The Seven Deadly Sins

Philippe de Broca has worked consistently since the 1960s, directing films for theatrical release and television. Yet when one thinks of de Broca, one thinks not of his recent titles but of his earliest and most successful films: sincere, playfully impudent comic spoofs made with dexterity and vigor, which stress illusion over reality. In these early films, which he also co-scripted, de Broca’s characters are nonconformists who celebrate life and the joy of personal liberation. Structurally the films are highly visual, more concerned with communicating by images than by any specifics in the scenario. And these images often are picturesque. De Broca acknowledges his desire to give pleasure to the esthetic sense and, as such, he is a popular artist. While these early films are neither as evocative as those of François Truffaut (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on The 400 Blows ) nor as cinematic as those of Claude Chabrol (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on Le beau serge and Les cousins ), they exude style and wit. While they might be fanciful in content, their essence is emotionally genuine.

De Broca’s films are non-tragic, and feature humorous treatments of characters and their situations. One of his favorite themes is the relationship between the sexes, explored in his earliest films— Les Jeux de l’amour, Le Farceur , and L’Amant de cinq jours —each with Jean-Pierre Cassel playing a lighthearted lover. This character appears 20 years older in Le Cavaleur , featuring Jean Rochefort as a bored, self-centered womanizer. De Broca’s most popular early-career films, however, star Jean-Paul Belmondo: Cartouche , a flavorful comedy-swashbuckler chronicling the exploits of kind-hearted criminals in 18th-century Paris; and L’Homme de Rio , a charming James Bond spoof about a soldier on leave who is led to a stunningly photographed Brazil on a chase for treasure. His most renowned effort is Le Roi de coeur , set during the final days of World War I in a town that has been abandoned by all except the residents of an insane asylum. Thematically speaking, Le Roi de coeur is a perfect film for its time. Released just as the anti-Vietnam war movement was gaining momentum, it is a pungent satire that lampoons the very nature of war and conflict. Not surprisingly, Le Roi de coeur fast became a cult favorite among college students. It ran for six-and-a-half years alone at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, moviehouse. Le Roi de coeur is de Broca’s idea of an anti-war film. Typically, he does not focus on the calamity of a youthful hero who is robbed of his life (as in All Quiet on the Western Front ), or soldiers needlessly and maddeningly put to death by a military bureaucracy (as in Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant ), or the bloody slaughter of his protagonists. Deaths and tragedies in a de Broca film usually are obscured by humorous, feel-good situations. In Le Roi de coeur he gently, satirically celebrates individual freedom. His inmates appear saner than the warring society that has labeled them mad.

De Broca is more concerned with good than evil. He began his career as a newsreel cameraman in Algeria and made several documentary shorts, but switched to narrative filmmaking because he “decided the real world was just too ugly.” At his best, de Broca deals with possibilities—for peace, beauty, hope, love. Nevertheless, the work in his first half-decade as a feature filmmaker generally is more satisfying than his efforts of the past three decades. Among de Broca’s higher-profile post-1960s films are Le Cavaleur and Tendre Poulet ( Dear Inspector and Dear Detective ), a romantic comedy about a female cop who rekindles a romance with an old lover while sniffing out a killer. The latter was so popular that it spawned an American made-for-TV movie and an inferior de Broca-directed sequel, On a vole la cuisse de Jupiter ( Jupiter’s Thigh ). By the 1990s, de Broca mostly was directing for French television. A typical credit was Le Jardin des plantes ( The Greenhouse ), a chronicle of the warm and protective relationship between a little girl and her grandfather in the waning days of World War II. Le Jardin des plantes is a thematic throwback to Le Roi de coeur in that it may be interpreted as a statement about the folly of war. It also reflects on the less-thanhonorable behavior of some Frenchmen and women under the German occupation. Yet despite its somber setting, Le Jardin des plantes is consistent with de Broca’s cinematic view in that it primarily is a candy-coated entertainment that exudes a sentimentality for a time and place that in reality was brutal and dangerous.

By far de Broca’s highest-profile late-career theatrical feature is Le Bossu ( On Guard ), which may be linked to Cartouche as a swashbuckler/ripped-bodice period piece. Le Bossu is set in the France of Louis XIV and charts the derring-do resulting from a faithful swordsman’s rescue of an infant princess from the grasp of her sinister relations. While entertaining and acclaimed—it won nine César Award nominations— Le Bossu is nothing more than a slick, by-thenumbers commercial vehicle. In the end, de Broca’s best films were those made in the 1960s.—Rob Edelman

Widely credited as the founding father of the French Nouvelle Vague movement, Claude Chabrol is responsible for a body of work that is as prolific as it is boldly defined. A master of the suspense thriller, Chabrol approaches his subjects with a cold, distanced objectivity that has led at least one critic to liken him to a compassionate but unsentimental god viewing the foibles and follies of his creations. Inherent in all of Chabrol’s thrillers is the observation of the clash between bourgeois value and barely-contained, oftentimes violent passion. This clash gives the director’s work a melodramatic quality that has allowed him to drift between the realm of the art film and that of popular entertainment.

Born in Paris on June 24, 1930, Chabrol was educated at the University of Paris, where he was a pharmacology student, and at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. Following some military service, he developed an interest in the cinema and worked for a brief time in the publicity department of 20th Century Fox’s French headquarters. Chabrol’s true film career began during the 1950s, when he became one of a legendary group of critics for Cahiers du cinéma. Writing alongside the likes of Eric Rohmer (with whom he wrote a groundbreaking study of Alfred Hitchcock), Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, Chabrol developed theories of authorship that are still influential today, and attempted to revolutionize the cinematic value system.

One of the founders of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement, Chabrol began his filmmaking career in 1958 as the director, writer, and producer of Le Beau Serge. Modeled after Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, the film charted the visit of an ailing city-dweller (Jean-Claude Brialy) to his hometown, where he is reunited with his childhood friend (Gérard Blain), who is now a self-pitying alcoholic. Their transference of personal guilt, and then, in the words of Chabrol scholar Charles Derry, “exchange of redemption,” gave audiences an initial taste of the deeply-psychological situations Chabrol would continue to examine with chilly objectivity throughout his career, and established him as an important new talent.

Chabrol’s next film, Les Cousins (1959), proved to be another great critical success, earning a Best Film award at the Berlin Film Festival. Reuniting Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain as two cousins who are polar opposites, the film continued to develop Chabrol’s distanced approach to his subjects, and also introduced the director’s use of the names “Charles” and “Paul,” names he would continue to use in a number of his films to represent, respectively, the more serious bourgeois man and his pleasure-seeking counterpart. The same year he made Les Cousins, Chabrol released his first color feature, À Double Tour; a crime drama centering on the effects of the murder of a woman upon a dysfunctional family, it contained a measured critique of bourgeois moral values and the social and familial causes of violence.

These films, as well as L’Oeil du malin (1962) – which revolved around another triangle formed by a bourgeois couple and an outsider – constituted what many critics refer to as the more “personal” works of Chabrol’s early period. When they failed to do well at the box office, he turned to more commercial assignments (such as Le Tigre Aime la Chair Fraiche, 1964) that tended to alienate the critics who had championed his previous efforts. The director again won critical favor in 1968 with Les Biches, a psychological drama that addressed one of the central themes of his work, that of an outsider affecting a relationship between two people. The film, which revolved around the intrusion of a man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) upon a lesbian relationship, was a critical success, and heralded a new, more mature phase of Chabrol’s career. The film also starred Stéphane Audran, an actress who was both Chabrol’s muse and, for a number of years, his wife. That same year, the director released another tale concerning a relationship fractured by external forces, La Femme Infidèle. One of Chabrol’s most celebrated – and, to a number of critics, self-assured – film, it starred Audran as Helene, a woman whose marriage to Charles (Michel Bouquet) is drastically altered when Charles kills Helene’s lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet).

Time and again, Chabrol would revisit the theme of the simmering, potentially dangerous passion that chafed against the constraints of bourgeois repression – as well as those of a disrupted relationship – and did so through triangles formed by characters called Charles, Paul, and Helene. Que La Bête Meure (1969) saw Charles hunt down the hit-and-run killer of his son, and in doing so interrupt the relationship between the killer, Paul, and his sister-in-law Helene. In Le Boucher, released the same year, Poupaul, a possibly homicidal butcher, tries to have a relationship with uptight schoolteacher Helene, who has displaced her sexual energies onto Charles, one of her young students. Further conundrums of passion are on display in Juste Avant La Nuit (1971), when Helene, the wife of the adulterous Charles, must resort to an act of violence to squelch the passion that threatens her ordered bourgeois existence.

Toward the end of the 1970s, Chabrol began making television films and international co-productions, something that marked a departure from the nature of his previous work. His team of regular collaborators, who included Audran, Jean Yanne, Michel Bouquet, composer Pierre Jansen, producer Andre Genoves, and cinematographer Jean Rabier, also changed – with Chabrol’s son, Matthieu, replacing Jansen, and new actors such as Isabelle Huppert starring in his films. Huppert essayed the title character in Violette Nozière (1978), one of Chabrol’s most acclaimed films of the 1970s. Based upon the true story of a 19-year-old girl (Huppert) who was convicted of poisoning her father and attempting to kill her mother, the film achieved the remarkable feat of lending its unlikable protagonist a degree of three-dimensional sympathy, and drew favorable comparisons to Hitchcock, whose work provided Chabrol with a constant source of inspiration.

Chabrol’s films of the 1980s and ‘90s largely suffered in comparison to his earlier work; some critics noted that they lacked the unity and quality that gave the director’s films of the 1950s and ‘60s such enduring resonance. Still, he continued to work prolifically, earning particular international acclaim for Une Affaire de Femmes in 1988. Starring Isabelle Huppert as an abortionist who ends up holding the dubious honor of being the last woman guillotined in France (by the Vichy government), the film – like Chabrol’s earlier Violotte Nozière – succeeded in painting a complex, sympathetic portrait of a fairly unlikable woman, and offered one of the most insightful and balanced looks at abortion ever recorded on celluloid.

Chabrol’s subsequent collaborations with Huppert formed his most celebrated films of the 1990s: 1991’s Madame Bovary was a great success in France, while the 1995 psychological thriller La Cérémonie earned transcontinental plaudits. Boasting a strong cast that included Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacqueline Bisset, and Jean-Pierre Cassel, the César-nominated film provided an incisive look at class tensions, jealousy, and the politics of murder. Many critics declared that Chabrol was back at the top of his form. Although his next two major thrillers, Rien Ne Va Plus (1997) and Au Coeur du Mensonge (1999), were not as warmly received, there was no denying the director’s continued impact on both French and world cinema. —AllMovie guide

Born in 1931 in the seaport city of Nantes, Jacques Demy experienced a happy childhood. The son of an auto mechanic, Demy’s love for cinema inspired him to make home movies in 8mm. He would work as an apprentice to animator Paul Grimault and later as assistant to film-maker Georges Rouquier before starting his own career by directing a series of shorts. Le bel indifférent (1957) was an adaptation of a play by Jean Cocteau, notable for marking the start of his lifelong collaboration with art director Bernard Evein. The film’s use of color and sophistication of technique gained favorable notice from Jean-Luc Godard in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma; the magazine that served as the organ of the French New Wave. Demy would share with the New Wave a love for American genre films, specifically the musicals of Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen. Another important influence was the films of Max Ophüls, to whom he would dedicate his first feature Lola.

Made in 1961, Lola’s playful approach to storytelling and its heightened visual style made it the most beloved of the early New Wave films. The title character (played by Anouk Aimée) was a single mother who bore life’s difficulties with a light spirit, an essential theme in Demy’s films. Bay of Angels (1963) featured Jeanne Moreau as a single mother struggling to control her gambling addiction. His first feature in colour was the 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It was a romantic story of young lovers that was literally set to music, since every line of dialogue was sung; the performances keyed to Michel Legrand’s sumptuous score. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg became a deserved popular success, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. The film marked Demy’s first collaboration with actress Catherine Deneuve who became a star as a result of the film’s success.

The film’s follow-up, the 1967 The Young Girls of Rochefort was closer to the style of an American musical than the preceding film. It featured song-and-dance numbers and boasted dancers George Chakiris and Grover Dale (stars of West Side Story) as well as a cameo from Gene Kelly alongside a cast that comprised of Michel Piccoli, Danielle Darrieux and real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in the title roles. The film was similar to a Robert Altman-style ensemble film in its multiple strands of narrative with its characters frequently crossing each others’ path; missing contact by blind chance or meeting by impossible coincidence. It was Demy’s skill that ensured that these workings of fate felt as spontaneous and surprising in as it does in real life. Fate plays an important role in Demy’s films, secretly lurking behind all the happy and unhappy moments of his characters’ destiny. The success of these films resulted in a contract with Columbia Pictures and an extended period in Los Angeles. During this period Demy and his wife, fellow director Agnès Varda, became involved in America’s counter-culture; befriending Jim Morrison of The Doors. His one American-set film, The Model Shop was a loose sequel to Lola, with Anouk Aimée returning as Cecile/Lola, older and sadder but hopeful as always. His output became sparser in the 70s. His fantasy films, The Donkey Skin, The Pier Piper and Lady Oscar was greeted with skepticism despite its accomplished technique.

Une Chambre en Ville (1982) marked a return to his earlier musical style. However it differed significantly from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort in its tragic depiction of romantic love and its frank sexuality. The music by Michel Colombier was less melodious than Michel Legrand’s works with Demy; the film veered closer to classical opera in its dramatization of l’amour fou. Demy had longed to make the film since the 50s and regarded it as his most personal film. Its subsequent box-office failure proved to be disheartening. His final films, Parking and La table tournante was less successful. His final film was regarded with critical favour. Trois places pour le 26 reunited him with composer Michel Legrand and featured French star Yves Montand in one of his final roles. Jacques Demy suffered from AIDS towards the end of his life. He died in in October 1990 at the age of 59. He worked with Agnés Varda on memoirs of his childhood which resulted in the posthumously released bio-portrait Jacquot de Nantes. She subsequently worked on the restorations of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. The successful revivals of these films enshrined Demy as one of the great talents of French cinema. —Mr Bongo

The lynchpin of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland – during World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss citizen – he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine which also grew to include staffers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, among others. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958), the latter co-directed by Truffaut.

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Based on a rough story outline contributed by Truffaut, it was shot without a script, its inspiration the American gangster movies which its director loved so passionately. Crafted with a rough-and-tumble, home-movie-like quality, it dodged all accepted notions of narrative and visual storytelling, adopting a freeform hipness unlike anything before it and sparking a revolution in low-budget, on-the-fly independent filmmaking. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

Quickly, however, Godard’s refusal to be pigeonholed became apparent, and despite a few works of lesser quality, his work over the course of the upcoming decade was a remarkable period of innovation, experimentation, and sustained genius. In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism – similar to the charges of indulgence leveled at Michelangelo Antonioni over his frequent use of actress Monica Vitti – that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features – Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle – bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard’s so-called “radical” period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director’s dominant focus. Through Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife, Godard was initiated into Paris’ Maoist underground. Ultimately, his entire worldview shifted from that of the obsessive cinephile to a radical outlook which even prompted him to reject his own film oeuvre as “bourgeois.” The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues punctuated by telling images and symbols. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One – a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil – followed. The final project of 1968, One American Movie (a planned cinéma vérité collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), went unrealized.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gerard Martin, Armand Marco, Nathalie Billard, and Jean-Henri Roger) Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make “political films politically” and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism, all in an attempt to revive a kind of proletarian culture. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, in particular Gorin, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective’s work – 1969’s British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d’Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970’s Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu’a la Victoire – went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles, existing outside of common theatrical situations and never even appearing in the U.S.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective’s messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972’s Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution (primarily by passing out videotapes to networks of friends and associates). There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974’s Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975’s Numero Deux and the following year’s Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work. After a decade, Godard began moving away from radical politics, returning to more personal material, exploring issues of subjectivity and individuality.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his “trilogy of the sublime,” a collection of films – 1982’s Passion, 1983’s Prenom: Carmen, and 1983’s highly controversial Hail Mary (which Pope John Paul II denounced as “blasphemous”) – all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.

After 1985’s neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England’s Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986’s TV film Grandeur et Decadence d’un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987’s Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990’s Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France’s film legacy; most of Godard’s 1990s work was auxiliary to the series, including 1991’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero and 1994’s JLG/JLG – Autoportrait de December. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L’Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L’Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:91804~T1)

Born in Slatina, Romania on November 13, 1909, Eugène Ionesco grew up in France, but returned to Romania with his father after his parents divorced in 1925. He studied French Literature at the University of Bucharest from 1928 to 1933. In 1936, he married Rodica Burileanu. He and Rodica had one daughter for whom he wrote several unconventional children’s stories. Ionesco and his family lived in Marseilles during World War II, then settled in Paris after its liberation in 1944.

Ionesco did not write his first play until 1950. Having decided at the age of 40 that he ought to learn English, Ionesco acquired an English text and set to work, conscientiously copying whole sentences from his primer for the purpose of memorizing them. Rereading them attentively, he learned not English but some astonishing truths—that, for example, there are seven days in the week, something he already knew; that the floor is down, the ceiling up, things he already knew as well, perhaps, but that he had never seriously thought about or had forgotten, and that seemed to him, suddenly, as stupefying as they were indisputably true.

As the lessons became more complex, two characters were introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. To Ionesco’s astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, English, like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. But then, as Ionesco would later write, “A strange phenomenon took place. I don’t know how—the text began imperceptibly to change before my eyes. The very simple, luminously clear statements I had copied so diligently into my notebook, left to themselves, fermented after a while, lost their original identity, expanded and overflowed. The clichés and truisms of the conversation primer, which had once made sense … gave way to pseudo-clichés and pseudo-truisms; these disintigrated into wild caricature and parody, and in the end language disintigrated into disjointed fragments of words.”

Ionesco set about translating his experience into a play, The Bald Soprano, which was staged by Nicolas Bataille on May 11, 1950, at the Noctambules. The Bald Soprano went unnoticed, however, until a few established writers and critics (Jean Anouilh, Raymond Queneau, and Jacques Lemarchand) saw the play and supported it publicly. Their campaign to attract an audience for the play succeeded and the middle-aged Ionesco soon found himself in a position of international renown. He went on to write more than twenty plays including Rhinoceros, The Chairs, Jack or The Submission, The Lesson, The Killer, Exit the King, Macbett, and Journeys Among the Dead.

Ionesco rejected the logical plot, character development, and thought of traditional drama, instead creating his own anarchic form of comedy to convey the meaninglessness of modern man’s existence in a universe ruled by chance. His awards include the Tours Festival Prize for film, 1959; Prix Italia, 1963; Society of Authors theatre prize, 1966; Grand Prix National for theatre, 1969; Monaco Grand Prix, 1969; Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1970; Jerusalem Prize, 1973; and honorary doctorates from New York University and the universities of Louvain (France), Warwick (England), and Tel Aviv (Israel). He was elected into the Académie Française in 1970. —imagi-nation.com