Damian Pettigrew
Encyclopedia
Damian Pettigrew (born in Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

) is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...

, producer
Film producer
A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...

, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, and multimedia artist
Multimedia artist
Multimedia artists are contemporary artists who use a wide range of media to communicate their art. Multimedia art includes, by definition, more than one medium, therefore multimedia artists use visual art in combination with sound art, moving images and other media...

, best known for his cinematic portraits of Balthus
Balthus
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola , best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist....

 and Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...

. He won a Banff Rockie Award for Best Documentary and was nominated for the Prix Arte at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.

Biography

Pettigrew's mother was a child psychologist who trained with Anna Freud
Anna Freud
Anna Freud was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis...

  at the Hampstead Child Therapy Course in 1947. His father, Dr. J.F. Pettigrew, was the first Canadian surgeon to diagnose the heart condition known as aortic coarctation
Aortic coarctation
Coarctation of the aorta, or aortic coarctation, is a congenital condition whereby the aorta narrows in the area where the ductus arteriosus inserts.-Types:There are three types:...

 in 1953.

After reading English, French and Italian Literature at the universities of Bishop's
Bishop's University
Bishop's University is a predominantly undergraduate university in Lennoxville, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Bishop's is one of three universities in the province of Quebec that teach primarily in the English language...

, Oxford, and Glasgow (where he discovered the work of Scottish film director Bill Douglas
Bill Douglas
William Gerald Forbes Douglas was a Scottish film director best known for the trilogy of films about his early life.-Biography:...

), Pettigrew studied cinema at IDHEC in Paris. At the Cinémathèque Française
Cinémathèque Française
The Cinémathèque Française holds one of the largest archives of films, movie documents and film-related objects in the world. Located in Paris, the Cinémathèque holds daily screenings of films from around the world.-History:...

, he met Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...

 and Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy , born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone....

 and began frequenting their artists' circle. If his work is influenced by Gysin's celebrated cut-up technique
Cut-up technique
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing....

, the profound and lasting effect on his life was his friendship with Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

. After Beckett's death in 1989, he settled in Paris to devote himself to filmmaking (in particular, writing, directing, and editing).

In 1999, Pettigrew founded the film production company, Portrait et Compagnie, with French producer Olivier Gal. He spends a short part of each year on Lake Memphremagog
Lake Memphremagog
Lake Memphremagog is a fresh water glacial lake located between Newport, Vermont, United States and Magog, Quebec, Canada. The lake is long with 73 percent of the lake's surface area in Quebec, where it drains into the Magog River. However, three-quarters of its watershed, , is in Vermont. The...

 in the Eastern Townships
Eastern Townships
The Eastern Townships is a tourist region and a former administrative region in south-eastern Quebec, lying between the former seigneuries south of the Saint Lawrence River and the United States border. Its northern boundary roughly followed Logan's Line, the geologic boundary between the flat,...

 of Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

.

Work

A recognized authority on Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...

, his portrait of the maestro, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is a 2002 French documentary film written and directed by Damian Pettigrew.Based on Federico Fellini's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 , the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working...

, won the prestigious Rockie Award at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, receiving excellent reviews in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

, Newsweek International, Le Monde
Le Monde
Le Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...

, Corriere della Sera
Corriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...

, l'Unità
L'Unità
l'Unità is an Italian left-wing newspaper, originally founded as official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party.-History:L'Unità was founded by Antonio Gramsci on 12 February 1924, as the newspaper of workers and peasants, the official newspaper of Italian Communist Party : it was printed in...

, The Herald
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...

, The Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...

 (London), and newspapers throughout Europe, Brazil, Australia and Japan. Nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars, the film established his reputation as a director of "extraordinarily controlled" feature
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...

 documentaries.
Other films include portraits of Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...

, Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

, and Jean Giraud
Jean Giraud
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...

. His Balthus Through the Looking Glass
Balthus Through the Looking Glass
Balthus Through the Looking-Glass is a 1996 French documentary film directed by Damian Pettigrew on the French painter Balthus filmed at work in his studio....

, a study of the controversial French painter, was filmed in Super 16 over a 12-month period in Switzerland, Italy, France and the Moors of England. Esteemed by Guy Davenport
Guy Davenport
Guy Mattison Davenport was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.-Life:...

, it was honored in a cycle of film classics by Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...

, Marcel Carné
Marcel Carné
-Biography:Born in Paris, France, the son of a cabinet maker whose wife died when their son was five, Carné began his career as a film critic, becoming editor of the weekly publication, Hebdo-Films, and working for Cinémagazine and Cinémonde between 1929 and 1933. In the same period he worked in...

, and Jean Vigo
Jean Vigo
Jean Vigo was a French film director, who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s and was a posthumous influence on the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.-Biography:...

 at the Museum Ludwig
Museum Ludwig
Museum Ludwig, located in Cologne, Germany, houses a collection of modern art. It includes works from PopArt, Abstract and Surrealism, and has one of the largest Picasso collections in Europe. It also features many works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein....

 (Cologne, Germany) in September 2007.

In 2010, Pettigrew directed MetaMoebius, a cinematic essay on French graphic designer Moebius aka Jean Giraud
Jean Giraud
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...

 for the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain
Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain
The Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, often known simply as the Fondation Cartier, is a contemporary art museum located at 261 boulevard Raspail in the 14th arrondissement of the French capital, Paris...

 and CinéCinéma Classic
CinéCinéma Classic
CinéCinéma Classic is one of Cinecinema channels dedicated to classic films from all over the world, mainly American & French cinema.The Programs begin at 08:00 CET and goes till the next day morning.all Films broadcast in their original language with French subtitle or in a separate audio channel...

. His documentary, The Irene Hilda Story, based on the European cabaret
Cabaret
Cabaret is a form, or place, of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue: a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables watching the performance, as introduced by a master of ceremonies or...

 tradition during the Second World War as experienced by French stars Irene and Bernard Hilda, was broadcast in France and Germany by ARTE France that same year.

He recently completed Inside Italo (Lo specchio di Calvino), a feature-length study of Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

 for ARTE France
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...

 in co-production with Italy’s Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali and the National Film Board of Canada
National Film Board of Canada
The National Film Board of Canada is Canada's twelve-time Academy Award-winning public film producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary, animation, alternative drama and digital media productions...

. Starring Neri Marcorè as the famous Italian writer, the docu-fiction uses in-depth conversations filmed at Calvino's Rome penthouse a year before his death in 1985 and rare footage from RAI
RAI
RAI — Radiotelevisione italiana S.p.A. known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane, is the Italian state owned public service broadcaster controlled by the Ministry of Economic Development. Rai is the biggest television company in Italy...

, BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

, and INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel
Institut national de l'audiovisuel
The Institut national de l'audiovisuel , is a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives. Additionally it provides customers with a free and immediate access to archives of countries such as Afghanistan and Cambodia...

) television archives. The film's theatrical release is slated for 2012.

In development are two feature films: Darkness Visible starring Tim Roth
Tim Roth
Simon Timothy "Tim" Roth is an English film actor and director best known for his roles in the American films,Legend of 1900, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Skellig, Planet of the Apes, The Incredible Hulk and Rob Roy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for...

 and Eriq Ebouaney
Eriq Ebouaney
Eriq Ebouaney is a French film actor. He is best known for his portrayal as the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the 2000 film Lumumba, as "Blacktie" in Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale and as "Ice" in the 2008 action film Transporter 3 in which he starred opposite Jason Statham.-Early...

, and Beckett, based on the director's experience working with Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

.

Writer-Director

  • Fellini ou l'amour de la vie (1993)
  • Mr Gir et Mike S. Blueberry (1999)
  • L'histoire d'Irène / The Irene Hilda Story (2009)
  • Fellini :
    8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...

     en Six Mémos (2009)
  • Ionesco : Autour du Roi se meurt (2009)
  • MetaMoebius : Giraud-Moebius, métamorphoses (2010)
  • The Rome Trilogy:
    • Balthus Through the Looking Glass
      Balthus Through the Looking Glass
      Balthus Through the Looking-Glass is a 1996 French documentary film directed by Damian Pettigrew on the French painter Balthus filmed at work in his studio....

       / Balthus de l'autre côté du miroir (1996)
    • Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
      Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
      Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is a 2002 French documentary film written and directed by Damian Pettigrew.Based on Federico Fellini's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 , the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working...

       / Fellini, sono un gran bugiardo / Fellini, je suis un grand menteur (2002)
    • Inside Italo / Lo specchio di Calvino (2011)
  • Jean-Jacques Annaud (2012)

Producer

  • Ionesco : Conversations autour d'une caméra (Ionesco interviews)
  • Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (Fellini interviews)
  • Inside Calvino (Calvino interviews)
  • Jean-Jacques Annaud (Annaud interviews)

Screenplays

  • Darkness Visible (2003 / 2007)
  • Les Yeux de ma mâitresse (2005 - funded by the Centre National de la Cinématographie
    Centre National de la Cinématographie
    Le Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée or CNC is a French agency of the Ministry of Culture, responsible for the production and promotion of cinematic and audiovisual arts in France, is a publicly owned establishment, with legal and financial autonomy.Created by law on 25 October 1946...

    )
  • Inside Italo (2010)
  • Beckett (2011)

Publications

This bibliography is focused on the published interviews that were filmed, produced and directed by Pettigrew in collaboration with the following artists:
  • Fellini, Federico
    Federico Fellini
    Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...

     & Pettigrew, Damian:
    • Fellini, je suis un grand menteur. Paris: L'Arche, 1994 (ISBN 2851813404).
    • Fellini, eu sou um grande mentiroso. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1995.
    • Fellini, Ich bin ein großer Lügner. Munich: Verlag der Autoren, 1995 (ISBN 3886611566).
    • 'Fellini: Creation and the Artist' in Projections 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1995 (ISBN 0-571-17363-2).
    • 'Fellini et l'entretien avec Damian Pettigrew' in Cahiers Jungiens de Psychanalyse. (Paris, Issue 104, 2002.)
    • Fellini, sono un gran bugiardo. Prefazione di Tullio Kezich
      Tullio Kezich
      Tullio Kezich was an Italian film critic, screenwriter, playwright and actor.Kezich was born in Trieste...

      . Roma: Elleu, 2003 (ISBN 8874761228).
    • I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
      I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
      I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon is a book combining film stills and photographs with transcripts of the last filmed interviews with Federico Fellini conducted by Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992...

      . Preface by Tullio Kezich
      Tullio Kezich
      Tullio Kezich was an Italian film critic, screenwriter, playwright and actor.Kezich was born in Trieste...

      . New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003 (ISBN 0-8109-4617-3).
    • Federico Fellini. Sou um grande mentiroso. Uma conversa com Damian Pettigrew. Lisboa: Fim de Século, 2008.

  • Calvino, Italo
    Italo Calvino
    Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

     & Pettigrew, Damien:
    • The Paris Review Interviews - The Art of Fiction, No. 130. (Issue 124, Fall 1992).
    • Sogno e delirio. Il Calvino segreto. La Repubblica
      La Repubblica
      la Repubblica is an Italian daily general-interest newspaper. Founded in 1976 in Rome by the journalist Eugenio Scalfari, as of 2008 is the second largest circulation newspaper, behind the Corriere della Sera.-Foundation:...

      , September 10, 1995.
    • Uno scrittore pomeridiano. Intervista sull'arte della narrativa a cura di William Weaver
      William Weaver
      William Fense Weaver is an English language translator of modern Italian literature.-Biography:William Weaver is perhaps best known for his translations of the work of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, and has translated many other Italian authors over the course of a career spanning more than fifty...

       e Damien Pettigrew con un ricordo di Pietro Citati
      Pietro Citati
      Pietro Citati is a famous Italian writer and literary critic.He has written critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short but unforgettable memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino.In Kafka, Pietro Citati has the great writer...

      . Roma: Minimum fax, 2003 (ISBN 8887765863).

Awards

UNESCO Grand Prize - Best Documentary
  • 1996, for Balthus Through the Looking Glass


Lausanne International Festival of Art Films - Best Photography Prize
  • 1996, for Balthus Through the Looking Glass


European Film Awards Prix Arte Nomination - Best Documentary
  • 2003, for Fellini: I'm a Born Liar


Marseille International Film Festival Award - Coup de Coeur
  • 2003, for Fellini: I'm a Born Liar


Banff World Television Festival Rockie Award - Best Arts Documentary
  • 2003, for Fellini: I'm a Born Liar


Member, The Society of Multimedia Authors of France (SCAM) and The Society of Authors of France (SGDL)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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