Claude Santelli died on a December evening
at the precise moment when the SACD - of which he
was president five times between 1983 and 1992 - was
having a showing at its Maison des Auteurs of the
wonderful film on the Alexis Gruss Circus that he
made ten years ago.
He was preparing his staging of The Magic Flute
under that same circus tent with his usual passion
when the accident occurred that was to take his life.
Claude Santelli's work will be remembered for being
both varied, powerful and militant ever since his
first appearances on Le Théâtre de
la jeunesse, a television programme that brought
him to the attention of wide audiences early on.
He retained a child's sense of wonder about the world
of performing arts. The theatre was his home, and
he staged several productions. He was an active spectator,
attending performances almost every evening, which
he commented on the following day with the sensitivity
and spirit of an adolescent and the competence of
a highly cultivated man.
Like Camus he knew that the question of morality is
at the very core of life, that men's actions are only
meaningful and worthy when nurtured by sincerity and
a desire to transcend, and that the more trivial the
motive the more uncertain the work. Therein lay the
source of his struggles, the ethical and political
armour of his commitments.
His passionate commitment was to creating television
for the people that was also ambitious, blending enjoyment,
intelligence and education. He wrote and directed
numerous films for it, in particular several adaptations
of short stories by Maupassant that were landmarks
in the history of French television.
He was committed to preserving the primary virtues
of art - freedom, imagination and rigour - threatened
by the levelling and controlling of artistic creation
orchestrated by the economic powers-that-be
His commitment was also to support SACD playwrights
in their inalienable determination to have their identity
respected, to continue to create works of art rather
than participate in making manufactured products,
to help their status and remuneration to progress,
and to further develop the organisation's cultural
activities.
For the past seven years he was president of the Beaumarchais
association, which he contributed in creating at the
SACD together with Jean Matthyssens. He campaigned
there for discovering new playwrights, bringing out
plays about our times, making the voices of today's
writers be heard. We spent hours in exciting, luminous
discussions over scripts, trying to detect a promising
new playwright - even a great one - beneath the awkward
turns of phrase; we hoped to make a journey, to take
flight through this contribution to a tragic order
of beauty and to a rich imagination. More than five
hundred new works came out in this way over the association's
twelve or so years of existence, in all areas of the
dramatic arts from theatre to film, from television
to dance, from opera to radio, and including the most
advanced forms of interactive creation.
Finally, there was the circus, an old passion from
which he drew his eternal youth, his capacity to be
thrilled and to love. It was the kind of love that
is life's most creative ferment, which can also destroy
you
but not totally. Instilled in us are his
works of art, his struggles and at the very core "an
invincible sun".
Paul Tabet, Director of the Beaumarchais
association
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