Documentarian Michaël Prazan disadvates the sons of the abundant filmography of the director through his multiple interviews.
Surdoué filmmaker, a celebrated producer, Steven Spielberg writes the history of the seventh art for more than half a century. In thirty feature films, Duel to Fabelmansthe director of Jurassic Park will have explored all genres: tale, horror, science fiction, historical film, musical comedy, autobiographical story … Arte devotes all of her Sunday evening to him. The Franco-German chain broadcasts its journalistic thriller Pentagon Papers and three documentaries.
Author of reference surveys on the Second World War, Michaël Prazan signs the first, Steven Spielberg, man and childwhich disentangles the sons of this abundant filmography, shaped by a youth stopped net by the apocalyptic divorce of their parents and the shadow of the Shoah.
« The care taken in stories, characters ”
“Like many people of my generation born in the 1970s, the works of Steven Spielberg determined my youth and constituted a kind of university: Meeting of the third type, and, Indiana Jones, the teeth of the sea, who made me a blue afraid when I saw it because I was really small ”says the documentary maker. “Then, I hung less on the following films. We got lost in sight until Schindler’s listwhich marked a reconciliation with its Judaism and a rise, in the realization, in the care given to the stories, to the characters. »»
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Michaël Prazan lets the words of the maestro speak for themselves. His fascinating and intimate portrait, almost psychoanalytic, is the traditional analyzes of film critics and close collaborators. He draws, instead, in the interviews given by Spielberg to tell it. Confidences illustrated by extracts from films and even some family archives. “We have multiplied the steps to meet him: we had indirect contact. Unfortunately, it was in full covid, then he procrastinated, then he was filming. Our formidable documentalist was able to raise the rivers interviews he granted. He often entrusts the same thing. This mountain of transcriptions has drawn our patterns »says Michaël Prazan.
The turning point of Schindler’s list
Brinquebalé to the four corners of the United States because of the profession of his father engineer, the young Steven Spielberg develops an early love for the camera and the cinema through which he drowns his anxiety which crosses and connects his first films. Like Poltergeist (1982), where the sinister tree is a direct reference to the infant terrors of the director. “This fear comes from afar, from these hostile places lost in the midst of vast territories where he resided, and his comrades who made fun of his origins which he had to hide”notes Michaël Prazan. To the optimistic filmmaker of the beginnings defending otherness, will succeed a more fatalistic vision of the world, accelerated by the shock wave of the September 11 attacks.
Emperor of the box office, Steven Spielberg will long try to get rid of the filmmaker’s label « immature » And to win the recognition of his peers. After the reverse of Purple color and ofSun Empirethe consecration will come with Schindler’s list (1993), who puts the Holocaust at the center of the seventh art. “Spielberg clings to an incredible and forgotten story of a Nazi war profiteer, who is both a witness, an actor of the massacre and a Savior. This point of view will allow the world to identify with a story that only the survivors were carrying and making it known ”greets Michaël Prazan. His documentary just recalls the primordial and less known commitment of Spielberg for the memory of the Shoah, the collection and safeguard of the testimonies of the survivors.
