And so for my four years of high school, four different foreign-exchange students were conscripted to kick extra-points.
Welcome to the Midwest.
Here’s your helmet.
I can’t help but think that at least one of them — an accomplished clarinetist — would’ve preferred to spend Friday nights elsewhere, yet I suspect it was the school’s idea of how all male foreign-exchange students could best be assimilated.
If these kids thought they were coming to this small town in the Corn Belt of America to be cultural ambassadors, they were mistaken.
You. Will. Be. Like. Us.
The clarinetist, it turns out, was a pretty lousy kicker.
But even more unforgiveable than that, he was a guy who played the clarinet.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he now plays with a world-class orchestra — while the apes who picked on him predictably never left town.
So it’s probably a good thing Pierre Lhomme waited until college to become an exchange student.
He, too, played clarinet.
But he was at least able to champion his culture and not worry about being pushed around.
It’s not that college kids are really any smarter — just less likely to resort to violence.
After all, when Lhomme came to Springfield in 1949 from France to study at Wittenberg University, he was allowed to share a part of his culture with a student body that might still have believed the Earth was flat.
“Everyone was able to read,” Lhomme, now 80, explained in a recent e-mail, “but had no idea of the world outside of the U.S.”
By starting a film club with his American roommate, Lhomme dared to introduce the community to foreign-language cinema, renting stuff by Jean Cocteau and the likes of “The Baker’s Wife” by Marcel Pagnol for $35 a print from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
If that was all there was to say about this club and its founders, it’d still be a cool little story of how this French kid brought French movies to Springfield at a time when the world was getting smaller.
But what’s truly amazing is that, if such a club existed today at Wittenberg, they no doubt would have to screen one of Lhomme’s own films.
He left Springfield in order to study film, eventually becoming a legendary cinematographer in his home country.
During his time here, he got a different kind of education, hitch-hiking from Springfield to Chicago, to New York, to New Orleans, to a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina and back to New York, where he ended up selling his Selmer clarinet for $100 to jazz great Sidney Bechet, whom he’d already befriended in France.
While he’s now more or less retired — “not willing anymore to run for others,” is how he puts it — Lhomme became a heralded part of France’s fabled New Wave in the 1960s and beyond.
It was Lhomme’s camera work that helped sear the beauty of actresses Catherine Deneuve and Romy Schneider into the hearts and minds of discerning film fans around the globe.
Deneuve is best known to American movie-goers for her starring role in Roman Polanski’s 1965 thriller, “Repulsion.”
“Catherine Deneuve is a dear friend,” Lhomme wrote ever-so-casually. “I lensed her first film tests a long, long time ago.”
He later shot director Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Oscar-winning 1990 film “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring Gerard Depardieu.
For his part in “Cyrano,” Lhomme won the French and British equivalents of Oscars for best cinematography, in addition to receiving the Cannes technical grand prize.
Sweet movie
What’s perhaps even more amazing than all of this, though, is whom Lhomme was paired to room with during his time in Springfield — Robert Kipniss.
Kipniss himself would become an internationally known painter and printmaker.
A native New Yorker and self-described loner in his younger days, Kipniss might very well consider Wittenberg his spiritual alma mater.
While he transferred to the University of Iowa in 1950, his two years here in Springfield continue to inspire his work.
“The landscapes in Iowa are beautiful,” he said last spring, shortly before coming back to Witt for a residency, “but nothing compared to what I experienced walking and thinking in Springfield.”
So for these two guys to end up as roomies?
What are the odds?
“I was fond of cinema,” Lhomme recalled, “and I wanted to share my fascination and to help my fellow students to discover the European movies. Almost all of them were not aware it existed.
“Robert was, by chance and fortunately, my roommate and my first victim.”
When the two, who remain friends, formed their club, the Witt student government put up the $35 for the first film (after that, club dues covered the rentals).
“In ’49,” Kipniss said, “very few people in Ohio had seen foreign-language films with subtitles.”
Each screening sold out.
“It was quite a success,” he remembered. “It just broadened me in general, and I think it did for everyone who saw them.”
While highly influential, many of these films are still only now being discovered on this side of the Atlantic.
Lhomme’s first film, the noir-ish, 1962 political thriller “Le Combat dans L’ile” — about the son of a wealthy industrialist who secretly belongs to a right-wing paramilitary organization — only received its U.S. theatrical premiere in 2009, and was released on DVD last June.
Produced by Louis Malle, the 2009 New York Times review called it “beautiful to behold,” thanks to Lhomme’s “silvery and smoky cinematography” and “the natural gorgeousness of the cast.”
“I was part of the New Wave,” Lhomme explained. “It was a modest tsunami, about 15 or 20 authors.
“We could not afford sync sound. We had to film on location with equipment as modest as possible and young, new, cheap actors.”
But by the ’70s, things got perhaps a little too arty.
Lhomme was behind the camera for Yugoslavian writer-director Dusan Makavejev’s infamous “Sweet Movie,” which premiered at the Cannes festival in 1974.
Released on DVD in 2007 as part of the Criterion Collection — for $5, you can also watch it now at criterion.com — this was one for the ages.
The movie’s bizarro orgy scene, which has as much to do with the excretory system as it does the reproductive system — and that’s all I’m sayin’ — got it banned in the U.K. and Finland.
It also curiously contains, in an Ed Wood-goes-to-film-school sort of way, stock footage of Polish prisoners in a mass grave, killed by the Soviets in the early ’40s.
“It was an unpredictable nightmare,” Lhomme confessed. “I did learn a lot. To be more suspicious for instance. The director was the craziest I ever met and we ended the shooting unable to speak the one with the other.”
If a club at Wittenberg wants to show that one, the $35 is on me.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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