In 1967, he was the winner of the Academy Award for Documentary Feature for The Anderson Platoon. The film followed a platoon of American soldiers for six weeks at the height of fighting in Vietnam during 1966.
Pierre Schoendoerffer received acclaim in international short and feature film festivals. As a writer he won multiple festival, academy and military awards and prizes, including the Prix Vauban, in 1984.
In France he is famous for his 1973 three-time César Award-winning Le Crabe-Tambour ("Drummer Crab"), based on his French Academy-award–winning self-titled novel. His first success was in 1965 with his Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay winning The 317th Platoon (La 317e Section). Both films are based on his experience in the First Indochina War.
He is most known abroad, particularly in the United States, for his 1967 Oscar-winning Vietnam War B&W documentary, The Anderson Platoon, originally made for the French public channel ORTF's popular Cinq colonnes à la une monthly show. It earned him an Oscar, an International Emmy Award, a Red Ribbon Award at the New York Film Festival, a BBC's Merit Award and an Italia Prize.
Pierre Schoendoerffer, an Oscar-winning French filmmaker who was held prisoner in Indochina and chronicled the pain of war on screen and on the page, has died. He was 83.
The French military health service confirmed that he died Wednesday. France's Le Figaro newspaper said Schoendoerffer died in a hospital outside Paris after an operation.
"France will miss him," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement that praised the "legendary filmmaker and novelist" for risking his life for France and "helping us better understand our collective history."
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