist he admired in his childhood for Fortune Carrée. During a quick friendly relationship, Schoendoerffer narrated his three years adventure in Indochina to Kessel who was impressed. Soon they broke up promising to keep in touch.
In Hollywood Schoendoerffer became an apprentice on a movie for ten days thanks to his connections with Life magazine, but without a Green Card he was eventually forced to leave.
Back in France he signed his first important contract with Pathé Journal and two weeks later he flew to Morocco where the French Algeria anticolonial rebellion was emulated. He became a war correspondent filming the riots for the French audience, Morocco was then a French protectorate. There he met Patricia, a journalist at France Soir, who would later become his wife.
In 1956, he resigned from Pathé whose representative threatened him: "You are leaving us? So you'll never do cinema again, because we are huge!".
Writer and director (1956—2003)
At this point Schoendoerffer was confused with his young career, the major Pathé bringing him back to the situation he experienced in 1951. As he narrated his Hong Kong meeting with Kessel to his fiancée Patricia, she convinced him to contact the one he regarded as an "historic monument".
Kessel was actually searching for him since he had a film project in Afghanistan, The Devil's Pass, he wanted Schoendoerffer to direct it. Kessel wrote the script, Raoul Coutard, a First Indochina War photograph (SPI) veteran was in charge of the cinematography on his first film (later he would join Jean-Luc Godard), Jacques Dupont assisted Schoendoerffer with the direction and Georges de Beauregard produced it.
In 1958, he married "Pat", Patricia, the journalist he met in Morocco in 1955.
In 1959, Pierre Lazareff, founder of Patricia Schoendoerffer and Joseph Kessel newspaper France Soir, asked him to direct a reportage about the Algerian War for his Cinq colonnes à la une (ORTF) TV show. Thanks to Lazareff he would later return to Vietnam in 1966 and make his acclaimed The Anderson Platoon for the ORTF.
Later in 1991 he would come back to Dien Bien Phu and recreate the battle in a self-titled epic docudrama ... in the fashion of Tora! Tora! Tora! ... in which his son Frédéric would play his own role as cameraman. The actual Vietnamese army was used to play the role of both the Viet Minh and the State of Vietnam national army fighting in the French side against the Communists. Meanwhile, the French 11th Parachute Division played the role of the French Union paratroopers.
In the 2000s, his latest productions consist of the 2003 novel The Butterfly Wing (L'Aile du Papillon) and Above the Clouds (Là-Haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages), the theatrical adaptation of his 1981 novel Up there (Là-Haut).
Critical success
Pierre Schoendoerffer was acclaimed in several international short and feature film festivals around the world. As a writer, he won multiple festival, academy and military awards and prizes including the Prix Vauban, in 1984, celebrating his life achievement.
In France he is famous for his 1973 three-time César Award-winning
Le Crabe-Tambour ("Drummer Crab"), based on his French Academy-award—winning self-titled novel. He first met success back in 1965 with his Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay winning
The 317th Platoon (
La 317e Section). Both films are based on his experience in the First Indochina War.
However he is most known abroad, particularly in the United States, for his 1967 Oscar-winning Vietnam War B&W documentary,
The Anderson Platoon (
La Section Anderson), originally made for the French public channel ORTF's popular
Cinq colonnes à la une monthly show. This feature documentary earned him an Oscar at Hollywood, an International Emmy Award, a Red Ribbon Award at the New York Film Festival, a BBC's Merit Award and an Italia Prize.
Awards
- Military honors:
- Médaille militaire
- Croix de Guerre TOE
- Croix du Combattant volontaire
- Academic honors:
- Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur
- Officier de l'Ordre National du Mérite
- Officier des Arts et Lettres
- Chevalier des Palmes Académiques
- Artistic prizes
- 1967: Academy Award for Documentary Feature (Oscars): The Anderson Platoon
- 1967: Prix Italia: The Anderson Platoon
- 1967: Merit Award (BBC): The Anderson Platoon
- 1969: Prix Interallié: Farewell to the King
- ...
Fine Arts Academy
Pierre Schoendoerffer was elected at the Académie des Beaux-Arts' Section VII: Artistic creation in the cinema and the audio-visual field, Seat#4, on 23 March 1988, replacing Guillaume Gillet.
He is president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 2001.
Inspirations and Influence more less
His inspirations
Schoendoerffer was primarily influenced by epic adventure novels, notably Joseph Kessel's Fortune Carée (1932). Kessel wrote The Devil's Pass (1956) he co-directed with Jacques Dupont. In the late 1950s, he adapted on screen two Pierre Loti novels, first Iceland Fisherman (1886) then Ramuncho (1897). Following his 1992 motion picture Dien Bien Phu, Schoendoerffer spent three years working on the screen adaptation of his favourite writer Joseph Conrad's Typhoon (1902). The script was ready and the filmmaker started location spotting for shooting but the producer didn't found enough money to afford the high production budget, and so the project has been eventually cancelled.
Young Schoendoerffer was also inspired by Hollywood movies he watched instead of going to high school class. In The 317th Platoon, there's a running reference to Michael Curtiz' Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) historical movie. In 2004, a L'Express journalist asked Schoendoerffer his favourite movie: Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985).
Military photograph Jean Péraud was a "big brother" for him ... he was three years younger ... and "the most important person he met in Indochina" as well as an inspiring character model.
His own experience as a mariner, a Vietnam veteran and a globetrotter is a strong inspiration in most of his works. This is obvious in the Drummer-Crab, but the most autobiographical work is Dien Bien Phu (1992), where his elder son Frédéric impersonates him.
His influence
Productions like The 317th Platoon (1965), The Anderson Platoon (1967) and the Drummer-Crab (1977) obviously inspired both Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986).
French actress Aurore Clément seen in the Drummer-Crub plays a role in Apocalypse Now's French plantation chapters connecting the Vietnam war with the French experience in the First Indochina War. Another hint is Coppola borrows a famous line from The 317th Platoon: "the White leaves but the Yellow stays".
Oliver Stone adopted Schoendoerffer's cinéma vérité used in The 317th Platoon and The Anderson Platoon. During the production of Platoon, Stone who was also a Vietnam veteran forced his cast and crew to live like an actual platoon in the jungle, it was the very same technique used by Schoendoerffer twenty one years earlier in The 317th Platoon. Further Stone's film title and theme bear a striking resemblance with Schoendoerffer's platoon movie and documentary shot in Vietnam.
A third Hollywood director, John Milius, was influenced by Schoendoerffer when he adapted on screen the English translation of the 1969 novel l'Adieu au Roi which became Farewell to the King (1989). Schoendoerffer wanted to adapt his novel himself but he was unable to find a producer.
