Pierre Sauvage
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Pierre Sauvage is a
Documentary filmmaker
Sauvage is best known for his 1989-2023 feature documentary, Weapons of the Spirit, which tells the story of what the film calls a "conspiracy of goodness": how a Christian mountain community in Nazi-occupied France took in and saved five thousand Jews, including Sauvage and his parents. Sauvage himself was born in this unique Christian oasis—the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—at a time when much of his family was being tortured and murdered in the Nazi death camps. But it was only at the age of 18 that he learned that he and his family were Jewish and survivors of the Holocaust.
Weapons of the Spirit won numerous awards, including the prestigious
Also scheduled for release in 2023 are three other documentaries by Sauvage. Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, provides the challenging and eloquent testimony of
Upcoming is A ¥ear That Mattered: Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis, Marseille 1940-1941, a feature documentary about the most successful private American rescue effort of the Nazi era. In Marseille, France, after France fell to the Nazis, a New York intellectual named Varian Fry led a tiny group that helped to save as many as 2,000 people, including many luminaries of that time. In a paper presented in 2000 at the Remembering for the Future conference at Oxford University, Sauvage argued that "Viewed within the context of its time, Fry's mission seems not 'merely' an attempt to save some threatened writers, artists, and political figures. It appears in hindsight like a doomed final quest to reverse the very direction in which the world is heading."[1]
While celebrating some remarkable Americans—Varian Fry, Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, Charles Fawcett, Leon Ball, Hiram Bingham IV—the documentary places the story in the context of those challenging times, addressing American policies then towards the unwanted refugees. Sauvage's footage, author Dara Horn reported in her book People Love Dead Jews, introduced her posthumously "to several exceedingly intelligent, colorful, and sincere Americans (none of them Jewish)".[2] One of these Americans is Mary Jayne Gold, who wrote a memoir, Crossroads Marseilles 1940, to which Sauvage inherited the rights. Originally published by Doubleday in the U.S. in 1980, and published in France in 2001, to considerable acclaim, as Marseille Année 40, with Sauvage contributing an afterword, the book is Gold's account of how this heiress from the Midwest participated in and helped to subsidize the Varian Fry rescue mission while concurrently having an affair with a young French gangster.
Retrospectives of his documentaries have been held in Paris, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and the United States.
Honoring the memory of the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
In June 2004, Sauvage initiated and played a key role in organizing a "Liberation Reunion" that took place in
Biographical information
Sauvage is the son of once prominent French journalist and author Léo Sauvage (born Smotriez), and his Polish-born wife Barbara Sauvage, née Suchowolska. Sauvage was four when he and his parents moved to New York City in 1948, his parents choosing to hide the fact that they were Jewish. Sauvage returned to Paris at 18 to pursue his studies, staying with his cousin,
In the U.S., Sauvage co-authored with Jean-Pierre Coursodon a two-volume critical study of American film directors, American Directors (E.P. Dutton, 1983), characterized in The New York Times by Peter Biskind as "highly informed, literate, trenchant." He is the Los Angeles correspondent for the influential French film monthly Positif.
Although he had contributed to a documentary about the artist Robert Malaval in the '60s, Sauvage settled behind the camera as a staff producer-reporter for Los Angeles public television station
Sauvage lives in Los Angeles, with his wife, entertainment lawyer and professor Barbara M. Rubin. They have two children: master empath David Sauvage and movie and television trailer editor Rebecca Sauvage. In 2020, at a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, Sauvage was named a knight in the French National Order of Merit. He says he plans to continue galloping as long as he can.
Lecturer on Le Chambon, and on America and the Holocaust
For 40 years, a lecturer on the Holocaust and its continuing challenges, Sauvage has long been one of a pioneering handful of experts on rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust—"righteous Gentiles"—and contends that they still have much to teach us. He has also focused his efforts on what he has called the American experience of the Holocaust, urging Americans to look in as well as out. A key mentor for Sauvage in this effort was historian David S. Wyman, who died in 2018 and to whom Sauvage has paid tribute.
References
- ^ ""Varian Fry in Marseille" by Pierre Sauvage". Varianfry.org. Retrieved 2012-11-14.
- ^ Chandler, Adam (2012-01-17). "Varian Fry Saved Hundreds of European Intellectuals from the Nazis—and Was Forgotten – Tablet Magazine". Tabletmag.com. Retrieved 2012-11-14.