Roland Topor

Roland Topor
Born	(1938-01-07)7 January 1938 Paris
Died	16 April 1997(1997-04-16) (aged 59) Paris
Occupation	Illustrator, cartoonist, painter, playwright, designer, painter, fiction writer, actor, film and TV script writer
Nationality	French
Period	1964–1997
Genre	Satire, Surrealism
Literary movement	Panic Movement
Notable works	The Tenant

Roland Topor (7 January 1938 – 16 April 1997) was a French illustrator, cartoonist, comics artist, painter, novelist, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, known for the surreal nature of his work. He was of Polish-Jewish origin and spent the early years of his life in Savoy where his family hid him from the Nazi peril.

Literature

Roland Topor wrote the novel The Tenant (Le Locataire chimérique, 1964), which was adapted to film by Roman Polanski in 1976. The Tenant is the story of a Parisian of Polish descent, a chilling exploration of alienation and identity, asking disturbing questions about how we define ourselves. The later novel Joko's Anniversary (1969), another fable about loss of identity, is a vicious satire on social conformity.

In 1965 David De Silva (Becca Productions Ltd) bought the film rights to The Tenant for $15,000 and sent the novel to Roman Polanski in the hope that he would consider directing it. De Silva made the mistake of phoning Polanski from New York around 7PM which would be just about midnight London time. He received Polanski's response to the project in a letter dated 4 May 1966. Subsequently, De Silva sold the rights to Universal Pictures because Edward Albee wanted to adapt it as his first screenplay under a three picture deal with Universal but the deal never materialized. Polanski adapted the film 10 years later in 1976. De Silva believes Polanski never read the novel 10 years before. He says, "When the timing is right the timing is right.".

A new presentation of The Tenant by Roland Topor was released in October 2006. The book has Topor's original novel, a new introduction by Thomas Ligotti, a selection of short stories by Topor, a representation of Topor's artwork and an essay on the famous Roman Polanski film version. There is a working possibility of having Mr. Polanski write a new foreword to this edition.

Thomas Ligotti's introduction clocks in at 3500 words and concerns the affirmative themes of world-renowned authors, focusing on Luigi Pirandello, with the negationist themes of Roland Topor's The Tenant.

Songs

Roland Topor wrote two songs for Megumi Satsu, "Je m'aime" and "Monte dans mon Ambulance".

Cinema

With René Laloux, Topor made "The Dead Times" (Les Temps morts, 1964), "The Snails" (Les Escargots, 1965) and their most famous work, the feature length La Planète sauvage (1973).

Topor also worked as an actor, his most famous part being Renfield in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). In the same year, he also performed the surrealistic paralyzed boss in the movie Ratataplan by Maurizio Nichetti.

Chronology

Topor published several books of drawings, including Dessins panique (1965) Quatre roses pour Lucienne (1967) and Toporland (1975). Selections from Quatre roses pour Lucienne were reprinted in the English language collection Stories and Drawings (1967). His carefully detailed, realistic style, with elaborate crosshatching, emphasises the fantastic and macabre subject matter of the images.

• 1962 – Creates the Panic Movement (mouvement panique), together with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal.
• 1961 to 1965 – Contributes to French satirical magazine Hara-Kiri.
• 1965 – Creates, with partner René Laloux, the animated short film "Les Escargots." The movie won Special Jury Prize at the Cracow Film Festival.
• 1966 – Illustrates Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Re-Anecdoted Version), published by the Something Else Press.
• 1971 – Creates the drawings for the bizarre introduction of Fernando Arrabal's film Viva la muerte.
• 1973 – Topor designs and René Laloux directs La Planète sauvage, a 72-minute-long animated film, based on a novel by Stefan Wul.
• 1974 – Topor has a cameo in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie.
• 1975 – Illustrates Patricia Highsmith's Kleine Geschichtgen für Weiberfeinde, published by Diogenes Verlag. Published in English in 1977 by Heinemann as Little Tales of Misogyny.
• 1976 – Roman Polanski directs a movie version of Topor's book The Tenant.
• 1979 – Plays the role of Renfield in Werner Herzog's movie Nosferatu the Vampyre.
• 1983 – Creates with Henri Xhonneux the popular French TV series Téléchat, a parody of news broadcasts featuring puppets of a cat and an ostrich.
• 1989 – With Henri Xhonneux co-writes the screenplay for the film Marquis, loosely based on the life and writings of Marquis de Sade. The cast consisted of actors in period costumes with animal masks, with a separate puppet for de Sade's anthropomorphised "bodily appendage."
• 2011 – The Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne mounted a survey exhibition of 22 promotional posters designed by Roland Topor.

Bibliography

In 2010, the French publishing company United Dead Artists founded by Stéphane Blanquet published an oversized book "ReBonjour" on the work of Topor.

External links

• Lambiek Comiclopedia article
• Roland Topor at IMDb
• Covers of works by professor Gilles Methel and his student Marijan Rubesa from E.S.A.V./Université Toulouse II le Mirail
• The Very Rich Blog of Frantz Vaillant (in French)
• An interview (20-12-2007, in French) with Daniel Colagrossi about his then-recent book Topor traits