András Bán
Camera Sketches
Hôtel du Nord. The Unknown Photography of Alexandre Trauner.
Exhibition at the Miskolc Municipal Gallery,
4 September–4 October 2008
Vintage Gallery, Budapest,14 October–7 November, 2008
Paris Photo, Paris, 13 November–16 November 2008.
Alexandre (Sándor) Trauner (1906–1993) the production designer and art
director for the cinema achieved world fame. He worked with such directors as
Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève, Les enfants du paradis, Hôtel du Nord), Billy Wilder
(The Apartment, Irma la douce, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes), Jules Dassin
(Rififi), Joseph Losey (Don Giovanni), John Huston (The Man Who Would Be King) and Luc Besson (Subway).
Sándor Trauner as a painter is still well-remembered. He worked together in
the same studio at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest with George
(György) Kepes and Dezső Korniss. The audacity of their diploma exhibition
created a minor public scandal. As with most of his generation, he thought it best
to try his luck elsewhere, which took him to Paris, a step closer to the world of
cinema. But he never left off painting.
But Alexandre Trauner the photographer is virtually unknown. The Miskolc
Municipal Gallery and the Vintage Gallery in Budapest are the first to show photographs
of his taken in the Thirties and which were found among his papers in 2008.
Trauner was 23 years old when he arrived in Paris, seemingly just another
bohemian artist trying to live on centimes in another cheap atelier in Montparnasse.
He didn't speak French, he frequented the Café du Dôme, a favourite of
Hungarian émigrés, where there was always someone who would buy him a
coffee. He wanted to be a painter, a famous painter. Within ten years he was one
of the best-known production and art designers on the French film scene.
[...]
Trauner's planned destination was Paris, but chance took him to Épinay, to the
film studio. He became first an occasional helper and then assistant to the Russian
set designer Lazare Meerson, a few months after his arrival. There was a bond
between them: both would really have liked to paint. Instead, they both began to
consider their sets as large-scale versions of their paintings. Trauner worked
alongside Meerson on twenty films; René Clair was the director of the first few
among them—this was certainly not a bad school in which to learn filmmaking.
During this time he met Jacques Prévert, who was to become a lifelong friend.
Through Prévert he gained an entry to le tout Paris and found himself part of the
Parisian intellectual scene. He changed his café, shifting from the Dôme to the
Flore. Prévert also recommended him to Marcel Carné, when the director was
looking for a set designer for Drôle de drame. Thus he received astonishingly
exciting challenges from Carné and Prévert and became a part of a long run of
successes, working together with the best actors and scriptwriters of the era. They
collectively expressed the spirit of 1930s Paris, through the strange dramas and
lyrical realism that were a feature of Carné's best films and Trauner's best sets.
He worked with Carné until 1950, but his commissions from other directors also
multiplied. He was leading designer on some seventy films until 1985, and not only
in Paris. After 1956, he was often given work in Hollywood, first alongside Billy
Wilder, but he also worked with Marc Allégret, Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, John
Huston, Luc Besson, Bertrand Tavernier, to mention but a few of the directors.
[...]
András Bán
is a critic who has published widely on contemporary art.
He lectures on visual anthropology at the University of Miskolc.
