Dear John Boorman,
As part of their evenings devoted to European cinema, the ARP and the Cinéma des Cinéastes, decided to pay tribute today to a great voice of cinema in Europe: a British friend, Irish at heart, who 50 years later Save who can, his first feature film, delighted the Directors' Fortnight of the last Cannes Film Festival with Queen and Country. Tonight, dear John Boorman, we recognize your formidable career, your unique work that has marked the history of cinema with its visual power and its narrative audacity.
If your films have reached such a large audience, it is because you have been able to capture all genres to impose your own rhythm: film noir with The point of no returnor gangster The General, science fiction with Zardoz or the horror movie with The Exorcist II, the historical film with Excalibur or adventures with The Emerald Forest or the war movie withDuel in the Pacific and The War at Sevenor espionage with The Panama Tailor. With you, genre cinema becomes an author’s cinema for the happiness of the greatest number. Playing with the codes of the genre, you stage individuals who venture into an initiatory and symbolic quest to better emancipate themselves from a closed universe and a circular history. The trajectory of your films and your characters is that of an arrow fired with force and skill, which aims right, straight to the heart. This quest is, of course, that of the Arthurian legend whose masterful, unforgettable version you have offered us, with Excalibur. It is also the work of Laura Bowman, the American Rangoonwhose personal pain meets the drama of an entire people and finds its resolution in the encounter with A, the guardian figure of the film. It’s also, in In my Country, that of the Afrikaner poet and African-American journalist, each in search of reconciliation and redemption. Through this constantly renewed quest, you film a dream reality where myths and spirituality emerge in the way of these elements of fiction and magic that you distil in your first documentaries, perhaps because naked reality seems too artificial to you on the screen.
A great fan of silent cinema, you have taken inspiration from the great films of the genre to master the art of telling stories without dialogue. For Duel in the Pacific, you realize the masterstroke of resting the lock-up on the force of the images, the game – remarkable - of the actors Lee Martin and Toshiro Mifune, the power of gestures and looks, which carry the viewer better than any scenario. What makes the strength of your films is your work on image and sound and their evocative power which has a profound resonance in the audience: the footsteps of Lee Martin that resonate in the long corridor, rhythming the scene as relentlessly as a drum roll or countdown, the now mythical musical duel of Deliverance which poses all the stakes of the film with the challenge launched by the guitar of the townsman to the banjo of the villager, the black and white of the General or chromatic variations of Point of no return and the breathtaking landscapes where the water you like to film plays a central role: the Amazon River but also the Irish mountains of Wicklow and their tumultuous waters.
Director with a strong aesthetic, crowned with two Palmes d'or in Cannes for your productions, you are also a great director of actors: you have played the greatest: Marcello Mastroianni, Jon Voight, Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Richard Burton, Helen Miren, Uma Thurman, Patricia Arquette, Pierce Brosnan, Juliette Binoche and Samuel L Jackson. You surrounded yourself with faithful actors: Lee Martin but also Brendan Gleeson. Actors who have this rare ability to make us forget who the good, which is the villain, and to make us love the less desirable characters. Like the intensity of your films, sometimes unbearable, these endearing characters question the shadow that is in us. We rarely emerge unscathed from your work, which often touches us viscerally: as when the voracity of the guests turns to the ferocity bestial in Leo the last or that Martin Cahill, popular legend of the great Irish banditry, crucified one of his associates on suspicion
This violence is at the heart of one of your greatest films, Deliverance, where cruelty is at the measure of the impetuosity of the challenge launched between comrades: the descent of the wild river turns to the tragedy of survival. This portrait of America in the 1970s and of the original violence in American history has left a lasting mark on minds by its universal scope, far from any ecological angelism, on the conflictual relationship between man and nature. Director in love with the 7th art of which you are a great connoisseur, you have a fair look on the cinema, full of passion but without concession. It is through film criticism that you have entered the cinema: in the pages of a magazine then for the BBC where you devote a documentary to one of the founding figures of cinema, D.W. Griffith: Promising dreams and hard times, your diary, is a true declaration of love on the 7thth art. You give a magnificent definition of cinema where the play of light on the screen offers the possibility of another world, which frees us from space and time, as in a heady dream.
Dear, John Boorman,
Because your films are such stuff as dreams are made on[1], the Republic of Arts and Letters, which is the Republic of dreamers and dream-makers, is honoring you today.
Dear John Boorman, it’s for your immense talent, for your work made of the very matter of dreams, that the Republic of Arts and Letters, that of dreamers and merchants of dreams, pays tribute to you tonight. Dear John Boorman, on behalf of the French Republic, we present you with the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.