Serge Silberman

Origins and early life

Serge Silberman was born on 1 May 1917 in Lodz, then in the Regency Kingdom of Poland, to a Jewish family, and he survived the Nazi concentration camps before settling in Paris after the war with nothing.

Work and career

He began by trading in the ruins of the German occupation zone and moved into film production in the 1950s, first with Jean-Pierre Melville, whose Bob le flambeur he produced in 1956, then with Jacques Becker, René Clément and Jess Franco. His great partnership was with Luis Buñuel: Silberman produced most of the Spanish director's late films, beginning with Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964 and continuing through The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1973, The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire.

It was Silberman who introduced Buñuel to the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and the three of them worked as a unit for more than a decade. In 1985 he produced Ran, Akira Kurosawa's King Lear, at a scale no Japanese studio would finance, and in 1986 Nagisa Oshima's Max mon amour. He was, in the phrase used of him in the trade, a producer who made films that could not otherwise have existed. He died in Paris on 22 July 2003.