The note detailing the reason for death says nothing other than that he was sleeping.
And if so,
Jean-Claude Carrière
has achieved what few in his life (and in his death): die as the best of his friends.
There is much talk about the good life lived next to people who love each other, but perhaps a little attention should be paid to the good death, loved, together with the people with whom one loved so much.
This screenwriter, playwright, indefatigable multilingual conversationalist and short filmmaker with
Oscar
liked to remember that when
Luis Buñuel's
wife
told him how his friend had died, she was happy.
"Luis simply said: 'Now I'm dying'. And at that moment his heart stopped. Death was the last action of his life," he said and who knows if the same thing happened to him.
He boasted of having eaten with Buñuel up to 2,000 times.
He had counted them, he said.
From those lunches came nine scripts, six films and a book (
My last breath
).
And at each of these meals the two together built a legacy of cinema, art, jovial surrealism and, above all, eternal friendship.
Far beyond life.
And of death.
Early on Monday, the greatest of the writers that cinema has ever produced, died at the age of 89 in his sleep.
Reviewing his filmography basically seems like an excessive exercise.
Surreal even.
To this man born in
Colombières-sur-Orb
,
Hérault
, in 1931, European cinema owes its life.
And from now, maybe until his death.
From
Jacques Tati
(he turns the films 'My Uncle' and 'Monsieur Hulot's Holidays' into novels) to
Jean-Luc Godard
('Hail whoever you can, life' or 'Passion') to
Louis Malle
('Long live Maria' or 'Milou in May'),
Milos Forman
('Hopeless Youth', 'Goya's Ghosts' or 'Valmont'),
Michael Haneke
('The White Ribbon'),
Volker Schlöndorff
('The Tin Drum'),
Philippe Garrel
('Lover for a day'),
Luis García Berlanga
('Natural size') or
Fernando Trueba
('The artist and the model'), all have been transcribers of their words in images.
And of course, the first of them all,
Luis Buñuel
.
They met in 1964. By then, he was already an Oscar-winning man thanks to a tiny, urban nightmare in short film format entitled
'Heureux anniversaire'
and signed together with
Pierre Étaix
.
Then he would be awarded the same award but of honor in 2015.
He said that everything changed the day he learned to contradict Buñuel, to say no.
"His producer summoned me very ceremoniously and said: 'Luis doesn't want a typist, but a collaborator.' And I understood."
He always trusted in his work as an "invisible worker", as he liked to say.
Nine scripts wrote together.
Of these, six were films: 'Diary of a waitress' (1964),' Belle de Jour '(1967),' The milky way '(1969),' The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie '(1972),' The ghost of freedom '(1974) and' That dark object of desire '(1977).
It was a total of almost two decades of work, food and, above all, friendship.
Of life and, of course, even of death.
Product of the republic well understood
Carrière boasted of not showing off.
It was described as the simple and perfect product of public education, of the well-understood republic which is the only way to understand it.
He was born, he said, in a house without books or pictures of any kind.
Until the day a teacher showed him the most enigmatic of objects: a book.
As
Borges
said
, all the inventions of man, from the plow to the telescope or the phonograph, prolong and even improve our senses.
Only the book does that, but with the imagination.
And there he stayed to live.
He liked, and he dedicated his life to that, creating characters that were the way to multiply himself by all the people he was capable of.
"They say that on one occasion an actor asked
Pirandello
why a character said one thing on page ten and the opposite on page twenty. Pirandello limited himself to declaring his absolute ignorance. 'And I don't know, I'm just the author 'was his reply. "
And told the anecdote in a Spanish accentuated like French but with the forceful cadence of his hand, he made it clear that he was nobody to contradict Pirandello.
He wrote to get rid of any responsibility for his characters.
Despite the success of his first film as a director, he soon gave up making to focus on himself, which was his way of focusing on others.
If he was with Buñuel for 20 years, he worked with
Peter Brook for
more than 30
, since theater was always his other passion.
"I never had the feeling of having a world of my own that needed an image of my own," he said as a preamble to what could be the best definition of his work: invisible cinema.
"It is enough to read
Juan de la Cruz
: 'We do not travel to see, but not to see'. What is not seen in the film is more important than what is right to see. And that is always a mystery," he said, he would take a second and add his own de-dramatization of what was said: "Once at the end of a film, the audience stood up to applaud and among those who most applauded there was a dog. The director was surprised and asked the owner why I thought the dog had liked it so much. The owner replied: 'It's weird because he didn't like the book at all'. Who knows what the dog had seen. That's the mystery. "
And so.
One of the scripts he left written with Buñuel was 'Agón' and supposedly it was going to deal with death.
He said he was not concerned.
He said that the time he was closest to her because of a complicated heart operation, he had been struck by the fact that the life of an 80-year-old man (he) was in the hands of a 40-year-old man (the surgeon).
He also said that he started writing when he was nine years old, but that he did not know why.
He always wanted to.
He said that he did not know anything about himself, that personal answers always get a false answer, that he mistrusts those who are very clear about who they are.
"Nobody knows the truth about himself," concluded Carrière.
D.E.P.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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