Dear Tom Luddy, dear Jean-Pierre Gorin, dear friends,
It’s a real honor and a great pleasure for me and my wife Rachel to welcome you tonight at the residence of France for a celebration of French American friendship.
We are gathered here to express the French government’s recognition to Jean-Pierre Gorin, French filmmaker and brilliant professor at UC San Diego, and to Tom Luddy, who among many other identities happens to be the co-director of the Telluride Film Festival.
Jean-Pierre Gorin and Tom Luddy are two very different human beings, of course! But they share nonetheless a same passion for cinema.
As I was saying, this ceremony is first of all a story of friendship and fidelity, so I’ll try something that is perhaps a little unconventional but will be, I hope, appropriate: instead of separating the biographies of our two heroes, I’ll mix them in a unique historical narration. And… I’ll try to be brief…
Jean-Pierre Gorin and Tom Luddy met at the very beginning of the seventies, and were introduced to each other by none other than Jean-Luc Godard – who, by the way, and notwithstanding our traditional French imperialism, happens to be Swiss and French, and perhaps even more swiss than French… Godard and Gorin were trying to show in the US the first films they were making under the name of the Dziga Vertov Group, a movement they co-founded in 1968 – you will of course appreciate the date –, to explore the notion of political cinema. Gorin, after brilliant studies, had been working for a while for the daily newspaper Le Monde (who eventually… fired him). He was also a political activist – this, perhaps, explaining that… Godard approached him during his research on La Chinoise, in 1965, and they began working together in 1968, just forty years ago.
During those same years, on the other side of the Atlantic, Tom Luddy, after studying in Berkeley and working in New York for a film company, was coming back to Berkeley to take the job of program director for the Pacific Film Archive. When Gorin and Godard arrived in Berkeley, Tom Luddy was there for them, as he always is with the people he loves, with the people he admires.
Because if there’s one fundamental quality in Tom Luddy, a quality everybody in this room knows and loves, it’s his generosity, and his unique capacity to bring people together. Tom Luddy has this ability to create bridges between persons of different horizons, cinema of course, but also music, literature, gastronomy… As one of his friends, the great novelist Thomas Sanchez, another Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, wrote about him last summer, “God may have created everyone, but Luddy has their telephone number, and he’ll share them with you for the right reason”…
And during his five years at the Pacific Film Archive, Tom Luddy shared with everybody his passion for cinema and brought to Berkeley all the most important filmmakers in the world. But it was not enough, so Tom Luddy also decided to found a festival, the Telluride Film Festival, in a small ghost town in Colorado. Today, the festival is a legend and the ghost town is certainly one of the hippest destinations in the US…
From Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda to François Truffaut and Catherine Deneuve, from Chris Marker to Claude Chabrol, everybody in the 70’s came to Berkeley, or to Telluride, and everybody left with a new friend.
In the meantime, Jean-Pierre Gorin went on producing with Godard a series of films that was both an aesthetical and a political examination of the seventies, the most famous of them being Tout va bien, with Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. But in 1975, Gorin left France and began his career as a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where Manny Farber, probably the most influential American film critic, was teaching. Jean-Pierre Gorin, a passionate professor whose influence was decisive for many of his students, is still there today, and is still working with Manny Farber, who is 90-year-old now. He made three films in the last thirty years, an American Trilogy that will be brought out on dvd by Criterion this year. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s work has been screened all around the world, and has curated programs at all the major festivals. And in 2006, Tom Luddy invited Jean-Pierre Gorin to be the guest director at the Telluride Film Festival. They have come full circle, or “La boucle est bouclée”, as we say in France.
There would still be so much to say about Tom Luddy and Jean-Pierre Gorin, about their adventures in the world of culture. But I promised to keep it short, did’nt I? However I need to speak one minute about one of Tom Luddy’s achievements, the restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoleon and it’s screening in Telluride. At the end of the seventies, Tom Luddy was working with Francis Ford Coppola at Zoetrope as a director of special projects. In this capacity, he supervised the restoration of the legendary masterpiece by Abel Gance, probably one of the most difficult films to restore in the world. He not only did it, but he also managed to screen the film in Telluride in the presence of a young guy : the 89-year-old director Abel Gance. That’s one of those miracles that only Tom Luddy could perform.
To conclude, and before the ceremony itself, allow me to thank a few people.
Alice Waters, of course, who has provided the food tonight, and who has been an important presence in Tom Luddy and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s lives,
Francis Ford Coppola, who couldn’t make it tonight but sends us the excellent wine you’re drinking,
Greil Marcus, who will be back very soon for his own decoration, and whose last book, l’Amérique et ses prophètes, was published in France a few months ago,
Edith Kramer, who was in charge of Pacific Film Archive after Tom Luddy and is one of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s best friends,
And of course, thank you to Monique, Tom Luddy’s wife, who has always been there, speaks an excellent French but has never managed to make his beloved husband speak this exotic language.
Thank you to all of you for being here and for celebrating with me these two wonderful people.
Jean-Pierre Gorin, pour l’exigence et la rigueur de votre démarche artistique, pour l’importance de votre œuvre dans l’histoire récente du cinéma français, et au nom du ministre français de la Culture, je vous fais Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres.
Tom Luddy, pour votre générosité, pour l’immense travail de diffusion du cinéma français que vous avez effectué depuis plus de trente ans, et au nom du ministre français de la Culture, je vous fais Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres.
Je vous remercie.