TEHRAN (IBNA) -- Persian
translation of ‘Ateliers’ (1996) by leading French novelist, screenwriter ‎and actor Jean-Claude Carrière featuring a survey of his works and collaborations with ‎prominent film directors has been published and is available at Iranian bookstores.‎
This work, which spans the film and theater career of the late Jean-Claude Carrière in more than sixty years, has been rendered into Persian by Mohammad-Reza Shaikhi and features an exclusive preface by the author. Tehran-based Cheshmeh Publishing has released the book in 603 pages.
‘Ateliers’ (Workshops) describes that at each step of his work, Carrière encountered difficulties of all kinds and even obstacles that sometimes seemed insoluble. Here, he tries to tell in a simple form, how he solved them or did not solve them. The author speaks of his personal writing problems – which were numerous – and also about the workshops he led- almost a hundred- all over the world, from Los Angeles to Beijing, from Tehran to Jerusalem.
This book is not about theory, but about practice, failures alongside successes. Carrière’s collaborations with great directors such as Luis Buñuel, Peter Brook, Pierre Étaix, Louis Malle, Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Nagisa Oshima, Jacques Deray, Volker Schlöndorff, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, and even the young Louis Garrel have been engagingly portrayed in ‘Ateliers’.
Jean-Claude Carrière received an Academy Award for best short film for co-writing ‘Heureux Anniversaire’ (1963), and was later conferred an Honorary Oscar in 2014. He was nominated for the Academy Award three other times for his work in ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ (1972), ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ (1977), and ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1988). He also won a César Award for Best Original Screenplay in ‘The Return of Martin Guerre’ (1983).
Carrière was an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud and was president of La Fémis, the French state film school that he helped establish. He was noted as a frequent collaborator with Luis Buñuel on the screenplays of the latter’s late French films.
Carrière and Umberto Eco published ‘This is Not the End of the Book’ in 2012, a book of conversations on the future of information carriers. Carrière also wrote comics for Bernard Yslaire and Pierre Étaix. He was given an Academy Honorary Award in 2014, for his lifetime work in writing approximately 80 screenplays, as well as his essays, fiction, translations and interviews.