Jean-Daniel Pollet is a French film director and screenwriter who was most active in the 1960s and 1970s. He was associated with two approaches to filmmaking: comedies which blended burlesque and melancholic elements, and poetic films based on texts by writers such as the French poet Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge

Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...

.

Career

Pollet was born on 20 June 1936 in La Madeleine, Nord, in France.
His film career started in 1958, when he did a short film set in Paris called Pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse..., in which Pollet filmed the movements of dancers' silhouettes. Pollet built on the images and themes from this first film in many of his later works, by incorporating elements of popular comedies imbued with both burlesque

Burlesque

Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...

 and melancholic elements. In the early 1960s, Pollet began exploring another approach to filmmaking with the film Méditerranée, which he made over two years with Volker Schlöndorff

Volker Schlöndorff

Volker Schlöndorff is a Berlin-based German filmmaker who has worked in Germany, France and the United States...

. Pollet tried to create a form of poetic film, using texts and commentaries by writers such as Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel , published by Seuil, which ran until 1982...

, Jean Thibeaudeau, and Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge

Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...

.

In the 1990s, he was paralyzed after a train accident, and so he filmed his last movies in the areas around his house in the French town of Cadenet. In 2006, when Pollet realized that his death was approaching, he wrote his last screenplay, Jour après jour, which was finished by Jean-Paul Fargier. Pollet died at the age of 68 on 9 September 2004 at Cadenet, Vaucluse, in France.

Filmography

• 1958 : Pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse...
• 1960 : La Ligne de mire
• 1961 : Gala
• 1963 : Méditerranée
• 1964 : Bassae
• 1965 : Une balle au cœur
• 1965 : Paris vu par...
  Paris vu par...
  -Cast:"La Muette" Directed by Claude Chabrol*Stéphane Audran as The mother*Claude Chabrol as The father*Gilles Chusseau as Boy*Dany Saril as The maid"Saint-Germain-des-Prés" Directed by Jean Douchet*Jean-Pierre Andréani as Raymond...
  
  (segment Rue Saint-Denis)
• 1966 : Les Morutiers
• 1966 : Le Horla
• 1967 : Tu imagines Robinson
• 1970 : Le Maître du temps
• 1971 : Le Sang
• 1971 : L'Amour c'est gai, l'amour c'est triste
• 1973 : L'Ordre
• 1976 : L'Acrobate
• 1978 : Pour mémoire (La forge)
• 1986 : Au Père Lachaise
• 1988 : Contretemps
• 1991 : Trois jours en Grèce
• 1994 : Dieu sait quoi
• 2001 : Ceux d'en face
• 2006 : Jour après jour, terminé par Jean-Paul Fargier

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