Biography
Jean-Paul Janssen in Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre (Eure-et-Loir) and died February 21, 1986 in Paris, was a French director, documentary filmmaker and image reporter. He is known for the climbing films he has made, including Opéra Vertical and La Vie au Bout des Doigts. Jean-Paul had a twin brother, also a director and cameraman, Jean-Pierre Janssen, who died on May 7, 2013. His son Alexandre currently lives in Reunion, as does his former companion Stéphane Moreno.
In the 1960s, Jean-Paul Janssen was one of the cameramen for the show 5 columns on the front page. During the Vietnam War, it was with his brother Jean-Pierre Janssen that François Chalais managed to film an American pilot taken prisoner in Hanoi, who turned out to be John McCain, future Republican candidate for the 2008 American presidential election. shoots in Treize jours en France by Claude Lelouch and François Reichenbach, the film about the 1968 Olympic Games in Grenoble, France, the scene of a skier's fall. Janssen followed the helmet in close-up as it flies down the valley, bouncing. His greatest disappointment will be when the film L'Amour de la vie - Artur Rubinstein receives the Oscar in 1970 for best documentary film, François Reichenbach is hailed for his "handheld camera", while it is Janssen who shoots practically all the images of the film alone (in the credits an 's' was missing from its name).
During the filming of Downhill Racer with Robert Redford in Sankt Anton in Austria, he met the Norwegian journalist Edda Sörensen, whom he married in June 1969. Together they made the documentary Narragansett the regatta Los Angeles- Tahiti. The sailboat's skipper was Alain Colas, to whom Serge Gainsbourg dedicated his song Manureva. After the broadcast on the 2nd channel, a critic from Le Monde called this 26-minute film a poem of the sea. "Did you like the old man and the sea? Then you will love the Narragansett. Two years later, he directed Pen Duick III, a 52-minute documentary on the transatlantic regatta from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro aboard Éric Tabarly's sailboat.
Janssen then concentrates his work on climbing. He first signed a documentary trilogy on the mountaineer Patrick Berhault: Overdon (1980), Over-Ice (1981) and Oversand (1981). He then directed two films on the French mountaineer Patrick Edlinger, Opéra Vertical and above all La Vie au Bout des Doigts (1982), for which he was nominated for the César for best documentary short film at the 9th ceremony in 19845.
After his death from generalized cancer, the Marsiannes were created, a video festival of sporting adventures and discoveries which included a video competition in tribute to Jean-Paul Janssen. The winners received a "Janssen", a unique piece of blanc de chine with gold moldings, created by the ceramist Jean Girel.
