Close Up

13 February 2019: The Magician’s Apprentice

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The Magician’s Apprentice
Gérard Patris, 1977, 80 min
French with live score (TBC)
Introduced by Eva Prinz

A rarefied cult made-for-television portrait of Boris Vian. Deeply influenced by the Surrealists, Gérard Patris and Luc Ferrari made this strange Boris Vian bio-pic and homage to the French polymath (musician, author, poet, translator, Jazz critic…) in an attempt to convey the extent of Vian’s imaginative works in theatre and fiction. The film features a late 1970s theatre group re-enacting plays, songs and scenes from Vian’s oeuvre, it also includes buried historic footage of Vian in concert and being interviewed in English.


Eva Prinz co-edited with Tosh Berman The Manual of St-Germain-des-Pres (Rizzoli, 2004) by Boris Vian – the first English translation of Vian’s guide to the Left Bank of Paris. Prinz is also editor and co-publisher Luc Ferrari: Complete Works (Ecstatic Peace Library/Omnibus, 2019).

Part of Stereo Spasms Festival, curated by Ecstatic Peace Library