Fanspot
Chain Tower
“I’m afraid. They’ve messed up the music on the organ because the musician fell asleep. He… He has… He fell asleep. The music…”
Pierre (Michel Piccoli)
For the purposes of this scene, Michel Piccoli and Lea Massari embark on a sailboat under the supervision of director Claude Sautet. The weather is fine and everything is going well. The sequence is supposed to evoke the lost happiness of Pierre, the character played by Michel Piccoli, as his mind wanders during his coma. Living in the Ile de France, Pierre used to spend his vacations in La Rochelle and on the Ile de Ré, where life seemed to be simpler.
Paul Guimard, the author of the novel Les Choses de la vie, asked Jean-Loup Dabadie to transform his book into a screenplay for the cinema. “Nobody wanted this story and I knew few people at that time in the film world, except Claude Sautet,” Jean-Loup Dabadie recalled in the magazine Première. While he hopes that the filmmaker will agree to move on to directing, he prefers to approach him by the backdoor, asking him if there is anyone among his acquaintances who might be suitable for the job. The note to Claude Sautet lands on the desk of Graziella, his secretary. She remembered: “I started reading. I found the accident extraordinarily well written but I didn’t like the character of the architect. When Claude came back, around one o’clock in the morning, I just said to him: ‘There is a script for you’, throwing it on the couch. He grabbed it, and read it in one sitting. That surprised me because he never read the scripts all at once.”
The next day, Claude Sautet called the agent Jean-Louis Livi and announced that he wanted to direct Les Choses de la vie. Its main motivation being to stage the car accident at the center of the story. A real technical challenge for the time.
The only award given to the film was the Louis Delluc Prize. The latter rewarding Claude Sautet.
The Chain Tower of La Rochelle
The two towers of the port of La Rochelle, the Tour Saint-Nicolas and the Tour de la Chaîne had a defensive vocation.
Together with the Lantern Tower, the Chain Tower and the Saint-Nicolas Tower allowed the maritime city to defend itself.
These two medieval buildings guarded the entrance to the port with a chain.
The Saint-Nicolas tower is the highest. It is made up of rooms, stairs and galleries.
The tower of the chain, as its name indicates, made it possible to go up and down the very heavy chains. Of cylindrical form, it measures 15 meters in diameter.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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By Gilles Rolland
Passionné de cinéma, de rock and roll, de séries TV et de littérature. Rédacteur de presse et auteur des livres Le Heavy Metal au cinéma, Paroles de fans Guns N' Roses, Paroles de fans Rammstein et Welcome to my Jungle : 100 albums rock et autres anecdotes dépareillées. Adore également voyager à la recherche des lieux les plus emblématiques de la pop culture.