AN AMERICAN NAMED KAZAN

Awards :

Pessac International Historical Film Festival :

• History of Cinema Documentary Award – 2019

Protagonists : 

• Patricia BOSWORTH, journalist et biographer
• Jay COCKS, screenwriter
• James GRAY, filmmaker
• Bertrand TAVERNIER, filmmaker
• Michel CIMENT, critic, journalist
• Jeanine BASINGER, film historian
• Frances KAZAN, novelist
• Katherine HOURIGAN, publisher

Elia Kazan, a Greek-Turkish man who died in 2003 at the age of 94, was the embodiment of the American dream: that of the immigrant who started out with nothing and became a Hollywood and Broadway prince after the Second World War. Elia Kazan was an actor, theatre director, filmmaker and writer who founded the Actor’s Studio, collaborated with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and discovered Marlon Brando and James Dean. Some of his credits include masterpieces such as “A Tramway Named Desire”, “America, America” and “East of Eden”. In 1952, in the heyday of McCarthyism, Kazan, although a former communist militant, resigned himself to disclosing the names of former comrades. A decision he took in the aftermath of a terrible internal conflict: should he denounce and be considered a traitor or shouldn’t he denounce and risk losing his hard-earned position? This decision will earn him the opprobrium of many of his colleagues in the film and theatre world right up until his death. Kazan, though tormented by his act, will never apologize. On the contrary, his creativity will find in this gesture a new source of freedom, and from “On the Quays” to “The Arrangement”, he will produce several of his most beautiful films. Who really was Elia Kazan, who for all his life considered himself a stranger, an outsider? And how did he become Hollywood’s most controversial legendary artist?