David lean

He was born in London in 1908. He was British to the bone. Raised in a Quaker family, he did not see a movie until he was 17: The Hound of the Baskervilles (Maurice Alvey, 1922). But it was love at first sight: he wanted to make movies although, he confesses, for his family “it was as if he said he wanted to work in the circus.” In 1927 he joined the industry. And he starts at the bottom, as a guy for everything at Gaumont. He just as he prepares the tea that drives the clapperboard. He pecks at different departments, he learns here and there. He is attracted to the moviola, and establishes himself as an editor.

In some ways, Lean is a mystery. He did not have a university education, but his films have a solid literary base. How did you educate the taste of him? When he was editing for Paramount, he met Bernad Shaw, who was adapting his play Pygmalion from him . In 1942, during the war, he collaborated in the propaganda works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger . Lean tosses the idea of ​​directing, but takes it in stride. They offer him to shoot fast low-budget movies, and he says “no”. Instead, he listens to playwright Noël Coward, who asks for help to make his film debut: both co -direct Blood, Sweat and Tears (1942). It will be his rule all his life to only make the movies that he wants to make. The collaboration with Coward is repeated inLa vida manda (1944), shot for Cineguild, founded by both and Ronald Neame , and continued in The Mocking Spirit and Brief Encounter , from 1945.

These two titles anticipate a topic that interests Lean greatly: the difficulties in love, marriage and adultery. The question not only affects him personally (the director was married five times), but becomes part of his artistic inquiry: The Passionate Friends (1949), based on Wells; Madeleine (1950), a real case; Summer Follies (1955), the experience of an American in Venice; the turbulent love affairs in times of revolution in Doctor Zhivago (1965), from the work of Pasternak; the impossible romance of an Irish woman and a British man in Ryan’s Daughter (1970), a loose adaptation of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”; Adela’s journey of initiation in A Passage to India(1984), from Forster’s novel. Lean addresses the question of love in a very particular way: she presents characters influenced by environmental conventions, and yet they try to overcome them, to be freer. With a fatalistic sense, it is not uncommon for these characters to retain the ties of the beginning at the end of their adventures (for example, the protagonists tempted by adultery in Brief Encounter ), but at least their spiritual stature increases.

Lean’s early films were praised by critics. His adaptations of Dickens’s Broken Chains (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) are considered exemplary. Instead, when the passionate Lean traveler leaves the cozy but artificial environment of the studios, first in Follies… , but later, with Sam Spiegel, in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and with other titles already mentioned, he is labeled a megalomaniac. The usual attacks on Cecil B. DeMille are directed at other cultivating filmmakers before intimacy, such as Wyler ( Ben-Hur) and, of course, Lean. Those monumental frameworks where heartbreaking conflicts take place (the colonel who builds a bridge in the jungle for the enemy; the leadership of an English officer among the Arabs; love in a revolutionary context), produce an a priori and unfair rejection. Rejection that reaches later directors: Richard Attenborough , who shot a Gandhi that Lean himself considered, or Steven Spielberg , with a film as “leanian” as Empire of the Sun. The parsimony at the time of shooting prevented some projects from materializing: the two films that he was preparing with Robert Bolt about the mutiny on the Bounty, and the adaptation of “Nostromo” by Joseph Conrad, which Christopher Hampton and Bolt worked on. His death caught up with him in 1991: he was 83 years old, but he still believed he could see one day sailing the “Nostromo”. Power of celluloid dreams.