Enclosure

Armand Gatti (1924 – ) is a French playwright, poet, journalist, screenwriter and film-maker. His 1963 film, El Otro Cristóbal was entered into the 1963 Cannes Film Festival.

One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, and Jean Cayrol, but because none of his films have been released on video in the US, he remains an elusive figure for many cinephiles. He appears in Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) and in Chris Marker’s Immemory CD-Rom (reprinted this year); he wrote China (1956) for Marker’s Petite Planète collection and traveled with Marker in the making of Letter from Siberia (1957), which inspired his book Siberia — Zero + Infinity the following year.

According to his 1989 biographer, Dorothy Knowles, Gatti was born in 1924 in a shantytown in Monaco (his Italian anarchist father, who escaped murder in a Chicago slaughterhouse because of his political activities, fled Mussolini’s reign); during WWII, Gatti joined a small French resistance maquis. Captured, tortured, and sentenced to a concentration camp in Hamburg where he was forced to work in a diving bell at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Gatti eventually escaped and joined a British SAS special forces team. After the war, he worked as an award-winning journalist for many years until he traveled with Marker, published his first plays, and directed his first film, The Enclosure (L’Enclos, 1961).

L’Enclos was screened out of competition at Cannes but it was hailed by Truffaut, Resnais, Cocteau and others. —Wikipedia