Biography
Pettigrew's mother was a child psychologist. His father, Dr. J.F. Pettigrew, was the first Canadian surgeon to diagnose the heart condition known as aortic coarctation in 1953. [3]
After reading English, French and Italian Literature at the universities of Bishop's, Oxford, and Glasgow (where he discovered the work of Scottish film director Bill Douglas), Pettigrew studied cinema at IDHEC in Paris. At the Cinémathèque Française, he met Brion Gysin and Steve Lacy and began frequenting their artists' circle. If his work is influenced by Gysin's celebrated cut-up technique, the profound and lasting effect on his life was his friendship with Samuel Beckett.
In 1983, Pettigrew launched a remake of Film (film) (1965) starring Klaus Kinski, with Beckett as consultant and Raoul Coutard as cameraman. [4] Kinski’s scheduling, however, proved intractable. Beckett next proposed Jack Lemmon for the role but the project was abandoned when Lemmon explained he was incapable of competing with Buster Keaton (who first played the roles of O and E in 1965). With Beckett and Pettigrew in 1984, the actor David Warrilow initiated Take 2, a tentative sequel to Film, but the project remained unfinished at the playwright's death in 1989. [5] In 1990, Pettigrew settled in Paris to devote himself to filmmaking.
In 1999, he co-founded Portrait et Compagnie with French producer Olivier Gal. He spends a short part of each year on Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. [6]
Work
A recognized authority on Federico Fellini, his portrait of the maestro, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar , won the prestigious Rockie Award at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, receiving excellent reviews in The New Yorker , The New York Times , Los Angeles Times , Newsweek International , Le Monde , Corriere della Sera , l'Unità , The Herald , The Telegraph (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 documentaries. [7] The interview transcripts were published in 2003 as I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon with 125 illustrations and a preface by Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich. The Italian director pays particular homage to Tullio Pinelli, his co-scriptwriter on such classics as I Vitelloni , La Strada , and La Dolce Vita . [8]
Other films include portraits of Eugène Ionesco, Italo Calvino, and Jean Giraud. His Balthus Through the Looking Glass , 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, [9] it was honored in a cycle of film classics by Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Jean Vigo at the Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany) in September 2007. [10]
In 2010, Pettigrew directed MetaMoebius, a cinematic essay on French graphic designer Moebius aka Jean Giraud for the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain and CinéCinéma Classic. His documentary, The Irene Hilda Story, based on the European cabaret tradition during the Second World War as experienced by French stars Irene and Bernard Hilda, Micheline Presle and Henri Salvador, was broadcast in France and Germany by ARTE France that same year. [11]
A mid-career retrospective of his work in film was held at the Centre des Arts d'Enghien-les-Bains from 5 October 2011 to 28 March 2012. [12] His informal discussion with Ingmar Bergman (conducted in the fall of 2003 at Fårö Island) on the Swedish director's affinities with Samuel Beckett's work was published in L’Âge d’or du cinéma européen in 2011. [13]
In 2012, he completed Inside Italo (Lo specchio di Calvino), a feature-length study of Italo Calvino for ARTE France in co-production with Italy’s Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali [14] and the National Film Board of Canada. [15] Starring Italian actor Neri Marcorè and distinguished literary critic Pietro Citati, the docu-fiction uses in-depth conversations filmed at the writer's Rome penthouse a year before his death in 1985 and rare footage from RAI, BBC, and INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel) television archives. ARTE [16] and SKY ARTE (Italy) [17] broadcast the 52-minute version on 19 December 2012 and 14 October 2013, respectively. [18]
In 2024, Pettigrew completed the first feature-length documentary on Carolyn Carlson, the France-based American dancer and choreographer. Begun in January 2012, the film focuses on the creation of several major works by Carlson including Synchronicity (2012), Dialogue with Rothko (2013) and Woman in a Room with Diana Vishneva, principal dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre, and Black Over Red (2017) with Marie-Agnès Gillot, star dancer at the Paris Opéra Ballet. The 55-minute version was first broadcast by Arte France and the ZDF on 14 January 2024. [19]
Awards and festivals
- Information for this section provided by IMDb [23] and the official site of Fellini: I’m a Born Liar. [24]
UNESCO Grand Prize - Best Documentary
- 1997 for Balthus Through the Looking Glass
Best Photography Prize - Lausanne International Festival of Art Films
- 1997 for Balthus Through the Looking Glass
Official Selection - 8th Marseille International Film Festival (Vue sur les docs)
- 1997 for Balthus Through the Looking Glass
Official Selection - 56th Edinburgh International Film Festival
- 2002 for Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (selected in over 40 international festivals including Edinburgh, Moscou, Amsterdam, Toronto and Montréal)
Nomination Prix Arte for Best Documentary - European Film Awards
- 2002 for Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
Coup de Cœur Award - 13th Marseille International Film Festival (Vue sur les docs)
- 2002 for Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary - Banff World Television Festival
- 2002 for Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
Homage to Fellini 1993-2003 - Cannes International Film Festival , Cinémathèque Française and Rimini Fellini Foundation
- 2003 for Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
Official Selection - 1st Cairo Panorama of European Film
- 2004 for Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
Official Selection - Toronto Jewish Film Festival (selected in 10 international festivals)
- 2010 for The Irene Hilda Story
Official Selection - 14th Blue Metropolis
Italo Calvino - 90th Anniversary 1923-2013 - Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
Member, The Society of Multimedia Authors of France (SCAM), The Society of Authors of France (SGDL), and ONE Campaign
Federico Fellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8+1⁄2 as the 10th-greatest film.
Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism and surrealism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 1973 Jerusalem Prize.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was a French artist, cartoonist and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim predominantly under the pseudonym Mœbius for his fantasy/science-fiction work, and to a slightly lesser extent as Gir, which he used for the Blueberry series and his other Western themed work. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others, he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.
Blueberry is a Western comic series created in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition by the Belgian scriptwriter Jean-Michel Charlier and French comics artist Jean "Mœbius" Giraud. It chronicles the adventures of Mike Steve Donovan alias Blueberry on his travels through the American Old West. Blueberry is an atypical western hero; he is not a wandering lawman who brings evil-doers to justice, nor a handsome cowboy who "rides into town, saves the ranch, becomes the new sheriff and marries the schoolmarm". In any situation, he sees what he thinks needs doing, and he does it.
8+1⁄2 is a 1963 comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The metafictional narrative centers on Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director who suffers from stifled creativity as he attempts to direct an epic science fiction film. Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, and Eddra Gale portray the various women in Guido's life. The film is shot in black and white by cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo and features a score by Nino Rota, with costume and set designs by Piero Gherardi.
La dolce vita is a 1960 satirical comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini. It was written by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi. The film stars Marcello Mastroianni as Marcello Rubini, a tabloid journalist who, over seven days and nights, journeys through the "sweet life" of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness. The screenplay can be divided into a prologue, seven major episodes interrupted by an intermezzo, and an epilogue, according to the most common interpretation.
Balthasar Klossowskide Rola, known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his imagery.
Pietro Citati was an Italian writer and literary critic.
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 Italian dramatic comedy film directed and written by Federico Fellini and starring Roberto Benigni, Paolo Villaggio, and Nadia Ottaviani. Based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici by Ermano Cavazzoni, and revisiting themes Fellini first explored in La strada (1954), the film is about a fake inspector of wells and a former prefect who wander through the Emilia-Romagna countryside of Fellini's childhood and discover a dystopia of television commercials, fascism, beauty pageants, rock music, Catholicism, and pagan ritual.
Numa Sadoul (born 7 May 1947, Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa is a French writer, actor, and director, who has been a resident of France since 1966.
Tullio Kezich was an Italian screenwriter and playwright, best known as the film critic for Corriere della Sera and for his award-winning biography of Italian director Federico Fellini.
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 methods, conscience, and philosophy.
Balthus Through the Looking-Glass is a 1996 French documentary film directed by Damian Pettigrew on the French painter Balthus.
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. The interviews are edited and introduced by Pettigrew with a preface by Italian film critic and Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich.
The Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, 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.
Joseph-Marie Lo Duca was an Italian-born journalist, novelist, art critic, and film historian best known as the co-founder in 1951 of the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma with André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Léonide Keigel.
Fellini: A Director's Notebook is an Italian documentary for television directed by Federico Fellini shot in 16mm and first broadcast in the United States on NBC in 1969, on NBC Experiment in Television.
Tsilla Chelton was a French actress of theatre and film, famous for playing the main role in 1990 film Tatie Danielle, in which she was nominated for a Cesar award and as an elderly Dominican in Sister Smile.
Ahmad Kamyabi Mask is a writer, translator, publisher, and current Professor Emeritus of Modern Drama and Theater of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran. He is a prominent scholar of French Avant-garde theater and influential in the study of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.
