Kyrou, Ado

(Adonis Kyrou / October 18, 1923, Athens, Greece - November 4, 1985, Paris, France)

   Greek born, he settled in Paris after World War II and became very close to the surrealists. After meeting two of them, Robert Benayoun and Gérard Legrand, who were also film critics, he began writing about movies in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and L'Âge du Cinéma, the latter a review he founded. From 1953 to 1970, he collaborated on Positif. An adept and a defender of an erotic, dreamlike, and poetic cinema, he expressed his point of view in several books: 1952 Le Surréalisme au Cinéma (Arcanes, republished in 1963 by Le Terrain Vague; reedited in 2005 by Ramsay); 1957 Amour, Erotisme et Cinéma (Le Terrain Vague; reedited in 1967 by Eric Losfeld); 1962 Luis Bunuel (Collection Cinéastes d'aujourd'hui, Seghers). He directed several shorts and two feature-length films (the second, Le Moine, was an adaptation of Mathew G. Lewis's gothic masterpiece co-written by Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carrière; Bunuel should have shot the movie). He died of a heart at­tack at age sixty-two.

 Filmography

        ◘ La Déroute (short; also screenwriter)

        ◘ Le Palais idéal (short; also screenwriter)

        ◘ Parfois le Dimanche (short; co-director with Raoul Sangla; also co-screenwriter)

        ◘ La Chevelure (short; also screenwriter)

        ◘ Le Temps des Assassins (short; co-director with Jean Vigne; also co-screenwriter, cinematographer)

        ◘ Eirini Kai Zoi (documentary; Greece)

1963 ◘ Un Honnête Homme (short; also cinematographer)

1965 ◘ To Bloko (Greece)

1973 ◘ Le Moine / Il Monaco / Der Mônch und die Frauen (France / Italy / West Germany)

 Television Filmography

1965 ◘ Dim Dam Dom (TV series)

1967 ◘ Allô Police (episode "Brelan d'As")

1969 ◘ Allô Police (episodes "Au Diable la Malice", "L'Enquête visible")

1971 ◘ Face aux Lancaster (20 x 13')