The 317th Platoon

Pierre Schoendoerffer (French: Pierre Schœndœrffer; 5 May 1928 – 14 March 2012) was a French film director, a screenwriter, a writer, a war reporter, a war cameraman, a renowned First Indochina War veteran, a cinema academician. He was president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts for 2001 and for 2007.

In 1967, he was the winner of the Academy Award for Documentary Feature for The Anderson Platoon. The film followed a platoon of American soldiers for six weeks at the height of fighting in Vietnam during 1966.

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 later returned to Vietnam in 1966 and made his acclaimed The Anderson Platoon for the ORTF.

Later in 1991 he came 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 played 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 (decade), 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). —Wikipedia