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Patrick Bauchau: Film Comment Pg. 2

Secrets at Play - Patrick Bauchau

From Film Comment -- July/August, 1998
by Beverly Walker (continued from Page 1)

Though born in Brussels, Patrick Bauchau lived primarily in Switzerland until he entered a British private school at age 13. He is the middle of three sons. His father, Henri Bauchau, a scion of Belgian steelmakers, set a standard for continual self-reinvention. During the war, he joined the Belgian underground as a paratrooper - and was shot down; entering French publishing, he conceived the first "pocket" books there - and was bankrupted. Moving to Switzerland, he spent the next twenty years as headmaster of an elite girls finishing school. Today he lives in Paris, a respected author and poet who, at age 83, is also a practicing pyschoanalyst. The actor's mother, Mary Kozyrev, now deceased, was by all accounts an equally formidable personality. Orphaned at 4 when her White Russian parents were murdered before her eyes, she was sent to Finland, then Belgium. Impatient for the first snowfall, she once disappeared from boarding school and wasn't found until next day, walking in a northerly direction - "going to meet the snow."

Bauchau believes he inherited his mother's unpredictable Russian blood: "I was always getting kicked out of schools, so I lived with various relatives from time to time, including my grandfather in the Bauchau chateau. I learned to fit into new environments very quickly; this gives you an independant approach to life. It was interesting, the amount of freedom I gained, because no one could keep up with me. Even today, I am the only member of my family who speaks English." His facility with languages - also a maternal inheritance, he believes - held him in good stead from the time he entered school in Bath speaking no English whatsoever. He did so well that he was subsequently admitted to Oxford on scholarship. His official area of study was languages.

During this period he became fascinated by movies. "I discovered directors like Kurosawa and Bergman in London art cinema, but I was also very interested in American movies, and in the Cahiers du Cinéma stance towards them." That stance, of course, was a form of deciphering - discovering a directorial signature in studio pictures, upgrading genre helmsmen such as Nicholas Ray and Raoul Walsh to auteur or "author" status. "In my last years at Oxford, rumors were floating in from Paris about the nouvelle vague - Resnais, Truffaut, Godard; I was intoxicated by Breathless for an entire year." He gravitated towards likeminded people, some of whom would later make significant cinematic places for themselves: Peter Wollen, Clare Peploe, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Ilona Halberstad, who publishes the British magazine Pix. All remain close friends.

After graduation, Patrick moved to Paris, where he found employment with Alexandre Mnouchkine, Ariane's father, who was producing Philippe DeBroca movies and working for United Artists. "But I couldn't figure out what I should do in movies. I wanted a quality career. It was Jean-Luc Godard or nothing."

During this period he met Sarris, and when Sarris returned to New York a few months later, Bauchau decided to go, too. There, via Sarris, he met Eugene Archer, another maverick cinéaste and auteurist, who became a close friend and strong influence.

"I arrived in New York at the time of Shadows, a truly inspired work filmed almost in real time. 'Forget Godard,' I said, 'Cassavetes is my new hero.'" After several months of incessant moviegoing (the New Yorker et al.), followed by exhaustive analyses and listmaking with Sarris and Archer - and occasionally Peter Bogdanovich - he returned to Paris.

"I was still oriented towards the world as a student, unsure of a direction, hero-worshipping this or that one. I got involved with acid and other drugs, and preoccupied with questions like 'Is this world here, or not?'" He married Mijanou Bardot, sister of Brigitte; they had a daughter, Camille. He also got connected to "the Cahiers nebula," a group of dogmatic auteurists that included Barbet Schroeder, Eric Rohmer, Jean Douchet, and Jacques Rivette. Though friendly with them, Bauchau's own "list" of authentic auteurs differed from theirs; thus he wasn't invited to their exclusive afternoon salons.

Schroeder recalls the period: "Patrick was influenced by the Americans, especially a weird little guy named Eugene Archer who admired The Bitter Tea of General Yen and the films of John Ford. But they weren't part of the Cahiers pantheon - not then." Schroeder's comments are a vivid reminder of how politicized film attitudes were in the Sixties, especially in France. The "wrong" aesthetics could make you an outsider. The Vietnamese War raged; John Ford was vilified as the jingoistic director of Green Beret enthusiast John Wayne. It's important to note, however, that the Cahiers position on both John Ford and Frank Capra eventually swung the other way, towards Archer and Bauchau's kind of appreciation.

Another significant friend was the Scottish iconoclast Donald Cammell. Says Bauchau: "Donald was moving away from his previous life as a painter, starting to relate to Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and other rock 'n' roll figures. He was as self-taught in cinema as anyone I've ever met, totally uninterested in the auteur theory - or any other. His sense of comedy was unique. I was captivated by him." Cammell would go on to direct (with Nicholas Roeg) Performance, one of the most controversial films of its time. When he died by his own hand in the summer of 1996, a palpably sad memorial service brought together many Sixties compatriots. Bauchau read a moving poem by Rumi, a 12th century Sufi poet credited, he says, with founding the whirling dervishes: "It has a joy about it. It suggests that death is a positive passage, and I believe it was for [Cammell]. I accept it."

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Photo of Patrick Bauchau © 1997 NBC and Twentieth Television (Fox). Click the image to a larger version in a new window. Do not use photo without prior, written permission.