Perhaps inevitably for a man going about town in a violet tie, Lamorisse specifically settled on the 'lovers' wind,' a gentle wind said to bear the whispers of the enamored. Thus inspired, Lamorisse decided that evening in Chelkowski's apartment that the winds of Iran would be his film's narrator. Chelkowski studied his shelves for inspiration, and found a book called Tales from the Four Winds. But Chelkowski, who was at the time researching Persian literature and theater, pointed out that Iran had few birds, particularly in the arid desert regions where Lamorisse planned to film. Sent to see them by the Ministry of Culture, the filmmaker arrived in a light beige suit and a violet tie - 'definitely not your standard color for a tie,' Chelkowski notes - and an equally strange idea: The film would be told, literally, from a bird's-eye view. Even though it's been almost a half-century, Chelkowski and his wife remember Lamorisse well.

This was a man who loved to fly.Įarly in the project Lamorisse visited an American scholar in Tehran, Peter Chelkowski.

But its ending, when Pascal is swept into the sky by a bouquet of balloons, is undeniably exhilarating, in part because you can sense the director's giddiness at being aloft, too.

For all its obsession with color (Lamorisse inflated an orange balloon inside the red one to make the red really pop, so to speak) the film's palette is gritty, and its pace is loose and improvisational, as though the camera were simply tagging along. In some ways, the film was an unlikely contender for children's hearts, let alone awards. (It's available from the Criterion Collection.) It won awards worldwide, including an Oscar for Best Screenplay (though it has hardly any words) and a Palme d'Or at Cannes. Nine years and 42 drafts later came The Red Balloon, a 34-minute cinematic fairy tale about a young boy (played by Lamorisse's then-6-year-old son Pascal) traversing Paris with a magic balloon. A restless student, he eventually found his way into photography and then filmmaking, and made his first film, a short documentary about an island off the coast of Tunisia, at age 25. Albert Lamorisse was born in Paris in 1922.

The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse