Dear Françoise Bonnot,
Determined and resolute, these are the first words that come to you
describe, when, in 1957, at only 18 years, once your baccalaureate
obtained, you launch into the adventure by abandoning yourself
fully to your passion, the cinema. With hindsight, it was surely
inevitable that you will one day join what is sometimes called the
“large family”, of which a number of illustrious representatives are
present today. You have indeed made your first ranges with
your mother, deepened your learning with Henri Verneuil,
your son’s father, as well as with Jean-Pierre Melville, whom you
considered an older brother. In just five years, you have already
proven yourself as an assistant and you become an editor, on
the unforgettable Monkey in Winter, illuminated by the duo Gabin-Belmondo and the
memorable dialogues by Michel Audiard.
The intelligence and commitment that characterizes you have enabled you to
you walk between very different genres, sailing with ease
from oppressive closed doors to political fictions, from
intimate biographies with great Shakespearean dramas. Only point
common among all the feature films to which you have contributed:
your personal paw, mix of precision, silverware and
discernment, able to transform a demanding scenario into a leader
visual work. You play brilliantly, but also discreetly, a profession
too often neglected, a profession that is at the heart of making a film,
a profession that gives full meaning to the beautiful expression of Gilles Deleuze
to characterize cinema, “filing-movement”. Yet we must
our best emotions or our most memorable memories in knowledge
from those “little hands” on the big screen, from those “birth attendants”
images, these workers of the sensitive and the film.
Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony
Hopkins, Salma Hayek and more recently Helen Mirren have
your eye and your sense of sequence in their game. Who has
could forget your discreet but decisive work allowing Jean-Paul
Belmondo – then dubbed by a Spanish dancer for close-ups - from
dance flamenco admirably before our eyes in A Monkey in
Winter? The assembly is this fragile thread that connects the different meshes
a cinematographic work by giving it a logic, a fluidity,
a movement. Over the years, you have offered your knowledge
more than forty films and a dozen directors,
Julie Taymor, Ridley Scott, Jean-Jacques and others
Annaud, Nicole Garcia, Roman Polanski and Costa-Gavras, to which you
I know that there is trust, complicity and fidelity.
The Beatles' Musical Universe in Access the universe in 2007, the epic
Christopher Columbus, the political drama of L'Aveu, the
enclosed by Place Vendôme, no style, no filmic writing escapes
your science of filming and what Eiseintein defined
as the “thought of editing”. This thought allows the filmmaker
Russian to invent a cinematographic language at the same time
formulate the laws, updating, through the choice of the montage, the rhythm,
of the luminosity – that we think of Ivan the Terrible – “cinema-fist” that he
opposed the «cinema-oeil».
With such a wealth of experience, your reputation quickly crossed our borders.
You had to respond to the requests of another city-Light, a
other capital of cinema, Hollywood, where you live since now 25
French cinema and its technicians
in the world. The United States has brought you your greatest
Oscar, which you won in 1970 for
the unforgettable Z of Costa Gavras. On the occasion of the ceremony, you
demonstrate once again your modesty and humility. As soon as
your name is pronounced, you realize that you had not prepared
no speech. In 1983, Missing: you then get a new
award, with the BAFTA of the best editing, without forgetting your
multiple appointments to Caesar.
As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of
Georges Méliès, whose famous Voyage dans la lune (1902) was presented
at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, I am pleased to recall
the cinema owes to the fairground spirit, the technique of the image, the factory of
illusion, whether driven by realism or nourished by
our children’s dreams before the fleeting images of the magic lantern.
Dear Françoise Bonnot, because you represent cinema in its
image factory dimension, because you have so discreetly but
so strongly contributed to the influence and recognition of cinema
on behalf of the President of the Republic and in accordance with
of the powers vested in us, we make you a knight of the
Legion of Honour.
Dear Jean-Robert Pitte,
To use the subtitle of one of your books, there is no
“Competing passions” in your career. You have placed your life and your
commitment to science, to service, and to
of the State and Heritage. Now Delegate for Information and Guidance
with the Prime Minister, your past and present journey is
marked by the double seal of public commitment and passion for
knowledge and learning.
You are a scientist because of this journey that has led you from
Sorbonne, where you were a student, at the University of Paris – Sorbonne,
where you professed, and at the Institut de France, which received you in 2008 at
within the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. You are also
in action, so to speak. Internationally recognized and distinguished geographer
by numerous universities, distinguished representatives of this science
of space and the human, your work has crossed continents and
landscapes from Mauritania to the lands of Castanide, these countries of
chestnut trees» with singular uses, from Japan to Bordeaux
by Burgundy. You are also through the concern you have for
to transmit, dare I say deliciously, science to the greatest
number, as evidenced by your commitment to the
Geography of Saint-Dié des Vosges. Ignorance of geography, in
other terms of the inscription of man in a space, a territory,
a landscape, is, in your own words, marked at the corner of your mind
willingly slinger, “a weapon of mass destruction”.
This commitment to the transmission of knowledge and
knowledge, you have demonstrated this many times in the
academic responsibilities, since you were institute director,
then UFR, Vice-President and finally President of the Université Paris-
Sorbonne. You then had the intuition that history several times
of the Alma mater was now part of the rapid
places of knowledge and research and in an international competition
increased around the so-called “knowledge society”.
Without a geographer at her head, perhaps the Sorbonne would never
tried and succeeded in setting up in Abu Dhabi.
If there is one area, dear Jean-Robert Pitte, that manifests better than anything
other the two passions that animate you, it is your love of heritage
intangible. Specialist of landscapes and gastronomy, you are
President of the geography society since 2009 and you defend your
discipline with passion and determination through local products, the
gastronomy and good wine, in a cultural and
sociological of spaces and places.
This love of gastronomic and culinary heritage, for the scientist that
you are, it is first of all the roots of geography in history, the
reading of the landscape as palimpsest, with your noted History of
French landscape, or the inscription of history in space, that you
illustrate in French gastronomy. History and geography of a passion.
These are also your works in which the enthusiasm of the defender
the academic rigour of the researcher, without forgetting the
touch of humor that characterizes you: The wine and the divine, Bordeaux-
Burgundy. Rival passions, The desire for wine.
André Tchernia had already explored the history of the vine and wine in
antiquity. Jean-Louis Flandrin, born in the «garden of France»,
historian of cultural practices and the sensitive, had given to the history
its academic nobility. You have your
Geographer’s wise and greedy look by registering wines and
vineyards in a history of territories and landscapes, in a
History of these “country names” dear to Proust – Gevrey-Chambertin,
Morgon, Pauillac, Jurançon – shaping a culture of the senses as much
an experience of memory, a present delight as well as a future
always recomposed. In your own way and at your own pace, by your
publications as by your many commitments you have so
given birth to a strange discipline of which you are one of the
the most eminent representatives: the «geo-gastronomy»!
I know how much you took in the 2010 meal registration
French gastronomy with UNESCO World Intangible Heritage,
translation of the leading role of culinary heritage in our
international influence. Centuries of tradition and know-how,
shared celebration of taste and conviviality are the elements that have
convinced UNESCO of the relevance of this candidacy.
You have led this fight for the
French gastronomy, at the head of the Presidency of the French mission
heritage and food crops (MFPCA). There is no doubt
your expertise and knowledge of gastronomic traditions
changes have contributed to this result. More than a
old-fashioned oripeau, more than a dusty legacy, the gourmet meal
is indeed the fruit of a subtle alchemy between such varied elements
that the landscape, the built heritage, the rhythm of the seasons, the language and its
expressions, the manufacture of utensils and objects.
In other words, it is an expression of this «process of civilization»
described by Norbert Elias. It is, at the time of the standardization of taste and
the standardization of products and consumption patterns, one
key cards allowing our country to carry the requirement of the
cultural diversity in Europe and the world.
Because it is around a table that you propose to meet
of others, cultures, tastes. This is also the idea that you
plan to promote with the creation of a city of gastronomy, to
which, as you know, I pay particular attention to and
support. This place of culture and discovery, which would be
also a resource centre and a hub for economic development
and tourism would fully honour the well-known adage of
Claude Levi-Strauss that it is not enough that a food is good for
He must be good enough to think”.
Dear Jean-Robert Pitte, for your outstanding academic and
your passion for transmission, for your talents as a writer and storyteller
for your unwavering commitment to promoting the
cultural heritage, on behalf of the Republic
French, we make you Commander in the order of Arts and
Letters.
Dear Mehdi Qotbi,
«Caused by the vacuum
That attacks the surface
Qotbi
Doesn’t want to get carried away
You have to fill the hole
He does it his way
By blackmailing the paper
By covering it with music
Who denies the time»
These verses were written for you by Eugene Guillevic, among many
other illustrious names that your work will have powerfully inspired.
To praise your commitments and your work is to salute a
presence in the world emerging from our contemporary duty obligations
immediately signify, which embodies at the same time a magnificent trait
union between France and Morocco.
In your aesthetic universe, it is by their presence that the signs
make sense – signs that are there until the spell, until vertigo
their mere presence, saturation on canvases where no place
is left blank. A world of pages where characters are linked to
infinity in sentences without beginning and without end, where the repeated
sign gives way to the reign of the only meaning; a painting that reads as much
that she sees herself at the borders of writing and painting, where
secrets and metamorphoses, where the
large and small, when the signs become sea, land or face. A
a journey through the writing, to use Michel’s words
Jobert, an alphabetic universe, caught by a telluric intoxication, [who] dreams
to the creation of the world». Demiurgic dreams where yet the object of the
creation remains buried in the secret of the sign and its materiality
indecipherable – in the game of an abstraction where the trace of
those who inspired you, such as Henri Michaux and Jean Degottex, who
were drawn from Chinese calligraphy. In a language that
does not mean, that means nothing, you teach us precisely to
read the world in the poetry of his flesh. Jean d'Ormesson saw in you
a “creator before creation”.
In Sura 96, we read that it is through the qalam (calame) that God
taught man what he did not know. The written thing, which penetrates through
Arab culture, will have fascinated all those who have sought to trace
the invisible, to make visible the mystery. The oriental calligraphic tradition
has long marked European aesthetics, with Leonard
of Vinci, with Albert Dürer and his wood-engraved knots, with you who
also travel from one bank to the other.
Paying tribute to you also means paying tribute to dialogue and
the Franco-Moroccan friendship to which you have devoted your energy and
your generosity. I am thinking of the Franco-Moroccan Friendship Circle, in the Trait
Morocco-Europe Union of which you are the President but also to the Letter
Together, the voice of French people of Maghreb origin in France, including
you are both the founder and editor. A
commitment closely linked to a singular journey, that of a child of
Takkadoum, in Rabat, who will continue his artistic studies in Toulouse
and in Paris, before exhibiting on all continents.
You once said, I’ve always tried to make everything
I received everything from Morocco and I received everything from France».
Today, it is my turn to present you with badges. They too keep
in a sense their share of mystery, far from the immediacy of the pump and
They also carry, in white and green, the warmth and secret of this
who makes friends.
Dear Medhi Qotbi, on behalf of the French Republic, we make you
Commander in the National Order of Arts and Letters.