Pierre Schoendoerffer

Pierre Schoendoerffer 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 BeauxArts for 2001 and for 2007 In 1967 he was the winner of the Academy Award for Best 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 Pierre Schoendoerffer was born in Chamalières of a French Alsatian Protestant family As Alsace was a territory contested and annexed in the 17th 19th and 20th centuries by both France and Germany leading to the FrancoPrussian War 1870 next World War I 191418 his forefathers were French and lost all their belongings His maternal grandfather who was an 1870 veteran volunteered in the French Army in 1914 at the age of 66 and the rank of captain He was killed during the Second Battle of the Aisne at Chemin des Dames His father was the director of the Annecy hospital and died shortly after the end of the battle of France 1940 where he was injured He met his wife Patricia in Morocco then a SpanishFrench joint protectorate she was a journalist for FranceSoir They had three children actor and screenwriter Frédéric Schoendoerffer director and producer Ludovic Schoendoerffer and actress Amélie Schoendoerffer Pierre Schoendoerffer died aged 83 on 14 March 2012 in France During World War II Schoendoerffer lost his father and was not doing well with his studies at school in Annecy In winter 194243 he read Joseph Kessels epic adventure novel Fortune Carrée 1932 which changed his ambitions he wanted to become a mariner and travel the world In 1946 he spent his summer as a fisherman aboard a small fishing trawler in the BourgneufenRetz bay near Pornic Pays de la Loire close to Brittany From this experience he would later direct Than the Fisherman shot in Vietnam and Iceland Fisherman The following year he went back to the Pays de la Loire region and embarked on a Swedish cargo ship at Boulogne In 1947 on board a merchant navy coaster he sailed for two years in the Baltic Sea and North Sea This experience would later find echoes in Seven Days at Sea The DrummerCrab and even in Above the Clouds From 1949 to 1950 he left the sea to fulfill mandatory military service in the Alpine infantrys 13e Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins 13th Alpine Hunters Battalion 13e BCA based in Chambéry and Modane RhôneAlpes The Alpine infantry would later be the title characters corps in The Honor of a Captain Young Schoendoerffer had realized he was not born to be a mariner but he did not want to be a soldier either thinking he would be wasting his time What he wanted to do was filmmaking As he failed to enter the television and cinema industries he began photography instead One day as he read a Le Figaro article about war cameraman Georges Kowal Killed in action during the First Indochina War he decided to try his luck in the Service Cinématographique des Armées Armies Cinematographic Service SCA now ECPAD Source Article Pierre Schoendoerffer from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30