A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Paris, France
Born:
May 21, 1911
Died:
June 16, 2013
Maurice Nadeau (21 May 1911 – 16 June 2013) was a French teacher, writer, literary critic, and editor. He was born in Paris. He was the father of the actress Claire Nadeau and the film director Gilles Nadeau. Orphaned during the First World War, Nadeau attended the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, where he discovered politics. In 1930, he joined the French Communist Party, where he worked with Georges Cogniot. He was expelled from the party in 1932. He then read Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which inspired him to join the Ligue Communiste, a Trotskyist party created by Pierre Naville. In this period, he frequently met Louis Aragon, André Gide, André Breton, Jacques Prévert and Benjamin Péret. Made a teacher of literature in 1936, he taught until 1945, briefly as a teacher of literature in Prades, but he preferred to be a schoolteacher in Thiais in order to move closer to Paris. He then collaborated with André Breton on the review Clé, which protested against the internment in France of Spanish republicans in the early phases of the Spanish Civil War. After a brief period of mobilization, he returned to teaching during the Nazi occupation and engaged in clandestine political activities. His resistance network (which included a German soldier who would be executed) was dismantled in the course of a raid. David Rousset and several of his other members were deported. Rousset's wife helped Nadeau to escape deportation. This first part of his life led to the publication in 1945 of his Histoire du surréalisme (History of Surrealism) published in the United States in 1965 and the United Kingdom in 1968). The book was long the major reference work on surrealism despite the fact that André Breton disliked it. At the Liberation, Nadeau became a critic for the resistance newspaper Combat, edited by Albert Camus, with the help of its editor-in-chief Pascal Pia. He ran the literary page for seven years and brought to prominence authors such as Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, René Char, Henri Michaux, Claude Simon and Henry Miller. He also began editing the works of the Marquis de Sade. He stunned his contemporaries by coming to the defense of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. In 1982, he wrote a fine introduction (replacing that of John Fowles) to the French edition of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, published by Maurice Nadeau/Papyrus under the title Sarnia, the Latin name for Guernsey, the setting of the novel. Source: Article "Maurice Nadeau" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.