Nelly Kaplan, director of “La Fiancée du Pirate” (1969), died Thursday morning of Covid-19 at the age of 89.
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Nelly Kaplan, director of “La Fiancée du Pirate” (1969), anarcho-feminist writer and icon of the New Wave, died Thursday morning of Covid-19 at the age of 89 in a Geneva hospital.
The Franco-Argentinian director made a brilliant entry into fictional cinema in 1969 with “La fiancée du pirate”, which was scandalously released and has become a cult film.
Having a taste for occult sciences, revolt and eroticism, she will have a great career with books and other films influenced by surrealism.
Biochemist father, soprano singer mother
Nelly Kaplan was born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) on April 11, 1931. She had a French passport in 1975. Her great-grandparents, Jews from Odessa and Kiev, had settled in Argentina, fleeing the pogroms.
The father is a biochemist, the mother a soprano singer. Faced with this turbulent child, her mother“Glue to Coliseo Palermo, a big city cinema where, all day long”, she watches movies, fascinated. “I wanted to get away from this South American society where being a girl was like Be nice and shut up ”, she said with a charming accent.
Her parents let her go to France for three months. She will spend her life there. She embarked alone on the “Claude-Bernard”, arrived in Le Havre in 1953, rented a room in Paris, rue de Seine, went to cinés-clubs.
One day in 1954, filmmaker Abel Gance spotted her at the Cinémathèque française.
“I have always been free”
André Breton, the main animator of surrealism, will also be the friend of a lifetime. In 1961, he will be the voice of a film by the young woman on the painter Gustave Moreau. Another surrealist, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, as well as Picasso (she will make a film about him, Lion d’Or 67 in Venice) will also be close.
She exchanged rich correspondence with almost everyone, those with Gance and Mandiargues having been published in 2008 and 2009.
A singular beauty with a slender figure and a mischievous look, Nelly Kaplan was never supposed to get married: “I have always been very free. I never clung to a man and that is probably what intrigued them ”.
At the end of the 1950s, she was first assistant to Abel Gance who was shooting “Austerlitz”. In 1963, she worked with him again on “Cyrano et d’Artagnan”.
In 1965, she published a book “At the Source, the beloved woman”, on erotic drawings by André Masson, his first censored book. She will face censorship again in 1974, with his novel “Memories of a sheet reader», Written under a pseudonym and edited by Jean-Jacques Pauvert.
Then it is the adventure of “The pirate’s fiancée ”. “23 producers refused it even though we had the advance on receipts!”, she was indignant. However, he was selected for the Venice Mostra. On September 3, 1969, he received a ten-minute standing ovation: the film, banned for children under 18 when it was released, was launched.
