Claude Autant-Lara

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Claude Autant-Lara (August 5, 1901 in Luzarches, Val-d’Oise – February 5, 2000 in Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes), was a French film director.

He was educated in France and at London's Mill Hill School during his mother's exile as a pacifist. As a director, he frequently created provocative movies, saying "if a film does not have venom, it is worthless". In the 1960s, he turned his back on the New Wave movement, and from then on he had no popular successes.

His memoir is titled "The rage in the heart" (1984).

On June 18, 1989, he came to public notice again, controversially, when he was elected to the European Parliament as a member of the National Front and the oldest member of the assembly. In his maiden speech, in July, he caused a scandal by expressing his "concerns about the American cultural threat", provoking a walkout by the majority of the deputies.

In an interview granted to the monthly magazine Globe in September 1989, he remarked that the Minister of Justice Pierre Arpaillange engaged in "racial insults, racial slandering and incitements to racial hatred". He also described Nazi gas chambers as a "string of lies". The resulting scandal led to his resignation as European deputy. Moreover, the members of the Academy of the Fine Arts, of which he was a vice-president for life, voted to prohibit him from taking his seat thenceforth.

[edit] Filmography (director)

1928 : Construire un feu
1933 : Ciboulette
1937 : L'Affaire du courrier de Lyon (co-directed with Maurice Lehmann)
1939 : Fric-Frac
1942 : Le Mariage de chiffon
1942 : Lettres d'amour
1943 : Douce
1945 : Sylvie et le fantôme
1947 : Le Diable au corps
1951 : L'Auberge rouge [also screenwriter]
1953 : Le Blé en herbe
1953 : Le Bon Dieu sans confession [also screenwriter]
1954 : Le Rouge et le noir
1955 : Marguerite de la nuit
1956 : La Traversée de Paris
1958 : Le Joueur
1959 : En cas de malheur
1959 : La Jument verte
1960 : Tu ne tueras point
1961 : Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
1963 : Le Meurtrier
1964 : Le Magot de Josefa
1965 : Le Journal d'une femme en blanc
1967 : Le Plus vieux métier du monde
1967 : Le Franciscain de Bourges
1969 : Les Patates
1977 : Gloria

In 1973 he adapted Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen for television.

In addition, he was director of at least five other films produced between 1923 and 1936, and actor and artistic director in Nana, a silent film produced by Jean Renoir in 1926.