Albi – Albigenses / Tarn / Lecture
Pierre-Roland Saint-Dizier: “The pleasure of taking the reader on a journey”
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Over the past fifteen years, Pierre-Roland Saint-Dizier has produced around twenty comic book scripts on themes as diverse as the adventure of airmail, transatlantic liners, the roads to Santiago de Compostela, the erosion of sea coasts or the traffic of horns in the heart of Africa. At 46, this Protean journalist whose head is teeming with a thousand projects, tells us about his latest baby “The Gold of El Ouafi”, the little-known story of the first French marathon runner to win Olympic gold at the Amsterdam Olympics. , in 1928.
– How does a student with a film license and a master’s degree in bioethics find himself a comic book scriptwriter after having been a maths and chemistry teacher in a college in Libreville in Gabon, then a journalist within the Peugeot group- Citroën in Mulhouse?…
– Africa is an opportunity that I seized within the framework of what was then called cooperation. An alternative that I found preferable to classic military service and which offered me a great life experience. What followed was indeed a job as a journalist for seven years in the editorial staff of “L’Ami Hebdo” in Mulhouse, where I also took care of the internal newspaper for the PSA group’s Mulhouse site. And since 2008, I am Albigensian. I work for the City of Albi where I am in charge of publications, and in particular Albi Mag, the municipal magazine.
– The screenwriter who slumbered in you was soon to awaken…
– My first serious contact with the world of comics dates from a comic strip film festival in the Mulhouse region. Then, the director of L’Ami Hebdo, Bernard Deck, asked us to create a historical comic strip on the Coteaux district, one of the top ten ZUPs in France. I participated in it within a collective and when I arrived in Albi, I declined the same concept within the Grand Sud editions with albums on Albi, Carcassonne, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Then there was “Normandie, legendary liner” because I was fascinated by the most beautiful Transatlantic in history and then Campus Stellae, a series of four albums devoted to the roads of Santiago de Compostela in the 13th century…
– About fifteen other works followed (see elsewhere). What fed this desire to tell stories by backing the story to a comic strip?
– This probably comes from my childhood during which I awakened my imagination early. We lived in a 22-storey building in Mulhouse, a universe full of sounds and images. With one of my brothers, we are constantly inventing stories. I already read a lot of comics. I would have liked to draw, but I’m really not good at it! Writing screenplays is the pleasure of telling a story, of taking the reader on a personal journey to discover unsuspected universes. Everything often starts with an image, a reading, an encounter, a trip. You then have to build a story around this imaginary.
– The tandem formed with the draftsman is obviously essential?
– We’re building a team. It can be made up of one or two screenwriters, a draftsman often associated with a colorist. You must first write a synopsis of four or five pages summarizing the story that you are proposing to the publisher, supplementing it with a few test plates. Patience and perseverance are then the two key words to win the contract. And when it is signed, you have to get to work immediately! There is a lot of research work to be done in order, in particular, to provide the designer with as many iconographic documents as possible. Writing with four hands is not obvious, a harmony in the style of writing is necessary. For the comic strip on Boughera El Ouafi, I worked with Paul Carcenac, pure Albigensian and young journalist at Le Figaro, and the tandem worked! As for the designer, Christophe Girard, he already has a good experience and has produced fantastic work for this album.
“I have five new comics on fire”
– Let’s talk about this latest creation, available for a few days in bookstores (1). How did the idea of dealing with this subject come about?
– It was Paul Carcenac, a sports enthusiast, who first mentioned it. We talked together and I was quickly seduced by the story of this young boy from the Algerian Sahara who was to become the first French marathon runner to win an Olympic gold medal! When we know that in the history of the Olympics, France has only won ten gold medals in athletics, it was a first source of interest. But the album, inspired by real facts freely adapted, also delves into the life of an extraordinary athlete who was in turn an Algerian skirmisher, a worker at Renault, became an Olympic champion against all odds before being treated like a “attraction” by a great American circus, was robbed of all his fortune and ended up murdered in circumstances that were opaque to say the least…
– With this comic, you finally pay homage to a “forgotten” in the history of sport in our country…
– When Alain Mimoun was received at the Elysée after his victory in the Melbourne Olympics Marathon in 1956, he mentioned in his speech the gold medal, 28 years earlier, of Boughera El Ouafi who had been invited to ceremony. But this brief spotlight was not enough to extricate this champion from oblivion. Beyond the sporting exploit, the album is also intended as a hymn to effort, to self-sacrifice, and is a beautiful journey through time and space.
– We are certainly not mistaken in saying that other albums are in the making…
– I have five comics on fire as they say! One relates to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb a hundred years ago this year (2). A fascinating story that I am working on with an Egyptologist from Toulouse and which should be published next October. Also in preparation is an album on the Holocaust and one on the Maison des enfants in Moissac where 500 Jewish children were taken in, none being deported in the end. I also plan a comic strip which will be pure fiction on the theme of freedom. “Do we really want to be free? To escape this virtual world that oppresses us but secures us at the same time? Do we still know what the word freedom means today when it is often confused with anarchy? I want to build a reflection on this theme. »
– The comic seems to be at the top of its game right now…
– With the Covid, sales of comics, manga in particular, have indeed exploded. It must be said that the 9th art addresses all genres and that there is something for everyone with prices that remain affordable. Albi is fortunate to have two bookstores specializing in comics: Gaïa Lib and Atomics BD and the media library has an excellent section dedicated to comics. The Tarn also has several talented authors such as Jean Bastide, Pierre Druilhe, Niko Henrichon… And I’m not forgetting the Chick BD association which does a wonderful job. Certainly comics have a bright future ahead of them!
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“The gold of El Ouafi” – Editions Michel Lafon – 128 pages – €20.95.
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Pierre-Roland Saint-Dizier will host a conference on this future work “Howard Carter – The secret of the Valley of the Kings” Thursday, March 16 at 1 p.m. in the student hall of the Champollion university center. Free entrance.
An already rich bibliography
Since “Men and towers” which evokes the ZUP des Coteaux in Mulhouse (2010), Pierre-Roland Saint-Dizier has written around twenty screenplays on very varied themes. Let us quote “Normandy, legendary liner” (2011); four albums “Campus Stellae” devoted to the roads of Saint-Jacques; “Stories of…”, on the history of five towns including Albi; a trilogy on Saint-Exupéry; “Rêves de gosse”, an album on disability and childhood dreams” (2016); “The architect of the palace” devoted to the Sainte-Chapelle (2017); “The Ocean Signal” on sea level rise (2018); “Guerlain, prince of perfumes” (2018); “Liberty Bessie” (2019) about an African-American pilot; “Farewell to the Rhinoceros” (2019) on horn trafficking; “The Last Refuge”, fable on the human-animal relationship (2019).
Interview by G. Carles
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