Nelly Kaplan

Nelly Kaplan (11 April 1931 – 12 November 2020) was an Argentine-born French writer and film director who focused on the arts, film, and filmmakers. She studied economics at the University of Buenos Aires. Passionate about cinema, she abruptly put her studies on hold to go to Paris in 1953 to represent the new Argentine film archive at an international convention and later became a correspondent for different Argentine newspapers. She had arrived with a resume highlighting her journalistic experience and a letter of introduction to Henri Langlois, founder and curator of the Cinémathèque Française, who introduced her to Abel Gance. Gance gave her the opportunity to work on the film La tour de Nesle. She became Gance's assistant during the film and made and showed the program Magirama (triple screen) in Polyvision, then, still at Gance's side, she collaborated with him on Austerlitz (1960). He trusted her with the direction of all the second crew's action scenes during the filming of his movie Cyrano and d'Artagnan (Cyrano et d'Artagnan, 1964). Meanwhile, she published her work about Magirama under the name Le Manifeste d'un art nouveau, with a preface by Philippe Soupault. In 1960, she published a film report entitled Le Sunlight of Austerlitz, through the Plon publishing house. Beginning in 1961, she directed an entire series of art shorts, which won numerous prizes in various international festivals. Among these shorts were "Gustave Moreau," an analysis of the 19th century symbolist painter; "Rudolphe Bresdin," the engraver; "Dessins et merveilles," on the sketchbooks of Victor Hugo, as well as "Les années 25 ", " La Nouvelle Orangerie ", "Abel Gance hier et demain ", " A la source, la femme aimée", titles based on the secret notebooks of the painter André Masson. Her first feature movie, A Very Curious Girl, was the focus of a Kaplan retrospective in 2019, Wild Things: The Ferocious Films of Nelly Kaplan.