French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo
and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski will be this year's
recipients of Venice Golden Lions for career achievement, the
Venice Biennale board led by Paolo Baratta said Thursday.
The names were proposed by festival director Alberto
Barbera.
This year's 73rd fest runs August 31-September 10.
From this year the fest has decided to award two lifetime
achievement awards, one to an actor and the other to a
film-maker, the Biennale said.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, an icon of French and international
cinema, the festival website said, is one of the actors who best
interpreted the hallmark modernity of the Nouvelle Vague in his
representation of alienated characters, in Leda (À double tour,
1959) by Claude Chabrol; Breathless (1960) and Pierrot le Fou
(1965, presented in Competition at the Venice Film Festival),
both by Jean-Luc Godard; or Mississippi Mermaid (1969) by
François Truffaut.
In particular, in his portrayal of Michel Poiccard/László
Kovács in Breathless, Belmondo brought to the fore the figure of
the provocative and seductive antihero, a far cry from the
Hollywood stereotypes on which Godard himself had based the
character.
His extroverted acting style secured him some of the best
roles in French gangster movies, such as in The Big Risk (1960)
by Claude Sautet, Le Doulos (1962)by Jean-Pierre Melville and
Hit Man (1972)by José Giovanni, and he achieved enormous success
in many of his later movies, from That Man from Rio (1964) by
Philippe de Broca to The Night Caller (1975) by Henri Verneuil,
from The Professional (1981) by Georges Lautner to Itinerary of
a Spoiled Child (1988) by Claude Lelouch.
Venice Festival Director Alberto Barbera said: "Thanks to
his fascinating face, irresistible charm and extraordinary
versatility, he has played roles in dramas, adventure movies and
even comedies, making him a star who is universally respected,
by engagé directors and escapist cinema alike."
On the second career award, Barbera said: "Jerzy
Skolimowski is one of the most representative exponents of the
modern cinema born during the nouvelles vagues of the 1960s. He
and Roman Polanski are the two filmmakers who contributed most
to the renewal of Polish cinema during that same period."
Polanski himself (who called him in to write the screenplay of
his debut movie, Knife in the Water) predicted: "Skolimowski
will stand head and shoulders above his generation."
Actually, the fifty year career of the "boxing poet" (as he
was dubbed by Andrezj Munk, Skolimowski's cinematographic
"father"), during which he made seventeen feature-length films,
has been anything but easy, and his opus was marked by
continuous moves - from Poland to Belgium, from England to the
United States, before returning to his homeland less than ten
years ago.
Although his body of works is seemingly stateless, due to
heterogeneous and apparently dissimilar production styles, each
one of his movies is actually highly personal and original.
The trilogy he made in Poland during his debut years -
Rysopis (1964), Walkover (1965) and Barrier (1966) - were to the
Eastern Bloc countries what Godard's earliest movies were to
Western cinema, whereas his later masterpieces - The Departure
(1967, Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival), Deep End
(1970), The Shout (1978, Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival),
Hands Up! (1981) and Moonlighting (1982, Best Screenplay at
Cannes Film Festival) - are still top examples of a type of
cinema which is modern, free and innovative, radically
nonconformist and bold.
The last films he made after returning to his homeland -
Four Nights With Anna (2008), Essential Killing (2010, Special
Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival), presented in
competition at the Venice Film Festival as his following movie
11 Minutes (2015) - display an unexhausted and surprising
capacity for renewal which rightfully places him among the most
combative and original directors of contemporary cinema.
The line-up of the 73rd Venice International Film Festival
will be announced during the official press conference to be
held in Rome, at the Hotel Excelsior, on Thursday 28th of July
2016, 11 am.
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