Jean-Paul Clébert

 Jean-Paul Clébert was a French writer.


Before completing his studies in a Jesuit college, Jean-Paul Clébert left to join the French Resistance in 1943 at the age of 16. After the liberation, he spent six months in Asia and then returned to France. He described his unusual life as follows:

My secondary education was interrupted by the war but continued as a prisoner. I have never had a regular job but have been successively a house painter, cook, newspaper seller, farm worker, navvy undertaker’s mute, valet, cafe proprietor and tramp. Lived for some years with gipsies and am now engaged on writing a book about them. Have also traveled widely in the East. I now live alone on a farm in Haute Provence.

On returning he lived for 3 or 4 years as a clochard amongst the many homeless people in the underground world of Paris. This experience inspired his classic study of the underworld of Paris Paris insolite/Unknown Paris (1952), which he dedicated to his companions Robert Giraud and photographer Robert Doisneau. The book was championed by the remaining Surrealists, and the emerging Situationists based their theory of the dérive on Clébert's principles, using his book as a literal guide to the underside of the city. An illustrated edition with photos of Patrice Molinard (who debuted as a stills photographer on Georges Franju's documentary le Sang des bêtes) and layout by Massin was published in 1954.

Clébert’s friends Jacques Yonnet and Robert Giraud were inspired to write their own tales of the vagabond life on the streets of Paris; Yonnet’s Rue des Maléfices (1954), his sole novel (originally Enchantements sur Paris, English translation Paris Noir), and Giraud’s Le Vin des rues (1955). The three frequented Chez Fraysse on Rue de Seine in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with Doisneau, not far from Clébert’s other haunt Chez Moineau, the dirt-cheap refuge of bohemian youths and of Guy Debord, Michele Bernstein, Gil J. Wolman, Ivan Chtcheglov and the other members of the Lettrist International, and which was the subject of Ed van der Elsken’s photo-romain Love on the Left Bank (1956). Thus did Clébert attend both the last Surrealist meeting and some of the first gatherings of the Situationists. For two years he was a reporter in Asia for Paris Match and France Soir.

Clébert retreated from urban life in 1956 to the mountainous Luberon region of Provence, in which he discovered abandoned stone villages, and took up residence there without running water or electricity, before moving in 1968 to Oppède-le-Vieux. The village had been a refuge for artists during the war, where Alexey Brodovitch owned an old mill occupied by his brother, and where Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, widow of the aviator, was still resident. He spent the rest of his life there, dying on September 20, 2011.

Jean Miot

Jean Miot was a French journalist and media executive. He was the associate director of Le Figaro, France's conservative newspaper of record, from 1980 to 1993, and the chairman of its advisory committee from 1993 to 1996. He was the CEO of Agence France-Presse from 1996 to 1999.

Jean Miot was born on July 30, 1939 in Châteauroux, Berry, France. Miot began his career at Centre Presse, a local newspaper in Poitiers in 1964. He was a journalist for France-Antilles in 1968-1970. Between 1974 and 1980, he was the editor-in-chief of France-Antilles, Paris Normandie, Le Berry Républicain, Nord Matin, and Nord éclair.

Miot was the associate director of Le Figaro from 1980 to 1993, and the chairman of its advisory committee of Le Figaro from 1993 to 1996. He was also the president of the National Federation of French Press from 1993 to 1996, and the chief executive officer of Agence France-Presse from 1996 to 1999.

Miot was a knight of the Legion of Honour and an officer of the Étoile Civique. He was also a knight of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Sacavin and a member of the Confrérie des maitres-pipiers.  Additionally, he was a commander of the Senegalese National Order of the Lion.

Miot died of a heart attack on April 18, 2017 at the age of 77.

Luis Trenker

Luis Trenker was a South Tyrolean film producer, director, writer, actor, architect, and alpinist.

Alois Franz Trenker was born on 4 October 1892 in Urtijëi, Tyrol in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father Jacob Trenker was a painter from North Tyrol, and his mother Karolina was from Urtijëi in Val Gardena. He grew up speaking two languages: German, the language of his father, and Ladin, the language of his mother. He attended the local primary school from 1898 to 1901, and then attended the Josefinum in Bolzano in 1902 and 1903. From 1903 to 1905, he attended the arts and crafts school in Bolzano, where he developed his skills as a woodcarver.

In 1912, he entered the Realschule in Innsbruck, where he studied Italian as a foreign language. There he began his middle school studies. During his high school years, he spent his holidays working for mountain guides and ski instructors. After his matriculation examinations in 1912, Trenker studied architecture at the Technical University in Vienna.

At the start of World War I, Trenker fought as a cadet in an Austro-Hungarian heavy artillery unit on the Eastern Front in Galicia and Russisch-Polen. From 1915 to 1918, he fought in the mountain war against Italy in the border fortress of Nauders. Later he fought in Trento. From 1916 he served as a mountain guide in the Dolomites. At the end of the war he had achieved the rank of Lieutenant. He would write 23 books based on his war experiences, the most important of which were Fort Rocca Alta and Berge in Flammen, the latter of which was made into the 1931 film Mountains on Fire.

At the end of the war, Trenker made several unsuccessful attempts to start an architecture business in Bolzano. In 1924, he enrolled at the Technical University of Graz, and then worked as an architect in Bolzano, forming a business partnership with the Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister. In 1924, Trenker participated in the Winter Olympic Games in Chamonix as a member of the Italian five-man bobsled team. Under the leadership of Pilot Lodovico Obexer, they ended up in sixth place.

Trenker's first contact with film came in 1921, when he helped director Arnold Fanck on one of his mountain films. The main actor could not perform the stunts required, and so Trenker assumed the leading role. He gradually assumed more roles on the set, and by 1928 was directing, writing, and starring in his own films. By now he had abandoned his job as an architect to concentrate on his films.

In 1928 he married Hilda von Bleichert, the daughter of a fabrics manufacturer from Leipzig, and together they had four children. In 1932 Trenker created (with Curtis Bernhardt and Edwin H. Knopf) an historical film The Rebel. Trenker stated that the film's plotline of a Tyrolean mountaineer Severin Anderlan leading a revolt against occupying French forces in 1809, during the Napoleonic Wars. The greatest Tirolean patriot Andreas Hofer was a proto-type of "Severin Anderlan" ... Trenker was designed to mirror what was happening in contemporary Germany as it rejected the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

The main theme of Trenker's work was the idealization of people’s connection with their homeland and pointing out the decadence of city life (most clearly visible in his 1934 film Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son). This loosely played into the hands of Nazi propagandists, who seized upon the nationalistic elements of his work. However, Trenker refused to allow his work to be subverted as such and eventually moved to Rome in 1940 to avoid further governmental pressure. After a pair of documentary films, however, Trenker returned to Bolzano and stopped making films. The style he had developed in the thirties was not limited to nationalistic, folkloristic, and heroic clichés. His impersonation of a hungry, downtrodden immigrant in depression era New York was regarded as one of the seminal scenes for future Italian neorealism by the likes of Roberto Rossellini.

Trenker was accused of fascist opportunism after the war, but the charges were eventually dropped. In the 1950s, he returned to the movie industry, though by 1965 he was making primarily documentary films that focused on the Austrian province of Tyrol and South Tyrol (his homeland), which had become part of Italy. He also returned to writing about the mountains.

Luis Trenker died on 13 April 1990 in Bolzano at the age 97. He was buried in his family's plot at Urtijëi.

Frimann Falck Clausen

Frimann Falck Clausen was a Norwegian actor who might be remembered best from the role of lorries Wheel in the children's series Christmas in Skomakergata in 1979. He is also remembered from the role of the big brother Torsøien in the Norwegian film comedy Bør Børson Jr. from 1974. Clausen had assignments at several of the country's theaters, including The Norwegian Theater , Oslo New Theater and National Theater , plus he gave voice to Bror Tuck in the Norwegian version of the cartoon about Robin Hood.

Hans Holmen

Hans Holmen was a Norwegian painter and sculptor .

Hans Holmen graduated from Harriet Backer's Masters School in Kristiania from 1899 to 1900 and at the Zahrtmann's Masters School in Copenhagen the following two years. He debuted at Statens kunstutstilling 1902 with a painting from the riot. His motifs were found mostly in the forestry and agriculture of homesteads, and he eventually got a good name as a portrait painter.

A portraiture mission brought him to England and France, where he studied sculpture in the museums. He went more and more to this expression without losing the paint. After the First World War , he settled down in Sandefjord, where his sculpture by the priest and salmonist Magnus Brostrup Landstad took place in 1928. It was the first time a public statue was carved in Norwegian hard rock. Together with the " Myllarguten " ( 1940 ) on Nordagutu (more specifically at Nordagutu station ), Ulabrand Monument in Ula ( 1933)) and the bust of Harald Sohlberg on Røros, it is considered to be his main work. He has also formed memorials of the fallen 1940-1945 at Bommestad in Hedrum and in Stokke.

Peculiar are many of the graves, tombs and reliefs, nearly 60 in the century, like jewelry cemeteries in many parts of the country. Most are carved in stone, a few are made as bronze reliefs. A few wrought iron works are also available according to Holmen's drawings.

To his early production there are a number of illustrations to some of Lorens Berg's village books. Holmen also stood for the decoration in Kodal church, but these works have been removed by restoration of the church.

Holmen has also made the support of Lorens Berg at the Gallis water in Kodal .

Christ Daae Magelssen

Christ Daae Magelssen was a Norwegian sculptor .

Magelssen was son of parish priest in Åfjord Hans Gynter Magelssen (d. 1886) and Drude Cathrine Haar Daae (1815-88), a sister of Ludvig Kristensen Daa. As a young boy, he was first a sailor before he started making gallion figures in an English workshop. When he returned to Norway, he decided to become a sculptor, and went to Copenhagen in 1866 with a state grant. Here he was taught by the Danish sculptor Herman Wilhelm Bissen for three years. During this period, he performed his first major work, "Seaman, who sweeps his fathers' coast."

In the next few years, Magelssen lived in Kristiania before he went to Rome in 1871. Here he lived for ten years, initially with a state grant, and became acquainted with other Norwegians who were in Italy at the same time: Ole Bull, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Jonas Lie and Henrik Ibsen. During the Roman period, he made the colossal statue "Meleager", which was exhibited at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1878. In the 1880s he returned to Norway, and lived first in Bergen then Kristiania.

Magelssen died at the age of 98. He was married to Italian letterpress daughter Adele Elvira Salandri (born 1857).

Sæbjørn Buttedahl

Sæbjørn Buttedahl was a Norwegian stage and film actor who later found prominence as a sculptor.

Nils Sæbjørn Buttedahl was born in Lier, Norway and began his career as a stage actor in 1896 at the age of twenty. From 1907 to 1924 he was engaged at the Centralteatret in Oslo. He appeared in a number of stage plays by Henrik Ibsen, and appeared onstage with such eminent Norwegian actors of the era as Agnes Mowinckel and Martin Linge.

Buttedahl appeared in three feature-length silent films during his career as an actor. Two of these films, 1926's Simen Mustrøens besynderlige opplevelser and 1927's Den glade enke i Trangvik were directed by Harry Ivarson. His final film role was in the 1927 romantic drama Fjeldeventyret, directed by his son-in-law Leif Sinding.

During his time as an actor, Buttedahl also began a career as a sculptor, mainly as a sculptor of busts and almost exclusively sculpted notable theater personalities. He debuted his work at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo in 1912. Notable works in the public collection include:

Sæbjørn Buttedahl married Danish stage actress Clare Petrea Margrethe "Maggie" Benelli (1870–1933). They had one daughter, Ellen (Buttedahl) Sinding (1899–1980), who would marry film director Leif Sinding and become a film actress and dancer.

In 1926, Buttedahl immigrated to the United States and settled in San Diego, California where he died in 1960.

Karl Bergmann

Karl Bergmann was a Norwegian actor, director and theater director who was at the National Scene for a number of years, including theater director.

Bergmann debuted in 1901 at The National Scene, where he was employed later, also as director - and from 1931-34 as chief. As an actor, his talent ranged from dramatic roles such as Rosmer in Rosmersholm and the title role of John Gabriel Borckman, to comedy trials such as Daniel Heire in Ibsen's Youth League, as well as Holberg figures such as Erasmus Montanus and Vielgeschrey in The Timeless. In Hans Wiers-Jenssen's Bergen comedy, Jan Herwitz, he played the central role of Böschen until his last year of life.

Karl Bergmann has had several songs by Holberg , both on the National Scene and as a guest at the National Theater. He was in 1921-24 the head of the Stavanger Theater.

Øystein Wingaard Wolf

Øystein Wingaard Wolf is a Norwegian poet and author, living and working in Oslo. Since his debut in 1980 (Morderleken), he has published numerous books of poetry, as well as three music albums. He was awarded the Mads Wiel Nygaard's Endowment in 1986.

Louis Hémon

Louis Hémon was a French writer best known for his novel Maria Chapdelaine.

Hémon was born in Brest, France. He was enrolled in the Montaigne and Louis-le-Grand secondary schools in Paris, where he resided with his family. A bilingual secretary in several maritime agencies, he collaborated, starting from 1904, in a Parisian sports journal. After his studies of law and oriental languages in the Sorbonne, he moved to London.

In 1911, he moved to Canada, settling initially in Montreal. Hémon wrote Maria Chapdelaine during his time working at a farm in the Lac Saint-Jean region.

Hémon died July 8, 1913 when he was struck by a train at Chapleau, Ontario. He never saw the widespread publication of his landmark novel.