Jean Lacouture ou la position du biographe

With a career equally divided between journalism and biography, Jean Lacouture has followed the events of the past half a century from a singular vantage point.  As a journalist of the decolonisation, he met and portrayed all the great leaders of the third world (Ho Chi Minh, Nasser, Sékou, Touré, etc…).

As a biographer, he chose to recount the stories of men whose lives were intimately interwoven with politics ans aestetics (Malraux, Blum, Mauriac, Mendès-France, de Gaulle, Mitterand).  As a politically committed witness, he both cultivated the notion of “immediate history”, and developed an “heroic” conception of the world.  This film presents a portrait of Jean Lacouture that focuses as much on his certainties as on his doubts, and as much on his commitments as on his contradictions.