Gunter Sachs

Sachs blazed his way through the sixties and seventies as a true ‘playboy’ of the era. He scattered 1000 red roses over Brigitte Bardot’s villa from a helicopter and cruised around the St Tropez seafront in his Riva yacht, watching the glamorous lives of the jeuneusse dorée pass before him.

A look at his pictures and work, however, reveals that Sachs was not at all an exuberant bon vivant at heart, but something of a German pedant: orderly, precise and driven. As art expert Otto Letze remarked: “The more you dig into the depths of Sachs’ work, the more fascinating he becomes – as a perfectionist, a patron, a collector, a lateral thinker in the way he approached his collecting and his own creations. He is a fascinating personality; a pioneer of the first order who creates revolutionary things.”

In film, Sachs was an early adopter of time lapse and super slow motion. He played with digital technology and tried things out, often with amazing results.

Sachs’ first art film Le petit port told the story of a small port in the Swiss city of Lausanne. His search for a suitable musical collaborator led him to Peter Thomas, who was recommended by Sachs’ editor at the time. For Sachs, the collaboration was “outstanding; [Peter] is a lively chap and a fantastic musician. He composed to a tight schedule, and the finished recordings were always first-class. We never had any artistic run-ins. On the contrary, he was very adept at shifting gears.” Other films were made in quick succession – including Les giraffes de St. Tropez, in which the two (very much human) main actors take part in a 15-minute cinematic declaration of love. It is a homage by Gunter Sachs and Peter Thomas to their (then) adopted home in the south of France; to the wild-partying, St Tropez lifestyle of ‘seeing and being seen’.