French director and photographer Just Jaeckin, best known for his erotic film EmanueleHe died on Tuesday, September 6 at the age of 82, a family spokesman announced Wednesday.

“Only Jaeckin, the director of Emanuele with Sylvia Kristel, he died on 6 September in Brittany due to a long illness, at the age of 82 (…) He died surrounded by his wife Anne, a sculptor, and his daughter Julia, a photographer “, said the his agent in a release.

The film, presented for the first time in 1974, it was a great international successfrom Japan to the United States, and tells the sexual adventures of a young woman in Asia.

Emanuele was the highest-grossing film of the year in Francewith nearly 9 million viewers, and for thirteen years it was on the Champs-Elysées in Paris.

A social phenomenon, the film has been seen in theaters by tens of millions of viewers and many more if you count the other media.

A film that comes from literature

Emanuele was an adaptation of an erotic best seller namesake, written by Emmanuelle Arsan in 1959.

The producer, Yves Rousset-Rouard, who wanted to entrust the project to a young director, commissioned Just Jaeckin, a hitherto unexperienced photographer in cinema.

Just Jaeckin went on to shoot two more high-voltage sex movies, History of O and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, again with Sylvia Kristel.

The film was in danger of being censored in Francebut with the death of President Georges Pompidou, a new Secretary of State for Culture was appointed, which allowed the first without cuts.

Other films that wanted to achieve success

The success was so resounding that other films were made that borrowed the name of the protagonistwith more obscene arguments.

Born in 1940 in Vichy (center), Just Jaeckin owned, together with his wife, an art gallery in Paris where they practically exhibited their paintings and sculptures.

Movie star, Sylvia Kristel saw how her name was inextricably linked to that of the film and the director.

He had drug and alcohol problems and had to fight rumors of all kinds, he understood an alleged relationship with the president Valéry Giscard d’Estaingwho denied.

Kristel died in 2012 of cancer at the age of 60. Six years earlier she had published her autobiography of her, naked.

“Sylvia was a wonderful woman, very pure, very naive. She kept her surname, ‘Kristel’. She was overwhelmed, like me, by the commotion it caused. Emanuele. He marked her, it was very hard for her, “Jaeckin explained to AFP in 2012, on the occasion of the actress’s death.

In Argentina, the film was banned by the body that governed the cinema and which was headed by Miguel Paulino Tato, who began his role in the Peronist government of those years and continued during the military dictatorship.

This motivated many Argentines to travel to Uruguay to see it, the same phenomenon caused by Stanley Kubrick’s film, clockwork orangewhich has suffered the same fate in our country.

In Emmanuelle, Kristel played more with mystery than with what she showed – no explicit sex -. You have made more sensual films (the aforementioned Lady Chatterley’s lover), was once headed by Chabrol and was in Airport ’79 . But few remember it

Source AFP

wd