Tag Archives: woman surrealist

RIP Nelly Kaplan (1931 – 2020)

Argentina-born French writer and filmmaker  Nelly Kaplan died in Geneva. She turned 89.

She taught, wrote, assisted Abel Gance and directed her own films.

She is best known for a 1969 film, La Fiancée du pirate, “the pirate’s sweetheart”. You can see large parts of that film in a documentary by Zo Anima (they make quite interesting documentaries about film history) that mainly talks about the feminist and witch-like aspects of that film.

But also, it would seem, YouTube has the entire film online:

La Fiancée du pirate

Kaplan also wrote and directed two film documentaries about artists’ lives, a genre that is barely practiced today. Those artist films are Gustave Moreau (1961) and Rodolphe Bresdin (1962). If I am not mistaken, Moreau has his own museum in Paris, just like Wiertz in Brussels, with whom Moreau bears similarities, Moreau was the better painter.

Gustave Moreau (1961

The opening credits of Gustave Moreau states that quotations from the oeuvre of Breton, Huysmans, Racine, Jarry, Lautréamont and Baudelaire can be expected.

RIP Nelly Kaplan.