Biography

Born in 1939, Guy Seligmann is the son of Jean Seligmann, an antique Parisian shot by the Germans in 1941 in response to a series of attacks perpetrated by the Resistance. Attracted very early in the dark rooms by an older brother who loves American musicals, he runs a high school radio, a photo club and a cine-club. He remembers presenting Night and Fog. In 1958 he joined IDHEC. During an internship, he landed in Rome on the set of La Giornata Balorda by Mauro Bolognini, screenplay by Moravia and Pasolini. He then rubs shoulders with some of the biggest names in cinema and receives the advice of Roberto Rosselini who recommends to the younger generation to make "the great school of the twentieth century, television". Figure of the ORTF he is one of the union representatives (CGT) while remaining close to the cinema (he used to say the "cinematograph"), a great lover of arts and adept of an inventive television where the 'we play with forms, he becomes a pioneer of the mixing of genres by instilling in his works the codes of fiction, experimenting with docu-fiction (Mazamet, the city stricken from the map - 1975), and infuses before the inventions on the mode of video installations (Mattamorphoses - 1987). He makes it a point of honor to mention in his credits "Guy Seligmann realization," ... as Alain Resnais who considered that a film is never the work of a single man. To note in his filmography Vivre à Bonneuil (1974), on the experimental School directed by Maud Mannoni who will obtain the status of day hospital after the diffusion of the film. Director of scientific documentaries, he is the author of The Elementary Particles (1989) with the Nobel Prize Georges Charpak. Prolific author with remarkable longevity - no less than 677 occurrences on the site Inamediapro -, he is also one of the masterminds of some cult shows like Dim Dam Dom (see the interview of Ingrid Bergman by his accomplice Pierre Bouteiller - 1969), The Guest of the Sunday, White Screen and Red Curtain, The Big Studio (including the anthological four pianos show and two organs with Ray Charles keyboards, Maurice Vander, Michel Legrand, Rhoda Scott - 1982) , The Landmarks of History or Word of Filmmaker. In 1974, with a handful of fellow directors, Guy Seligmann began to "find ways to defend [their] rights." Renouncing to join the SACD which proposes a condescending undervaluation of the documentary compared to the fiction, they find, with the support of the lawyer Georges Kiejmann, an unstoppable legal argument to compel the ORTF to return rights. The documentary copyright on television was born: it was the creation of SCAM that Guy Seligmann chaired from 1991 to 1995, from 2009 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2011.
- IMDb mini biography by: Note Rémi Lainé