Biography
René-Lucien Chomette was born in Paris and attended two of the city’s premier lycées before serving in the Ambulance Corps during the Great War. Afterwards, he retired to a Dominican monastery for a spell before starting work as a writer under his first pseudonym, René Desprès.
Clair took up work as an actor in 1920 and progressed to assistant under pioneering filmmakers Jacques de Baroncelli and Henri Diamant-Berger. His first foray into directing was the surrealist short, Entr’acte. Featuring such notables as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, it was first screened during the interval of the Ballets Suédois 1924 performance of Relâche, accompanied by music composed by Erik Satie, who also featured in the film. Clair followed this with a number of shorts, including the science-fiction comedy Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray or At 3:25, 1925), and the bourgeois satire Un Chapeau de Paille d'Italie (1928), which established his style of formal experimentation, surreal subjects, and a large dose of populist humour.
At the close of the 1920s, Clair made the transition from silent film without incident. Indeed, his first “talkie”, Sous les Toits de Paris (1929), demonstrated immediately the way sound could be used to enhance—not hinder—creativity. A veritable cavalcade of high-quality comedies followed, particularly Le Million (1931) and À Nous la Liberté! (1932), generally celebrated as his best, most creative and popular works. Clair was soon regarded as the France’s premier filmmaker, outranking even Jean Renoir.
By the mid-1930s, however, his films were arguably becoming less socially relevant, a critique he attempted to answer with Le Dernier Milliardaire (1934). In light of its failure, Clair moved to the UK where he directed The Ghost Goes West, Britain’s highest grossing film of 1936, and then to Hollywood—whereupon the Vichy government revoked Clair’s French citizenship. Here he directed four films, including three of his staple supernatural comedies, such as I Married a Witch (1942).
Moving back to France after the war, Clair made a seven more films before retiring from filmmaking after 1965’s Les Fêtes Galantes. In 1960, he was elected an “immortel” member of the prestigious Académie française, a seat he held until his death in 1981. The Académie’s film prize, inaugurated in 1994, is named the Prix René Clair.
