Jacques B. Brunius papers

Jacques Henri Cottance was born in Paris on 16 September 1906. As a boy he studied at the Lyceé Chaptal and the Ecole Centrale, then enrolled at the Ecole Aeronautique et d'Automobile, which he left before graduation to pursue a career in the cinema as a critic, technician, actor, and director.

As a young man, Cottance was introduced to film-making by the renowned director René Clair, and within a dozen years of this early apprenticeship he had worked with some of France's most distinguished directors, including Luis Buñuel, Jacques Prévert, and Jean Renoir. Films in which Cottance acted include L'age d'r (Buñuel, 1930), L'affaire est dans le sac (Pierre Prévert, 1932), and Le crime de M. Lange (Renoir, 1935.) By the early 1930s, Cottance had joined the Surrealists and would become the friend and correspondent of André Breton, Robert Desnos, Phillippe Soupault, Antonin Artaud, Yves Tanguy, and E.L.T. Mesens, among others. Cottance's own film, Violon dIngres (1939), is considered a classic of surrealist cinema. From 1926 until his death, Cottance regularly wrote articles on the cinema for French and British periodicals.

On 25 November 1932, Cottance married Colette Therèse Jeannette Halmann, with whom he had a daughter, Laure-Anne, born in 1933. By the mid 1940s, Jacques and Colette had separated; their divorce was finalized on 25 March 1948.

Cottance was called up for military service in the general mobilization of September 1939; in February 1940, he left France for London to work on propaganda films with Alberto Cavalcanti, director of the Crown Film Unit. Soon after, Cottance had joined the Section Française of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), where, under the pseudonym Jacques Borel, he wrote and acted in radio programs such as "Les français parlent aux français" destined for listeners in occupied France. At the end of 1944, as the Section Française began to disperse, Cottance, by then separated from his wife Colette (who had stayed in France during the war), decided to remain in London. Now using the pseudonym Jacques-B. Brunius, from 1943 to 1950 he lived with Mary Kesteven and continued to work for the BBC (and would do so for the next 20 years), served as general correspondent for the French literary revue Fontaine, and contributed articles on the cinema to both La Revue du Cinéma and L'Ecran français. Brunius remained active in British surrealist circles and worked closely with Belgian artist E.L.T. Mesens.

In the early 1950s Brunius made several short documentary films, including Brief City (1951), To the Rescue (1952), and The Blakes Slept Here (1953). In 1954 he published a book on French experimental film called En marge du cinéma français.

In 1951 Brunius married Cécile Chevreau, a French-British actress who also worked for the BBC. The two separated temporarily in 1954; in 1956 their son Richard was born.

As a confirmed internationalist, Brunius was committed to the ideal of making literature available across national and linguistic boundaries. During the 1950s he devoted a great deal of time to translating English literature, especially plays, into French. Of special note are his translation of John Lloyd Balderston's Berkeley Square and Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. As a result of his high regard for Lewis Carroll, Brunius translated "Jabberwocky" into French and wrote several critical articles on Carroll's work.

In 1959 Brunius met Janet (a.k.a. Jeannette) Edwards, a young Welsh actress who would be his last companion.

During the 1960s Brunius continued to translate English works into French, most notably three plays by Harold Pinter, including Caretaker (Le Gardien), performed in Brussells in 1963, and three plays by James Saunders, including A Resounding Tinkle and Next Time Ill Sing to You. In 1960 Brunius served on the jury of the Festival of Tours. In 1964 he began a film on surrealism with long-time friend and associate Robert Benayoun. The film was never completed.

On 24 April 1967, just before the opening of the surrealist festival he had organized, Jacques-B. Brunius died of a heart attack in Exeter, England.