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His imagination was always on the go.
He had enough ideas not to have to deal with them.
Jean-Claude Carrière's fabulous art was so presence of mind that he could confidently waste it on everyday life: he was an outpatient point maker.
When I was interviewing him once in his Paris apartment, the doorbell suddenly rang.
"Are you expecting someone?" He asked me.
Before I could answer, I realized how quickly I had fallen into the trap of this vital surrealist.
Appearances awakened his spirit of contradiction.
Reality called for improvement.
Perhaps he had learned how to unhinge them from Luis Buñuel.
Or was it the other way around?
Storytelling was not just a job for him, it was a craft of life.
He saw it as an everyday food.
This profession was multifaceted enough.
Carrière was a screenwriter, novelist, playwright, essayist and illustrator.
Four giants with their honorary Oscars (from left): Harry Belafonte, Jean-Claude Carrière, Maureen O'Hara (front) and Hayao Miyazaki in 2014
Source: Getty Images
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Also: a coveted talk show guest, a gifted mediator (not only in his textbooks on writing, but also as long-time president of the Parisian film school La Fémis), a stubborn director (although not often) and occasionally a hilarious supporting actor (first with Buñuel, last 2016 in “Die Liebesfälscher” by Abbas Kiarostami).
For seven decades he led a restless artistic life.
You can hardly believe that the day before yesterday he slept quietly with his family.
One last punch line: set to duper expectations.
This was an art that Carrière, born in Colombières-sur-Orb in 1931, learned early on as a co-author of the comedian Pierre Étaix and, above all, Buñuel.
Together with the Spaniard, he subverted the dictates of logic and unity in order to open the construction to a cunning wealth of associations.
There was a brilliant freedom of narration in her films.
Dream and reality can no longer be distinguished from one another in “Belle de Jour”;
Time and space are permeable categories in “The Milky Way”.
In “Das Gespenst der Freiheit” the team did not keep a single one of their narrative promises, but instead led the audience purposefully astray.
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Their collaboration betrayed the desire to review and reinterpret the narrative traditions.
"The Milky Way" takes up the form of the picaresque novel;
“The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie” plays with elements of the tabloid theater;
just think of the numerous entrances and exits.
The screenwriter had a weakness for leaving stories and situations in the balance.
So they kept their strength;
otherwise, by the end of a movie, they would have finished themselves off.
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972)
Source: picture alliance / United Archives
His way of narrating was not custodial (although he helped Michael Haneke decisively to be Michael Haneke in “The White Ribbon”), it wanted to create free spaces in which the audience's imagination could romp.
He loved to sow doubts and reap a variety of responses.
Such freedom could only be taken by an author who was familiar with the most diverse narrative traditions, respected and cherished them.
He found his inspiration in all world cultures.
The high point of his decades of stage work with Peter Brook was the adaptation of the Indian national epic “Mahabharata”.
The book he worked on the longest was "The Circle of Liars", a collection of fables, fairy tales and stories from all over the world.
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In return, his films were understood and valued worldwide, were awarded international prizes, and won several Oscars (the first at the beginning of his career, in 1963 as co-director of the short film “Heureux Anniversaire”).
The Indian director Mani Kaul once surprised Carrière with the admission that he considers the beginning of “True Love Does Not Rust” to be the best gag in film history.
The comedy, which he wrote with Pierre Étaix, plays an incessant game with the subjunctive, the dreamed-of revision of life.
It begins with the narrator being unsure whether he met his wife on the terrace or inside a café.
The scenic back and forth costs the waiter the last nerve until he demands that the narrator should finally decide.
Carrière wrote scripts with the window ajar, so to speak.
The stories were allowed to blow in.
He was an unpretentious and accomplished colleague of his directors.
Belmondo and Delon 1970 in Carrières "Borsalino"
Source: picture alliance / United Archives
Thanks to this self-confident suppleness, he was able to work with a wide variety of temperaments such as Patrice Chéreau, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Nagisa Oshima and Andrzej Wajda.
His connection to the New German Film was close.
He lived with Hanna Schygulla for a long time;
his neighbor in Paris was Margarethe von Trotta.
Among other things, he wrote the clairvoyant pandemic thriller “The Third Degree” for Peter Fleischmann.
His working relationship with Volker von Schlöndorff was even more intimate.
The director hired him for the adaptation of literary models that were previously considered impossible to film (Günter Grass' “Die Blechtrommel”, Marcel Proust's “Eine Liebe von Swann”);
"The Fake" and "The Unhold" (based on Michel Tournier) also presented him with difficult tasks.
In any case, he accepted the challenge of novels that evaded adaptation with pragmatic informality, namely Milan Kundera's “The intolerable lightness of being”.
In Carrière's 150 titles comprehensive filmography there are also psychological thrillers such as “The Swimming Pool”, gangster films such as “Borsalino” or the cloak and sword piece “Cyrano de Bergerac”.
For all its heterogeneity, his work always bore more than just its watermark.
It betrayed an unmistakable handwriting.
He was always a corrective to his directors;
most recently he taught Philippe Garrel how essential humor is in melodrama.
In his writings and in interviews, Carrière repeatedly emphasized the need for perspective for his scripts.
He usually chose a distant perspective that was not rooted in the milieu, the culture in which the stories were set.
He did not want to erase a creative strangeness, because it gave rise to a receptivity to significant everyday details that the locals no longer notice.
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This art of distance was also a playing field for curiosity, for immersing oneself in the foreign or in bygone eras.
“Taking Off” is such a dense atmospheric study of the New York middle class in the early 70s, precisely because the screenwriter was French and the director Milos Forman was Czech and their perspective was sharpened by the transatlantic distance.
The cultural diplomat: Jean-Claude Carrière with Emmanuel Macron in 2018 in front of the Taj Mahal in India
Source: AFP via Getty Images
For “Comedy in May”, Carrière and Louis Malle chose the provincial perspective to tell of the Paris revolt in 1968.
For “The unbearable lightness of being” it was constitutive that it tells of the Prague Spring and its suppression in the intersection of political perspectives (director Philip Kaufman comes from the USA).
With Jean-Claude Carrière, cinematic storytelling became globalized.
He did not see stories as something that was hermetically sealed, but rather accessible to viewers of all origins.
The window he leaves is open.