Serge Silberman
Birth : 1917-05-01, Lódz, Lódzkie, Poland
Death : 2003-07-22
History
Serge Silberman (1 May 1917 – 22 July 2003) was a French film producer.
Silberman was born in Łódź, then a part of the Regency Kingdom of Poland in a Jewish family. During World War II, Silberman survived Nazi concentration camps and eventually settled in Paris. One of his first works as a film producer was Jean-Pierre Melville's 1955 film Bob the Gambler, a precursor to the French New Wave movement.
Silberman's most notable collaborations were with the surrealist film director Luis Buñuel. The pair, along with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who Silberman introduced to Buñuel, worked together on a number of films, starting with the 1964 film Diary of a Chambermaid. Silberman produced most of Buñuel's late films, including the Academy Award winner The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in 1972 and the director's very last film That Obscure Object of Desire in 1977.
Silberman had founded his own production company, Greenwich Film Productions, in 1966. The company was responsible for the production of over 15 films. In 1981, Silberman produced his most financially successful film, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva. The film was not well received in the country of its origin, France, but became a box-office hit abroad. The money gained from the movie enabled Silberman to provide funding for Akira Kurosawa's ambitious 1985 film Ran, which at the time of its making was the most expensive Japanese film ever.
Silberman was awarded an honorary César Award in 1988. He died in Paris in 2003 at the age of 86.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Producer
This film is of interest primarily because it contains within it the entire surviving footage of an unfinished 1974 film by the same director, Slave of Love, which was successfully remade shortly thereafter by another director, Nikita Mikhalkov.The "cover" story is about a woman (Jeanne Moreau) newly released from prison camps in the 1940s back into Russian society, who finds that there is no place for her in the world she has come back to. However, this painterly film is so filled with striking and surreal imagery that it would be misleading to say that the story is of any great importance in relation to that.
Producer
The wife of a British diplomat in Paris takes a chimpanzee as her lover.
Producer
With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa's late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.
Producer
In 1985, Chris Marker traveled to Japan to attend the filming of Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Marker analyzes the progress of filming; the infinite patience of a team under the orders of a meticulous director down to the smallest detail; the antithetical mixture of the modern with the traditional; of the real with the fictitious; of life with cinema… and literature.
Executive Producer
Wisconsin farm girl Elizabeth Carlson leaves family and her English teacher lover behind and escapes to New York. There she soon makes a career for herself as a fashion model. During a vernissage she's approached by a mysterious man whose motives are unclear...
Producer
Jules, a young Parisian postman, secretly records a concert performance given by the opera singer Cynthia Hawkins, whom he idolises. The following day, Jules runs into a woman who is being pursued by armed thugs. Before she is killed, the woman slips an audio cassette into his mail bag...
Producer
After dumping a bucket of water on a beautiful young woman from the window of a train car, wealthy Frenchman Mathieu, regales his fellow passengers with the story of the dysfunctional relationship between himself and the young woman in question, a fiery 19-year-old flamenco dancer named Conchita. What follows is a tale of cruelty, depravity and lies -- the very building blocks of love.
Producer
This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.
Producer
A crook on the run hooks up with a criminal gang to commit a kidnapping. However, things don't go quite as planned.
Producer
In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.
Producer
A US Army colonel in France tries to track down an escaped sex maniac.
Producer
Two drifters go on a pilgrimage from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Along the way, they hitchhike, beg for food, and face the Christian dogmas and heresies from different Ages.
Producer
After serving together in the French Foreign Legion, a mercenary and a doctor leave the service and go their separate ways. Later, they are reunited and become involved with a caper involving millions in a high-security safe. The two men become locked in during a holiday weekend as they attempt to crack the safe's combination.
Producer
A scientist from the East happens in France where it is supposed to improve one of his inventions. But it is much more interested in the fact to enjoy it and have fun ...
Producer
A woman seeks to avenge her father's death using a local dancer, with long poisonous fingernails, to do her bidding.
Producer
Al Pereira, a wise-cracking superspy, investigates a series of assassinations being performed by ruthless killers with bronze skin and horn-rimmed glasses. The trail of these mindless automata leads him to the lair of a seductive villainess who has formulated a computer-powered plot to overthrow the governments of Europe. 'Cartes sur table' is at once an homage to classical Hollywood thrillers and a playful riff on the newly-popular James Bond films.
Producer
Producer
Celestine has a new job as a chambermaid for the quirky M. Monteil, his wife and her father. When the father dies, Celestine decides to quit her job and leave, but when a young girl is raped and murdered, Celestine believes that the Monteils' groundskeeper, Joseph, is guilty, and stays on in order to prove it. She uses her sexuality and the promise of marriage to get Joseph to confess -- but things do not go as planned.
Producer
A beautiful dancer has two admirers -- one is a young worker whom she has only met by accident, and the other is an unscrupulous businessman. The worker had been training as a Buddhist monk and as his interest in the dancer and the businessman's pursuit of the woman develop, the dancer and the former monk end up at the archaeological site of Angkor.
Producer
Four prison inmates have been hatching a plan to literally dig out of jail when another prisoner, Claude Gaspard, is moved into their cell. They take a risk and share their plan with the newcomer. Over the course of three days, the prisoners and friends break through the concrete floor using a bed post and begin to make their way through the sewer system -- yet their escape is anything but assured.
Producer
Vienna, 1906. A passionate love story develops between Franz Lobheiner and the young Christine. Lobheiner is, however, currently seeing the married Baroness von Eggersdorf. Upon learning of his wife's infidelity, the Baron von Eggersdorf provokes a duel with Lobheiner. But the former is no longer a real threat to the Baron. Lobheiner is now passionately in love with Christine. How will this love quartet end?
Producer
A small town in Spain, October 1955. Isabel, a 35-year-old dreamer who feels like a failure because she is not married yet, becomes the new target of a group of soulless pranksters.
Producer
In Paris, Bob Montagne is practically synonymous with gambling -- and winning. He is kind, classy and well-liked by virtually everyone in town, including police inspector Ledru. However, when Bob's luck turns sour, he begins to lose friends and makes the most desperate gamble of his life: to rob the Deauville casino during Grand Prix weekend, when the vaults are full. Unfortunately, Bob soon learns that the game is rigged and the cops are on to him.
