The 2006 recipient of the San Francisco International Film Festival's Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting, Jean-Claude Carrière has been called “the screenwriter of choice for the world's finest directors” (New York Times). A consummate collaborator, he has crafted intelligent and boldly imaginative works with auteurs including Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Volker Schlöndorff, Andrzej Wajda, and, most notably, Luis Buñuel, who cited him as “undoubtedly the writer closest to me.” Buñuel hired the young Carrière in 1963 to work on the screenplay for Diary of a Chambermaid, beginning a decades-long collaboration that generated a half-dozen films as well as Buñuel's sly “autobiography” My Last Sigh.
Carrière will be on hand for the festival screening of Belle de jour at PFA on April 30, and on May 5 and 6 we present four more of his works with Buñuel, including The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and The Phantom of Liberty, described in My Last Sigh as a “triptych”: “All three have the same themes, sometimes even the same grammar; and all evoke the search for truth, as well as the necessity of abandoning it as soon as you've found it. All show the implacable nature of social rituals; and all argue for the importance of coincidence, of a personal morality, and of the essential mystery in all things, which must be maintained and respected."
Two films cowritten by Carrière and directed by Godard, Every Man for Himself and Passion, are featured in our Isabelle Huppert series.
Juliet Clark