Pierre-André Boutang

Biography

Pierre-André Boutang, born March 25, 1937, in Paris and died August 20, 2008, in Grosseto-Prugna, Corsica, was a French documentary filmmaker, producer, and director.

He was one of the directors of the Franco-German channel Arte, after previously being one of the directors of La Sept. A major figure in French television, Pierre-André Boutang, producer, director, programmer, and interviewer, knew how to combine intelligence and a broad audience through films and documentary series for ORTF since the 1960s. Throughout his long career, Pierre-André Boutang explored the worlds of literature, film, and television while fostering intellectual debate.

The son of philosopher Pierre Boutang, he was first a student at the Institute of Political Studies before becoming an assistant director for film and television. From 1962 to 1967, Pierre-André Boutang was responsible for selecting films for television, and later became a producer and director of numerous films and television series ("Les Écrans de la Ville," "Le Journal du Cinéma," "Cinéregards," "Champ Contre Champ"). He also wrote numerous articles for "Dim Dam Dom," a scathing program from the days of ORTF.

From 1967 to 1986, he produced several programs such as "Le Nouveau dimanche," "L'invité du dimanche," "L'homme en question," "Désir des arts," "Projection privée," "Bibliothèque de poche," "Archives du XXe siècle," and then "Océaniques" for FR3, where he produced profiles of Fidel Castro, Martin Heidegger, and Louis Althusser. The magazine was awarded a 7 d'Or in 1987 and 1988.

Television also owes him major series of interviews co-produced with Jean Rouch, including "Mémoires du XXe siècle," featuring portraits of Gilles Deleuze (3 DVDs from Editions Montparnasse) and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, as well as "Sartre par lui-même," in which the philosopher spoke about his work for three hours. At the same time, he produced films for the cinema by Jean Yanne, Marco Ferreri, Robert Bresson, and Alexandre Astruc's Sartre par lui-même, as well as Otar Iosseliani's Les Favoris de la lune. He is the author of a biography of Roman Polanski.

In 1990, invited by historian Georges Duby to work for Sept, the cultural television channel that later became Arte, he was appointed Deputy Director of Programming under Jérôme Clément and launched the cultural magazine "Océanopolis." Pierre-André Boutang, the initiator of numerous "Thema" programs that contributed to the channel's success, also created the channel's cultural magazine, "Metropolis," for which he was editor-in-chief for France from 1995 to 2006.

For eighteen years, Pierre-André Boutang had become a pillar of Arte. The Franco-German channel broadcast his documentaries such as "The ABCs of Gilles Deleuze," "13 Days in the Life of Picasso," "Alexander Solzhenitsyn," "Depardieu, the View of Others," "Mao, a Chinese Story," and, most recently, "Jeanne M," a portrait of Jeanne Moreau, and "Claude Levi-Strauss by Himself."