The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period. Since the 1920s, the American film industry has grossed more money every year than that of any other country.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The United States was in the forefront of sound film development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Picture City, FL was also a planned site for a movie picture production center in the 1920s, but due to the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the idea collapsed and Picture City returned to its original name of Hobe Sound. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar. Orson Welles's ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time. American screen actors like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially successful movies in the world, such as ''Gone with the Wind'' (1939), ''Star Wars'' (1977), ''Titanic'' (1997), and ''Avatar'' (2009). Today, American film studios collectively generate several hundred movies every year, making the United States the third most prolific producer of films in the world — the first being India and the second being Nigeria.

History

Origins

The second recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was Eadweard Muybridge's series of photographs of a running horse, which he captured in Palo Alto, California, using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar devices that would capture such motion. In the United States, Thomas Alva Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the ''kinetoscope'', whose heavy-handed patent enforcement caused early filmmakers to look for alternatives.

In the earliest days of the American film industry, New York played a role. The Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, built during the silent film era, was used by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. Chelsea, Manhattan was also frequently used. Mary Pickford, an Academy Award winning actress, shot some of her early films in this area. Other major centers of film production also included Chicago, Florida, California, and Cuba.

The film patents wars of the early 20th century led to the spread of film companies across the U.S. Many worked with equipment for which they did not own the rights, and thus filming in New York could be dangerous; it was close to Edison's Company headquarters, and to agents the company set out to seize cameras. By 1912, most major film companies had set up production facilities in Southern California near or in Los Angeles because of the location's proximity to Mexico, as well as the region's favorable year-round weather.

Rise of Hollywood

In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troupe, consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company decided to explore new territories, traveling several miles north to Hollywood, a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, ''In Old California'', a Biograph melodrama about California in the 19th century, when it belonged to Mexico. Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about Biograph's success in Hollywood, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. In Los Angeles, California, the studios and Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were made in several U.S. cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the industry developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors year-round, and by the varied scenery that was available. There are several starting points for cinema (particularly American cinema), but it was Griffith's controversial 1915 epic ''Birth of a Nation'' that pioneered the worldwide filming vocabulary that still dominates celluloid to this day.

In the early 20th century, when the medium was new, many Jewish immigrants found employment in the U.S. film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the movie studio. (It is worth noting that the US had at least one female director, producer and studio head in these early years, Alice Guy-Blaché.) They also set the stage for the industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-centric provincialism.

Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir; and actors like Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of actors — lured west from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films — to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week .

Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920s . After ''The Jazz Singer'', the first film with synchronized voices, was successfully released as a Vitaphone talkie in 1927, Hollywood film companies would respond to Warner Bros. and begin to use Vitaphone sound — which Warner Bros. owned until 1928 - in future films. By May 1928, Electrical Research Product Incorporated (ERPI), a subsidiary of the Western Electric company, gained a monopoly over film sound distribution . A side effect of the "talkies" was that many actors who had made their careers in silent films suddenly found themselves out of work, as they often had bad voices or could not remember their lines. Meanwhile, in 1922, US politician Will H. Hays left politics and formed the movie studio boss organization known as the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of America (MPDAA) . The organization became the Motion Picture Association of America after Hays retired in 1945.

In the early times of talkies, American studios found that their sound productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and even among speakers of other dialects of English. The synchronization technology was still too primitive for dubbing. One of the solutions was creating parallel foreign-language versions of Hollywood films. Around 1930, the American companies opened a studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights and winners of photogenia contests were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of the English-language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language. The Spanish-language crews included people like Luis Buñuel, Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Xavier Cugat and Edgar Neville. The productions were not very successful in their intended markets, due to the following reasons:

The lower budgets were apparent.

Many theater actors had no previous experience in cinema.

The original movies were often second-rate themselves, since studios expected that the top productions would sell by themselves.

The mix of foreign accents (Castilian, Mexican, and Chilean for example in the Spanish case) was odd for the audiences.

Some markets lacked sound-equipped theaters.

In spite of this, some productions like the Spanish version of Dracula compare favorably with the original. By the mid-1930s, synchronization had advanced enough for dubbing to become usual.

Golden Age of Hollywood

During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios. The start of the Golden Age was arguably when ''The Jazz Singer'' was released in 1927, ending the silent era and increasing box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula - Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture) - and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For example, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at 20th Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost all made at Paramount, and director Henry King's films were mostly made for 20th Century Fox.

At the same time, one could usually guess which studio made which film, largely because of the actors who appeared in it; MGM, for example, claimed it had contracted "more stars than there are in heaven." Each studio had its own style and characteristic touches which made it possible to know this — a trait that does not exist today. For example, ''To Have and Have Not'' (1944) is famous not only for the first pairing of actors Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) and Lauren Bacall (1924–) but also for being written by two future winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), the author of the novel on which the script was nominally based, and William Faulkner (1897–1962), who worked on the screen adaptation.

After ''The Jazz Singer'' was released in 1927, Warner Bros. gained huge success and was able to acquire their own string of movie theaters, after purchasing Stanley Theaters and First National Productions in 1928. MGM had also owned the Loews string of theaters since forming in 1924, and the Fox Film Corporation owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO (a 1928 merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America) responded to the Western Electric/ERPI monopoly over sound in films , and developed their own method, known as Photophone, to put sound in films . Paramount, which already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920s as well, and would hold a monopoly on theaters in Detroit, Michigan. By the 1930s, all of America's theaters were owned by the Big Five studios - MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox. .

Movie-making was still a business however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary — actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, craftspersons, and technicians. They owned or leased Movie Ranches in rural Southern California for location shooting of westerns and other large scale genre films. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation, theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material.

In 1930, MPDAA President Will Hays created the Hays (Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930 . However, the code was never enforced until 1934, after the Catholic watchdog organization The Legion of Decency - appalled by some of the provocative films and lurid advertising of the era later classified Pre-Code Hollywood- threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it didn't go into effect . Those films that didn't obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25,000.00 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPDDA owned every theater in the country through the Big Five studios .

Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age, MGM dominated the film screen and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether . Some MGM stars included "King of Hollywood" Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jeanette MacDonald and husband Gene Raymond, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly . But MGM did not stand alone. Another great achievement of US cinema during this era came through Walt Disney's animation company. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its time, ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' . This distinction was promptly topped in 1939 when Selznick International created what is still, when adjusted for inflation, the most successful film of all time, ''Gone with the Wind'' .

Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: ''Citizen Kane'', directed by Orson Welles (1915–1985) and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks (1896–1977), Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) and Frank Capra (1897–1991) battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as ''The Wizard of Oz'', ''Gone with the Wind'', ''Stagecoach'', ''Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'', ''Wuthering Heights'', ''Only Angels Have Wings'', ''Ninotchka'', and ''Midnight''. Among the other films from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be classics: ''Casablanca'', ''It's a Wonderful Life'', ''It Happened One Night'', the original ''King Kong'', ''Mutiny on the Bounty'', ''City Lights'', ''Red River'' and ''Top Hat''.

Decline of the studio system

The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood succumbed to two forces that developed in the late 1940s:

a federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their exhibition; and

the advent of television.

In 1938, Walt Disney's ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' was released during a run of lackluster films from the major studios, and quickly became the highest-grossing film released to that point. Embarrassingly for the studios, it was an independently produced animated film that did not feature any studio-employed stars. This stoked already widespread frustration at the practice of ''block-booking'', in which studios would only sell an entire year's schedule of films at a time to theaters and use the lock-in to cover for releases of mediocre quality. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold—a noted "trust buster" of the Roosevelt administration — took this opportunity to initiate proceedings against the eight largest Hollywood studios in July 1938 for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The federal suit resulted in five of the eight studios (the "Big Five": Warner Bros., MGM, Fox, RKO and Paramount) reaching a compromise with Arnold in October 1940 and signing a consent decree agreeing to, within three years:

Eliminate the block-booking of short film subjects, in an arrangement known as "one shot", or "full force" block-booking.

Eliminate the block-booking of any more than five features in their theaters.

No longer engage in ''blind buying'' (or the buying of films by theater districts without seeing films beforehand) and instead have ''trade-showing'', in which all 31 theater districts in US would see films every two weeks before showing movies in theaters.

Set up an administration board in each theater district to enforce these requirements. The "Little Three" (Universal Studios, United Artists, and Columbia Pictures), who did not own any theaters, refused to participate in the consent decree. A number of independent film producers were also unhappy with the compromise and formed a union known as the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers and sued Paramount for the monopoly they still had over the Detroit Theaters — as Paramount was also gaining dominance through actors like Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, Betty Hutton, crooner Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, and longtime actor for studio Gary Cooper too- by 1942. The Big Five studios didn't meet the requirements of the Consent of Decree during WWII, without major consequence, but after the war ended they joined Paramount as defendants in the Hollywood anti-trust case, as did the Little Three studios . The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the major studios ownership of theaters and film distribution was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. As a result, the studios began to release actors and technical staff from their contracts with the studios. This changed the paradigm of film making by the major Hollywood studios, as each could have an entirely different cast and creative team.

The decision resulted in the gradual loss of the characteristics which made MGM, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, RKO, and Fox films immediately identifiable. Certain movie people, such as Cecil B. DeMille, either remained contract artists till the end of their careers or used the same creative teams on their films, so that a DeMille film still looked like one whether it was made in 1932 or 1956. Also, the number of movies being produced annually dropped as the average budget soared, marking a major change in strategy for the industry. Studios now aimed to produce entertainment that could not be offered by television: spectacular, larger-than-life productions. Studios also began to sell portions of their theatrical film libraries to other companies to sell to television. By 1949, all major film studios had given up ownership of their theaters.

Television was also instrumental in the decline of Hollywood's Golden Age as it broke the movie industry's hegemony in American entertainment. Despite this, the film industry was also able to gain some leverage for future films as longtime government censorship faded in the 1950s. After the Paramount anti-trust case ended, Hollywood movie studios no longer owned theaters, and thus made it so foreign films could be released in American theaters without censorship. This was complemented with the 1952 Miracle Decision in the Joseph Burstyn Inc. v Wilson case, in which the Supreme Court of the United States reversed its earlier position, from 1915's Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio case, and stated that motion pictures were a form of art and were entitled to the protection of the First amendment; US laws could no longer censor films. By 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had replaced the Hays Code–which was now greatly violated after the government threat of censorship that justified the origin of the code had ended—with the film rating system.

New Hollywood and post-classical cinema

''Post-classical cinema'' is a term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new approaches to drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired in the classical period: chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature "twist endings", and lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The roots of post-classical storytelling may be seen in ''film noir'', in ''Rebel Without a Cause'' (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering ''Psycho''.

'New Hollywood' is a term used to describe the emergence of a new generation of film school-trained directors who had absorbed the techniques developed in Europe in the 1960s; The 1967 film ''Bonnie and Clyde'' marked the beginning of American cinema rebounding as well, as a new generation of films would afterwards gain success at the box offices as well . Filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and William Friedkin came to produce fare that paid homage to the history of film, and developed upon existing genres and techniques. In the early 1970s, their films were often both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. While the early New Hollywood films like ''Bonnie and Clyde'' and ''Easy Rider'' had been relatively low-budget affairs with amoral heroes and increased sexuality and violence, the enormous success enjoyed by Friedkin, Spielberg, and Lucas with ''The Exorcist'', ''Jaws'', and ''Star Wars'', respectively helped to give rise to the modern "blockbuster", and induced studios to focus ever more heavily on trying to produce enormous hits.

The increasing indulgence of these young directors did not help. Often, they’d go overschedule, and overbudget, thus bankrupting themselves or the studio. The three most famous examples of this are Francis Coppola’s ''Apocalypse Now'' and ''One From The Heart'' and particularly Michael Cimino’s ''Heaven’s Gate'', which single-handedly bankrupted United Artists. However, Coppola’s ''Apocalypse Now'' eventually made its money back and gained widespread recognition as a masterpiece.

Rise of the home video market

The 1980s and 1990s saw another significant development. The full acceptance of home video by studios opened a vast new business to exploit. Films such as ''Showgirls'', ''The Secret of NIMH'' and ''The Shawshank Redemption'', which performed poorly in their theatrical run, were now able to find success in the video market. It also saw the first generation of film makers with access to video tapes emerge. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and P.T. Anderson had been able to view thousands of films and produced films with vast numbers of references and connections to previous works. This, along with the explosion of independent film and ever-decreasing costs for filmmaking, changed the landscape of American movie-making once again, and led a renaissance of filmmaking among Hollywood's lower and middle-classes—those without access to studio financial resources. With the rise of the DVD in the 21st century, DVDs have quickly become even more profitable to studios and have led to an explosion of packaging extra scenes, extended versions, and commentary tracks with the films.

Modern cinema

The drive to produce a spectacle on the movie screen has largely shaped American cinema ever since. Spectacular epics which took advantage of new widescreen processes had been increasingly popular from the 1950s onwards. Since then, American films have become increasingly divided into two categories: Blockbusters and independent films. Studios have focused on relying on a handful of extremely expensive releases every year in order to remain profitable. Such blockbusters emphasize spectacle, star power, and high production value, all of which entail an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically rely upon star power and massive advertising to attract a huge audience. A successful blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to offset production costs and reap considerable profits. Such productions carry a substantial risk of failure, and most studios release blockbusters that both over- and underperform in a year.

Studios supplement these movies with independent productions, made with small budgets and often independently of the studio corporation. Movies made in this manner typically emphasize high professional quality in terms of acting, directing, screenwriting, and other elements associated with production, and also upon creativity and innovation. These movies usually rely upon critical praise or niche marketing to garner an audience. Because of an independent film's low budgets, a successful independent film can have a high profit-to-cost ratio, while a failure will incur minimal losses, allowing for studios to sponsor dozens of such productions in addition to their high-stakes releases.

American independent cinema was revitalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s when another new generation of moviemakers, including Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino made movies like, respectively: ''Do the Right Thing''; ''Sex, Lies, and Videotape''; ''Clerks''; and ''Reservoir Dogs''. In terms of directing, screenwriting, editing, and other elements, these movies were innovative and often irreverent, playing with and contradicting the conventions of Hollywood movies. Furthermore, their considerable financial successes and crossover into popular culture reestablished the commercial viability of independent film. Since then, the independent film industry has become more clearly defined and more influential in American cinema. Many of the major studios have capitalised on this by developing subsidiaries to produce similar films; for example Fox Searchlight Pictures.

To a lesser degree in the early 21st century, film types that were previously considered to have only a minor presence in the mainstream movie market began to arise as more potent American box office draws. These include foreign-language films such as ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' and ''Hero'' and documentary films such as ''Super Size Me'', ''March of the Penguins'', and Michael Moore's ''Bowling for Columbine'' and ''Fahrenheit 9/11''.

Hollywood and politics

In the 1930s the Democrats and the Republicans saw money in Hollywood. President Franklin Roosevelt saw a huge partnership with Hollywood. He used the first real potential of Hollywood’s stars in a national campaign. Melvyn Douglas toured Washington in 1939 and met the key New Dealers. Endorsements letters from leading actors were signed, radio appearances and printed advertising were made. Movie stars were used to draw a large audience into the political view of the party. By the 1960s, John F. Kennedy was a new, young face for Washington, and his strong friendship with Frank Sinatra exemplified this new era of glamor. The last moguls of Hollywood were gone and younger, newer executives and producers began generating more liberal ideas.

Celebrities and money attracted politicians into the high-class, glittering Hollywood life-style. As Ronald Brownstein wrote in his book “The Power and the Glitter”, television in the 1970s and 1980s was an enormously important new media in politics and Hollywood helped in that media with actors making speeches on their political beliefs, like Jane Fonda against the Vietnam War. This era saw former actor Ronald Reagan became Governor of California and subsequently become President of the United States. It continued with Arnold Schwarzenegger as California’s Governor in 2003. Today Washington’s interest is in Hollywood donations. On February 20, 2007, for example, Barack Obama had a $2300-a-plate Hollywood gala, being hosted by David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg at the Beverly Hilton. Hollywood is a huge donator for presidential campaigns and this money attracts politicians. Not only is Hollywood influencing Washington with its glamour and money but Washington also influences Hollywood.

See also

Pre-Code Hollywood

Cinema of the world

American Film Institute

Movie ranches

National Film Registry

List of films in the public domain in the United States

Footnotes

Notes

References

External links

History of Hollywood's Aerial Cinematography

Photo exhibit of filmmaking in Florida, presented by the State Archives of Florida

Rottentomatoes.com - A large collection of movie reviews and previews from hundreds of critics

Early American Cinema - Articles on early cinema and celebrities

Hollywood actress news updates - Actress pics, reviews of movies.

Category:Industry in the United States

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Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
season name	Frasier Season 3
bgcolor	#FF6600
dvd release date	May 25, 2005
country	United States
network	NBC
first aired	September 19, 1995
last aired	May 21, 1996
num episodes	24
prev season	2
next season	4 }}

The third season of ''Frasier'' originally aired between September 1995 and May 1996, beginning on September 19, 1995.

Reception

The season ranked 12th in the season ratings with an average viewership of 13 million making it the 7th highest ranking show on the network.

List of episodes

№

#

Title

Directed by

Written by

Original air date

References

* Category:1995 television seasons Category:1996 television seasons

it:Episodi di Frasier (terza stagione)

Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
name	François Truffaut
birth name	François Roland Truffaut
birth date	February 06, 1932
birth place	Paris, France
death date	October 21, 1984
death place	Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France
spouse
occupation	Actor, film critic, filmmaker, producer, screenwriter
years active	1955–1983 }}

François Roland Truffaut (; 1932–1984) was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five films.

Early life

Truffaut was born in Paris on 6 February 1932, out of wedlock. His mother was Janine de Monferrand. His mother's future husband Roland Truffaut accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname. He was passed around to live with various nannies and his grandmother for a number of years. It was his grandmother who instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with his grandmother until her death when Truffaut was ten years old. It was only after his grandmother's death that he lived with his parents for the first time. The identity of Truffaut's biological father was unknown, though a private detective agency in 1968 revealed that their enquiry into the matter led to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. Truffaut's mother's family disputed the findings but Truffaut himself believed and embraced them.

Truffaut would often stay with friends and try to be out of the house as much as possible. His best friend throughout his youth and until his death was Robert Lachenay, who was the inspiration for the character René Bigey in ''The 400 Blows'' and would work as an assistant on some of Truffaut's films. It was the cinema that offered him the greatest escape from an unsatisfying home life. He was eight years old when he saw his first movie, Abel Gance's ''Paradis Perdu'' from 1939. It was there that his obsession began. He frequently played truant from school and would sneak into theaters because he didn't have enough money for admission. After being expelled from several schools, at the age of fourteen he decided to become self-taught. Some of his academic "goals" were to watch three movies a day and read three books a week.

Truffaut frequented Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Française where he was exposed to countless foreign films from around the world. It was here that he became familiar with American cinema and directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray as well as those of British director Alfred Hitchcock.

Career

After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met André Bazin, who would have great effect on his professional and personal life. Bazin was a critic and the head of another film society at the time. He became a personal friend of Truffaut's and helped him out of various financial and criminal situations during his formative years.

Truffaut joined the French Army in 1950, aged 18, but spent the next two years trying to escape. Truffaut was arrested for attempting to desert the army. Bazin used his various political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his newly formed film magazine ''Cahiers du cinéma''. Over the next few years, Truffaut became a critic (and later editor) at ''Cahiers'', where he became notorious for his brutal, unforgiving reviews. He was called "The Gravedigger of French Cinema" and was the only French critic not invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 1958. He supported Andre Bazin in the development of one of the most influential theories of cinema itself, the auteur theory.

In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article called "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Certain Trend of French Cinema"), in which he attacked the current state of French films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers. The article resulted in a storm of controversy. Truffaut later devised the auteur theory, which stated that the director was the "author" of his work; that great directors such as Renoir or Hitchcock have distinct styles and themes that permeate all of their films. Although his theory was not widely accepted then, it gained some support in the 1960s from American critic Andrew Sarris. In 1967, Truffaut published his book-length interview of Hitchcock, ''Hitchcock/Truffaut'' (New York: Simon and Schuster).

After having been a critic, Truffaut decided to make films of his own. He started out with the short film ''Une Visite'' in 1955 and followed that up with ''Les Mistons'' in 1957. After seeing Orson Welles' ''Touch of Evil'' at the Expo 58, he was inspired to make his feature film debut ''Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows)''.

He was also notably one of the main stars in Steven Spielberg's 1977 film ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'', where he played scientist Claude Lacombe.

Truffaut was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1959 to 1965, and they had two daughters, Laura (born 1959) and Eva (born 1961). Madeleine was the daughter of Ignace Morgenstern, managing director of one of France's largest film distribution companies, and was largely responsible for securing funding for Truffaut's first films. While he had affairs with almost all of his leading ladies - in 1968 he was fiancé of Claude Jade - Truffaut and actress Fanny Ardant lived together from 1981 to 1984 and had a daughter, Joséphine Truffaut (born 28 September 1983).

Death

In 1983, Truffaut was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died on 21 October 1984, aged 52 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France. At the time of his death, he still had numerous films in preparation. His goal was to make thirty films and then retire to write books for his remaining days. He was five films short of his personal goal. He is buried in Paris's Montmartre Cemetery.

Work

''The 400 Blows'' was released in 1959 to much critical and commercial acclaim. Truffaut received a Best Director award from the Cannes Film Festival, the same festival that had banned him only one year earlier. The film follows the character of Antoine Doinel through his perilous misadventures in school, an unhappy home life and later reform school. The film is highly autobiographical. Both Truffaut and Doinel were only children of loveless marriages; they both committed petty crimes of theft and truancy from the military. Truffaut cast Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel. Léaud was seen as an ordinary boy of 13 who auditioned for the role after seeing a flyer, but interviews filmed after the film's release (one is included on the Criterion DVD of the film) reveal Léaud's natural sophistication and an instinctive understanding of acting for the camera. Léaud and Truffaut collaborated on several films over the years. Their most noteworthy collaboration was the continuation of the Antoine Doinel character in a series of films called "The Antoine Doinel Cycle".

The primary focus of ''The 400 Blows'' is centered on the life of a young character by the name of Antoine Doinel. This film follows this character through his troubled adolescence. He is caught in between an unstable parental relationship and an isolated youth. The film focuses on the real life events of the director, François Truffaut. From birth Truffaut was thrown into an undesired situation. As he was born out of wedlock, his birth had to remain a secret because of the social stigma associated with illegitimacy. He was registered as "A child born to an unknown father" in the hospital records. He was looked after by a nurse for an extended period of time. His mother eventually married and her husband Roland gave his surname, Truffaut, to François.

Although he was legally accepted as a legitimate child, his parents did not accept him. The Truffauts had another child who died shortly after birth. This experience saddened them greatly and as a result they despised François because of the memory of regret that he represented (Knopf 4). He was an outcast from his earliest years, dismissed as an unwanted child. François was sent to live with his grandparents. It wasn’t until François's grandmother's death before his parents took him in, much to the dismay of his own mother. The experiences with his mother were harsh. He recalled being treated badly by her but he found comfort in his father, Ronald Truffaut's laughter and overall spirit. The relationship with Ronald was more comforting than the one with his own mother. François had a very depressing childhood after moving in with his parents. They would leave him alone whenever they would go on vacations. He even recalled memories of being alone during Christmas. Being left alone forced François into a sense of independence, he would often do various tasks around the house in order to improve it such as painting or changing the electric outlets. Sadly, these kind gestures often resulted in a catastrophic event causing him to get scolded by his mother. His father would mostly laugh them off.

''The 400 Blows'' marked the beginning of the French New Wave movement, which gave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette a wider audience. The New Wave dealt with a self-conscious rejection of traditional cinema structure. This was a topic on which Truffaut had been writing for years.

Following the success of ''The 400 Blows'', Truffaut featured disjunctive editing and seemingly random voice-overs in his next film ''Shoot the Piano Player'' (1960) starring Charles Aznavour. Truffaut has stated that in the middle of filming, he realized that he hated gangsters. But since gangsters were a main part of the story, he toned up the comical aspect of the characters and made the movie more attuned to his liking. Even though ''Shoot the Piano Player'' was much appreciated by critics, it performed poorly at the box office. While the film focused on two of the French New Wave's favorite elements, American Film Noir and themselves, Truffaut never again experimented as heavily.

In 1962, Truffaut directed his third movie, ''Jules and Jim'', a romantic drama starring Jeanne Moreau. Over the next decade, Truffaut had varying degrees of success with his films. In 1965 he directed the American production of Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi novel ''Fahrenheit 451''. It showcased Truffaut's love of books. His only English-speaking film was a great challenge for Truffaut, because he barely spoke English himself. This was also his first film shot in color. The larger scale production was difficult for Truffaut, who had worked only with small crews and budgets.

Truffaut worked on projects with varied subjects. ''The Bride Wore Black'' (1968), a brutal tale of revenge, is a stylish homage to the films of Alfred Hitchcock (once again starring Jeanne Moreau). ''Mississippi Mermaid'' (1969), with Catherine Deneuve, is an identity-bending romantic thriller. ''Stolen Kisses'' (1968) and ''Bed and Board'' (1970) are continuations of the Antoine Doinel Cycle. And ''The Wild Child'' (1970) included Truffaut's acting debut in the lead role of 18th century physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard.

''Two English Girls'' (1971) is the yin to the ''Jules and Jim'' yang. It is based on a story written by Henri-Pierre Roche, who also wrote ''Jules and Jim''. It is about a man who falls equally in love with two sisters, and their love affair over a period of years.

''Day for Night'' won Truffaut a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1973. The film is probably his most reflective work. It is the story of a film crew trying to finish their film while dealing with all of the personal and professional problems that accompany making a movie. Truffaut plays the director of the fictional film being made. This film features scenes shown in his previous films. It is considered to be his best film since his earliest work. ''Time'' magazine placed it on their list of 100 Best Films of the Century (along with ''The 400 Blows'').

In 1975, Truffaut gained more notoriety with ''The Story of Adele H.'' Isabelle Adjani in the title role earned a nomination for a Best Actress Oscar. Truffaut's 1976 film ''Small Change'' gained a Golden Globe Nomination for Best Foreign Film.

One of Truffaut's final films gave him an international revival. In 1980, his film ''The Last Metro'' garnered twelve César Award nominations with ten wins, including Best Director.

Truffaut's final movie was shot in black and white. It gives his career almost a sense of having bookends. In 1983 ''Confidentially Yours'' is Truffaut's tribute to his favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock. It deals with numerous Hitchcockian themes, such as private guilt vs. public innocence, a woman investigating a murder, anonymous locations, etc.

Among Truffaut's films, a series features the character Antoine Doinel, played by the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. He began his career in ''The 400 Blows'' at the age of fourteen, and continued as the favorite actor and "double" of Truffaut. The series continued with ''Antoine and Colette'' (a short film in the anthology ''Love at Twenty''), ''Stolen Kisses'' (in which he falls in love with Christine Darbon alias Claude Jade), ''Bed and Board'' about the married couple Antoine and Christine—and, finally, ''Love on the Run'', where the couple go through a divorce.

In the last movies, Léaud's partner was played by Truffaut's favorite actress Claude Jade as his girlfriend (and then wife), "Christine Darbon." During the filming of "Stolen Kisses, Truffaut himself fell in love with, and was briefly engaged to, Claude Jade.

A keen reader, Truffaut adapted many literary works, including two novels by Henri-Pierre Roché, Ray Bradbury's ''Fahrenheit 451'', Henry James' "The Altar of the Dead", filmed as ''The Green Room'', and several American detective novels.

Truffaut's other films were from original screenplays, often co-written by the screenwriters Suzanne Schiffman or Jean Gruault. They featured diverse subjects, the sombre ''The Story of Adele H.'', inspired by the life of the daughter of Victor Hugo, with Isabelle Adjani; ''Day for Night'', shot at the Studio La Victorine describing the ups and downs of film-making; and ''The Last Metro'', set during the German occupation of France, a film rewarded by ten César Awards.

Known as being a lifelong cinephile, Truffaut once (according to the documentary ''François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits'') threw a hitchhiker he had picked up out of his car after learning that the hitchhiker didn't like films.

Truffaut is admired among other filmmakers and several tributes to his work have appeared in other films such as ''Almost Famous'', ''Face'' and ''The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'', as well as novelist Haruki Murakami book ''Kafka on the Shore''.

Attitude towards other filmmakers

Truffaut expressed his admiration for filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg. He once called German New Wave filmmaker Werner Herzog "the most important film director alive." In 1973, Jean-Luc Godard accused Truffaut of making a movie that was a “lie,” and Truffaut replied with a 20-page letter in which he accused Godard of being a radical-chic hypocrite, a man who believed everyone to be “equal” in theory only. The two never saw each other again.

Filmography

Director

{|class="wikitable sortable" width="100%" !Year||Title||Original title||Notes |- |1955 || ''A Visit''||''Une Visite'' || |- |1957 || ''The Mischief Makers''|| ''Les Mistons'' || |- |1959 || ''The 400 Blows'' || ''Les Quatre Cents Coups'' || Antoine Doinel series |- |1960 || ''Shoot the Piano Player'' || ''Tirez sur le pianiste'' || |- |1961 || ''A Story of Water'' || ''Une Histoire d'eau''|| Co-directed with Jean-Luc Godard |- |1962 || ''Jules and Jim'' || ''Jules et Jim'' || |- |1962 || ''Antoine and Colette'' || ''Antoine et Colette'' || Antoine Doinel series, segment from ''Love at Twenty'' |- |1964 || ''The Soft Skin'' || ''La Peau douce'' || |- |1966 || ''Fahrenheit 451'' || ''Fahrenheit 451'' || Filmed in English |- |1968 || ''The Bride Wore Black'' || ''La Mariée était en noir'' || |- |1968 || ''Stolen Kisses'' || ''Baisers volés'' || Antoine Doinel series; nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film |- |1969 || ''Mississippi Mermaid'' || ''La sirène du '' || |- |1970 || ''The Wild Child'' || ''L'Enfant sauvage'' || |- |1970 || ''Bed and Board'' || ''Domicile conjugal'' || Antoine Doinel series |- |1971 || ''Two English Girls'' || ''Les Deux anglaises et le continent'' || |- |1972 || ''Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me'' || ''Une belle fille comme moi'' || |- |1973 || ''Day for Night'' || ''La Nuit américaine'' || Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film |- |1975 || ''The Story of Adele H.'' || ''L'Histoire d'Adèle H.'' || |- |1976 || ''Small Change'' || ''L'Argent de poche'' || Called ''Pocket Money'' in English-speaking countries outside North America. Entered into the 26th Berlin International Film Festival. |- |1977 || ''The Man Who Loved Women'' || ''L'Homme qui aimait les femmes'' || Entered into the 27th Berlin International Film Festival. |- |1978 || ''The Green Room'' || ''La Chambre verte'' || |- |1979 || ''Love on the Run'' || ''L'Amour en fuite'' || Antoine Doinel series, entered into the 29th Berlin International Film Festival. |- |1980 || ''The Last Metro'' || ''Le Dernier métro'' || |- |1981 || ''The Woman Next Door'' || ''La Femme d'à côté'' || |- |1983 || ''Confidentially Yours'' || ''Vivement dimanche!'' || |}

Screenwriter only

{|class="wikitable sortable" width="100%" !Year||Title||Original title||Notes |- |1960|| ''Breathless'' || ''À bout de souffle'' || Directed by Jean-Luc Godard |- style=background:#efefef; |1988|| ''The Little Thief''|| ''La Petite voleuse'' || Directed by Claude Miller |- |1995|| ''Belle Époque'' || ''Belle Époque'' || Miniseries, with Jean Gruault; directed by Gavin Millar |}

Actor

{|class="wikitable sortable" width="100%" !Year||Title||Role||Notes |- |1959 || ''The 400 Blows'' || Man in Funfair (uncredited)|| |- |1970 || ''The Wild Child'' || Dr. Jean Itard || |- |1970 || ''Bed & Board'' || Newspaper vendor - voice (uncredited)|| |- |1973 || ''Day for Night'' || Ferrand, the film director|| |- |1975 || ''The Story of Adele H.'' || Officer (uncredited)|| |- |1976 || ''Small Change'' || Martine's Father (uncredited)|| |- |1977 || ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' || Claude Lacombe || Directed by Steven Spielberg |- |1978 || ''The Green Room'' || Julien Davenne || |- |1981 || ''The Woman Next Door'' || Cameo (uncredited)|| |}

Producer only

{|class="wikitable sortable" width="100%" !Year||Title||Original title||Notes |- |1958 || ''Good Anna'' || ''Anna la bonne'' || Directed by Harry Kümel |- |1960 || ''Testament of Orpheus'' || ''Le testament d'Orphée''|| Directed by Jean Cocteau |- |1961 || ''The Gold Bug'' || Le scarabée d'or || Directed by Robert Lachenay |- |1968 || ''Naked Childhood'' || ''L'Enfance Nue'' || Directed by Maurice Pialat |}

Bibliography

''Les 400 Coups'' (1960) with M. Moussy (English translation: ''The 400 Blows'')

''Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock'' (1967, second edition 1983) (English translation: ''Hitchcock'' and ''Hitchcock/Truffaut'' with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott)

''Les Aventures d'Antoine Doinel'' (1970) (English translation: ''Adventures of Antoine Doinel''; translated by Helen G. Scott)

''Jules et Jim'' (film script) (1971) (English translation: ''Jules and Jim''; translated by Nicholas Fry)

''La Nuit américaine et le Journal de Fahrenheit 451'' (1974)

''Le Plaisir des yeux'' (1975)

''L'Argent de poche'' (1976) (English title: ''Small change: a film novel''; translated by Anselm Hollo)

''L'Homme qui aimait les femmes'' (1977)

''Les Films de ma vie'' (1981) (English translation: ''Films in my life''; translated by Leonard Mayhew)

'''' (1988) (English translation: ''Correspondence, 1945–1984''; translated by Gilbert Adair)

''Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut'' (1988) edited by Anne Gillain

''Belle époque'' (1996) with Jean Gruault

See also

List of notable brain tumor patients

François Truffaut Award

''François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits'', a 1993 documentary film

''Two in the Wave'', a 2010 documentary film about Truffaut's relationship with Jean-Luc Godard

References

External links

''New Wave Film Encyclopedia'': "François Truffaut" an extensive biography

François Truffaut bibliography via the UC Berkeley Media Resources Center

Francois Truffaut at ''The Guardian Film''

Francois Truffaut at ''The New York Times Movies''

Legendary interview with Truffaut from 1970

An article on Truffaut and his influence by director Martin Scorsese as he commemorates him as one of the 60 greatest heroes from Europe as selected by Time magazine

AllMovie.com Biography

Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Best Director César Award winners Category:Film historians Category:Film theorists Category:French film actors Category:French film critics Category:French screenwriters Category:French film directors Category:French film producers Category:Burials at Montmartre Cemetery, Paris Category:Cancer deaths in France Category:Deaths from brain cancer Category:Actors from Paris Category:1932 births Category:1984 deaths

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Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
name	Jean-Luc Godard
birth date	December 03, 1930
birth place	Paris, France
citizenship	Swiss
education	La Sorbonne
occupation	Actor, director, cinematographer, screenwriter, editor, producer
years active	1950–present
influences	Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Henri Langlois, Jean Cocteau, existentialism
influenced	Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Quentin Tarantino, Arthur Penn, Hal Hartley, Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch, Brian De Palma, Wim Wenders, Serge Daney, Leos Carax, Gregg Araki
spouse	Anna Karina (1961–67)Anne Wiazemsky (1967–79)Anne-Marie Miéville (not official)
awards	Honorary Academy Award (2010), Honorary César (1987, 1998), Prix Jean Vigo (1960)
signature	Jean Luc Godard Signature.svg }}

Jean-Luc Godard (; born 3 December 1930) is a Franco-Swiss film director, screen writer and critic. He is often identified with the group of filmmakers known as the French ''Nouvelle Vague'', or "New Wave".

Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood cinema as well as the French "tradition of quality" (prestigious films based on literary classics). He is often considered the most extreme or radical of the New Wave filmmakers. His films express his political ideologies as well as his knowledge of film history. In addition, Godard's films often cite existentialism as he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy. His radical approach in movie conventions, politics and philosophies made him the most influential filmmaker of the French New Wave, inspiring directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Thomas Anderson, Arthur Penn, Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, Gregg Araki, John Woo, Mike Figgis, Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Lester, Jim Jarmusch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Brian De Palma, Wim Wenders, Oliver Stone and Ken Loach.

In the 2002 poll of the ''Sight and Sound'' publication, Godard ranked #3 in the critics' top ten directors of all time (which was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films for which the critics voted). In 2010, Godard received an Honorary Academy Award, but he did not attend the award ceremony.

Early life

Godard was born in Paris, the son of Odile (née Monod) and Paul Godard, a physician. His parents both came from Protestant families of Franco-Swiss descent, and his mother was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod. Relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod and pastor Frédéric Monod. Godard attended school in Nyon, Switzerland, and at the Lycée Rohmer, and the University of Paris. During his time at the Sorbonne, he became involved with the young group of filmmakers and film theorists that gave birth to the New Wave.

Film criticism and early filmmaking

After attending school in Nyon, Godard returned to Paris in 1948. It was there, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, that ''ciné-clubs'' (film societies) were gaining prominence. Godard began attending these clubs, where he soon met the man who was perhaps most responsible for the birth of the New Wave, André Bazin, as well as those who would become his contemporaries, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rozier, and Jacques Demy. Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He has said; "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread — but it isn't the case any more. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope ... a telescope. ... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer. ... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs."

His approach to film began in the field of criticism. Along with Éric Rohmer and Rivette, he founded the short-lived film journal, ''Gazette du cinéma'', which saw publication of five issues in 1950. When Bazin co-founded the influential critical magazine ''Cahiers du cinéma'' in 1951, Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, was among the first writers. They, along with several other writers for ''Cahiers du cinéma'' in the 1950s, started making brief forays into film direction.

Godard, while taking a job as a construction worker on a dam in 1953, shot a documentary about the building, ''Opération béton'' (1955). As he continued to work for ''Cahiers'', he made ''Une femme coquette'' (1955), a ten-minute short; ''All the Boys Are Named Patrick'' (1957) another short fiction film; and ''Une histoire d'eau'' (1958), which was created largely out of unused footage shot by Truffaut.

In 1958 Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining international prominence as a filmmaker, ''Charlotte et son Jules'', a homage to Jean Cocteau.

Cinematic period

His most celebrated period as a filmmaker is roughly from his first feature, ''Breathless'' (1960), through to ''Week End'' (1967) focused on relatively conventional works that often refer to different aspects of film history. This cinematic period stands in contrast to the revolutionary period that immediately followed it, during which Godard ideologically denounced much of cinema’s history as "bourgeois" and therefore without merit.

Films

Godard's ''Breathless'' (''À bout de souffle'', 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg distinctly expressed the French New Wave's style, and incorporated quotations from several elements of popular culture — specifically American cinema. The film employed various innovative techniques such as jump cuts, character asides and breaking the eyeline match rule in continuity editing. Truffaut co-wrote ''Breathless'' with Godard and introduced Godard to the producer who ultimately funded the film, Georges de Beauregard.

From the beginning of his career, Godard included more film references into his movies than any of his New Wave colleagues. In ''Breathless'', his citations include a movie poster showing Humphrey Bogart (whose expression the lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo tries reverently to imitate); visual quotations from films of Ingmar Bergman, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, and others; and an onscreen dedication to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio. Most of all, the choice of Jean Seberg as the lead actress was an overarching reference to Otto Preminger, who had discovered her for his ''Saint Joan,'' and then cast her in his acidulous 1958 adaptation of ''Bonjour Tristesse''. If, in Rohmer’s words, "life was the cinema", then a film filled with movie references was supremely autobiographical.

The following year, Godard made ''Le Petit Soldat'' (The Little Soldier), which dealt with the Algerian War of Independence. Most notably, it was the first collaboration between Godard and Danish-born actress Anna Karina, whom he later married in 1961 (and divorced in 1967). The film, due to its political nature, was banned by the French government until January 1963. Karina appeared again, along with Belmondo, in ''A Woman Is a Woman'' (1961), intended as a homage to the American musical. Angela (Karina) desires a child, prompting her to pretend to leave her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) and make him jealous by pursuing his best friend (Belmondo) as a substitute.

Godard's next film, ''Vivre sa vie'' (My Life to Live) (1962), was one of his most popular among critics. Karina starred as Nana, an errant mother and aspiring actress whose financially straitened circumstances lead her to the life of a streetwalker. It is an episodic account of her rationalizations to prove she is free, even though she is tethered at the end of her pimp's short leash. In one touching scene in a cafe, she spreads her arms out and announces she is free to raise or lower them as she wishes. The film's style, much like that of ''Breathless'', boasted the type of camera-liberated experimentation that made the French New Wave so influential.

''Les Carabiniers'' (1963) was about the horror of war and its inherent injustice. It was the influence and suggestion of Roberto Rossellini that led Godard to make the film. It follows two peasants who join the army of a king, only to find futility in the whole thing as the king reveals the deception of war-administrating leaders. His most commercially successful film was ''Le Mépris'' (1963), starring Michel Piccoli and one of France's biggest female stars, Brigitte Bardot. A coproduction between Italy and France, ''Contempt'' became known as a pinnacle in cinematic modernism with its profound reflexivity. The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is commissioned by the arrogant American movie producer Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script for an adaptation of Homer's ''Odyssey'', which the Austrian director Fritz Lang has been filming. Lang's 'high culture' interpretation of the story is lost on Prokosch, whose character is a firm indictment of the commercial motion picture hierarchy. Another prominent theme is the inability to reconcile love and labor, which is illustrated by Paul's crumbling marriage to Camille (Bardot) during the course of shooting.

In 1964, Godard and Karina formed a production company, Anouchka Films. He directed ''Bande à part'' (''Band of Outsiders''), another collaboration between the two and described by Godard as "''Alice in Wonderland'' meets Franz Kafka." It follows two young men, looking to score on a heist, who both fall in love with Karina, and quotes from several gangster film conventions.

''Une femme mariée'' (A Married Woman) (1964) followed ''Band of Outsiders''. It was a slow, deliberate, toned-down black and white picture without a real story. The film was entirely produced over the period of one month and exhibited a loose quality unique to Godard. Godard made the film while he acquired funding for ''Pierrot le fou'' (1965).

In 1965, Godard directed ''Alphaville'', a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir, and satire. Eddie Constantine starred as Lemmy Caution, a detective who is sent into a city controlled by a giant computer named Alpha 60. His mission is to make contact with Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), a famous scientist who has fallen mysteriously silent, and is believed to be suppressed by the computer. ''Pierrot le fou'' (1965) featured a complex storyline, distinctive personalities, and a violent ending. Gilles Jacob, an author, critic, and president of the Cannes Film Festival, called it both a "retrospective" and recapitulation in the way it played on so many of Godard’s earlier characters and themes. With an extensive cast and variety of locations, the film was expensive enough to warrant significant problems with funding. Shot in color, it departed from Godard’s minimalist works (typified by ''Breathless'', ''Vivre sa vie'', and ''Une femme mariée''). He solicited the participation of Jean-Paul Belmondo, by then a famous actor, in order to guarantee the necessary amount of capital.

''Masculin, féminin'' (1966), based on two Guy de Maupassant stories, ''La Femme de Paul'' and ''Le Signe'', was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics. An intertitle refers to the characters as "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola."

Godard followed with ''Made in U.S.A'' (1966), whose source material was Richard Stark's ''The Jugger''; and ''Two or Three Things I Know About Her'' (1967), in which Marina Vlady portrays a woman leading a double life as housewife and prostitute.

''La Chinoise'' (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright so far. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France. Released just before the May 1968 events, the film is thought by some to foreshadow the student rebellions that took place.

That same year, Godard made a more colorful and political film, ''Week End''. It follows a Parisian couple as they leave on a weekend trip across the French countryside to collect an inheritance. What ensues is a confrontation with the tragic flaws of the over-consuming bourgeoisie. The film contains some of the most written-about scenes in cinema's history. One of them, a ten-minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, is often cited as a new technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends. Startlingly, a few shots contain extra footage from, as it were, before the beginning of the take (while the actors are preparing) and after the end of the take (while the actors are coming out of character). ''Week End''s' enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads "End of Cinema", appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard's filmmaking career.

Politics

Politics are never far from the surface in Godard's films. One of his earliest features, ''Le Petit Soldat'', dealt with the Algerian War of Independence, and was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute rather than pursue any specific ideological agenda. Along these lines, ''Les Carabiniers'' presents a fictional war that is initially romanticized in the way its characters approach their service, but becomes a stiff anti-war metonym. In addition to the international conflicts Godard sought an artistic response to, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France. The earliest and best example of this is Karina's potent portrayal of a prostitute in ''Vivre sa vie''.

In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. There was, however, a distinct post-war climate shaped by various international conflicts such as the colonialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia. The side that opposed such colonization included the majority of French workers, who belonged to the French communist party, and the Parisian artists and writers who positioned themselves on the side of social reform and class equality. A large portion of this group had a particular affinity for the teachings of Karl Marx. Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until ''La Chinoise'' and ''Week End'', but is evident in several films — namely ''Pierrot'' and ''Une femme mariée''.

Throughout his career, Godard has been accused of harboring anti-Semitic views. As film critic Richard Brody demonstrates in a recent book, Godard has expressed in interviews the traditional stereotypes of Jews as miserly usurers. In 1985, for example, Godard spoke of Hollywood in the following terms: "What I find interesting in the cinema is that, from the beginning, there is the idea of debt. The real producer is, all the same, the image of the Central European Jew. They're the ones who invented the cinema, they brought it to Hollywood...Making a film is visibly producing debts." In 1981 on television, Godard expressed himself even more clearly: "Moses is my principal enemy...Moses, when he received the commandments, he saw images and translated them. Then he brought the texts, he didn't show what he had seen. That's why the Jewish people are accursed." Brody argues that these views towards Jews are likely the result of a variety of biographical and political elements in Godard's life, such as his pro-Palestinian politics and repugnance towards Hollywood. Brody has specifically criticized the "extremely selective and narrow use" of passages in his book. Brody notes that Godard's work has approached the Holocaust with "the greatest moral seriousness".

Vietnam War

Godard produced several pieces that directly address the Vietnam War. Furthermore, there are two scenes in ''Pierrot le fou'' that tackle the issue. The first is a scene that takes place in the initial car ride between Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). Over the car radio, the two hear the message "garrison massacred by the Viet Cong who lost 115 men". Marianne responds with an extended musing on the way the radio dehumanizes the Northern Vietnamese combatants.

In the same film, the lovers accost a group of American sailors along the course of their liberating crime spree. Their immediate reaction, expressed by Marianne, is "Damn Americans!" an obvious outlet of the frustration so many French communists felt towards American hegemony. Ferdinand then reconsiders, "That’s OK, we’ll change our politics. We can put on a play. Maybe they’ll give us some dollars." Marianne is puzzled but Ferdinand suggests that something the Americans would like would be the Vietnam War. The ensuing sequence is a makeshift play where Marianne dresses up as a stereotype Vietnamese woman and Ferdinand as an American sailor. The scene ends on a brief shot revealing a chalk message left on the floor by the pair, "Long live Mao!" (''Vive Mao!'').

Notably, he also participated in ''Loin du Vietnam'' (1967). An anti-war project, it consists of seven sketches directed by Godard (who used stock footage from ''La Chinoise''), Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.

Bertolt Brecht

Godard's engagement with German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht's theory of epic theatre and its prospect of alienating the viewer (''Verfremdungseffekt'') through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (in Brecht's case theater, but in Godard's, film). Brecht's influence is keenly felt through much of Godard's work, particularly before 1980, when Godard used filmic expression for specific political ends.

For example, ''Breathless''' elliptical editing, which denies the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema, forces the viewers to take on more critical roles, connecting the pieces themselves and coming away with more investment in the work's content. Godard also employs other devices, including asynchronous sound and alarming title frames, with perhaps his favorite being the character aside. In many of his most political pieces, specifically ''Week End'', ''Pierrot le fou'', and ''La Chinoise'', characters address the audience with thoughts, feelings, and instructions.

Marxism

A Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard’s early work. Godard’s direct interaction with Marxism does not become explicitly apparent, however, until ''Week End,'' where the name ''Karl Marx'' is cited in conjunction with figures such as Jesus Christ. A constant refrain throughout Godard's cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie’s consumerism, the commodification of daily life and activity, and man’s alienation — all central features of Marx’s critique of capitalism.

In an essay on Godard, philosopher and aesthetics scholar Jacques Ranciere states, "When in ''Pierrot le fou'', 1965, a film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word 'scandal' and the 'freedom' that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification, of pop art derision at consumerism, and of a feminist denunciation of women’s false 'liberation', was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story." The way Godard treated politics in his cinematic period was in the context of a joke, a piece of art, or a relationship, presented to be used as tools of reference, romanticizing the Marxist rhetoric, rather than solely being tools of education.

''Une femme mariée'' is also structured around Marx's concept of ''commodity fetishism''. Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which the spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis". He was very conscious of the way he wished to portray the human being. His efforts are overtly characteristic of Marx, who in his ''Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844'' gives one of his most nuanced elaborations, analyzing how the worker is alienated from his product, the object of his productive activity. Georges Sadoul, in his short rumination on the film, describes it as a "sociological study of the alienation of the modern woman".

Revolutionary period

The period that spans from May 1968 indistinctly into the 1970s has been subject to an even larger volume of varying labeling. They include everything from his "militant" period, to his "radical" period, along with terms as specific as "Maoist" and vague as "political". The period saw Godard align himself with a specific revolution and employ a consistent revolutionary rhetoric.

Films

Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s Godard became interested in Maoist ideology. He formed the socialist-idealist Dziga-Vertov cinema group with Jean-Pierre Gorin and produced a number of shorts outlining his politics. In that period he travelled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings. His films became intensely politicized and experimental, a phase that lasted until 1980.

According to Elliott Gould, he and Godard met to discuss the possibility of Godard directing Jules Feiffer's 1971 surrealist play ''Little Murders''. During this meeting Godard said his two favorite American writers were Feiffer and Charles M. Schulz. Godard soon declined the opportunity to direct; the job later went to Alan Arkin.

Jean-Pierre Gorin

After the events of May 1968, when the city of Paris saw total upheaval in response to the "authoritarian de Gaulle republic", and Godard's professional objective was reconsidered, he began to collaborate with like-minded individuals in the filmmaking arena. The most notable of these collaborations was with a young Maoist student, Jean-Pierre Gorin, who displayed a passion for cinema that grabbed Godard’s attention.

Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin collaborated to make a total of five films with strong Maoist messages. The most prominent film from the collaboration was ''Tout va bien'', which starred Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, at the time very big stars. Jean-Pierre Gorin now teaches the study of film at the University of California, San Diego.

The Dziga Vertov group

The small group of Maoists that Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group. Godard had a specific interest in Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker—whose adopted name is derived from the verb to spin or rotate and is best remembered for ''Man with the Movie Camera'' (1929) and a contemporary of both the great Soviet montage theorists, most notably Sergei Eisenstein, and Russian constructivist and avant-garde artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. Part of Godard’s political shift after May 1968 was toward a proactive participation in the class struggle.

1980 – 1999

His return to somewhat more traditional fiction was marked with ''Sauve qui peut (la vie)'' (1980), the first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: for example ''Passion'' (1982), ''Lettre à Freddy Buache'' (1982), ''Prénom Carmen'' (1984), and ''Grandeur et décadence'' (1986). There was, though, another flurry of controversy with ''Je vous salue, Marie'' (1985), which was condemned by the Catholic Church for alleged heresy, and also with ''King Lear'' (1987), an extraordinary but much-excoriated essay on William Shakespeare and language. Also completed in 1987 was a segment in the film ARIA which was based loosely from the plot of Armide; it is set in a gym and uses several arias by Jean-Baptiste Lully from his famous Armide.

His later films have been marked by great formal beauty and frequently a sense of requiem — ''Nouvelle Vague'' (New Wave, 1990), the autobiographical ''JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre'' (''JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December'', 1995), and ''For Ever Mozart'' (1996). ''Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro'' (''Germany Year 90 Nine Zero'', 1991) was a quasi-sequel to ''Alphaville'' but done with an elegiac tone and focus on the inevitable decay of age. During the 1990s he also produced perhaps the most important work of his career in the multi-part series ''Histoire(s) du cinéma'', which combined all the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement in the issues of twentieth-century history and the history of film itself.

2000 – present

Godard has continued to work actively into his seventies. In 2001, ''Eloge de l'Amour'' (''In Praise of Love'') was released. This film is notable for its use of both film and video – the first half captured in 35 mm black and white, the latter half shot in color on DV – and subsequently transferred to film for editing. The blending of film and video recalls the statement from ''Sauve Qui Peut'', in which the tension between film and video evokes the struggle between Cain and Abel. ''Eloge de l'Amour'' is rich with themes of aging, love, separation, and rediscovery as we follow the young artist Edgar contemplating a new work on the four stages of love (should it be an opera? a film?). He meets up with a lost love who is terminally ill, and at her passing we are thrust into the second half of the film where Edgar meets with her at her grandparent's house two years before. Producers for Steven Spielberg are negotiating the purchase of her grandparent's World War II story; the young woman attempts to stall the deal. This is one of Godard's most tender films, yet it is characteristically enigmatic and demands the viewer's full attention.

In ''Notre Musique'' (2004), Godard turns his focus to war, specifically, the war in Sarajevo, but with attention to all war, including the American Civil War, the war between the US and Native Americans, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The film is structured into three Dantean kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Godard's fascination with paradox is a constant in the film. It opens with a long, ponderous montage of war images that occasionally lapses into the comic; Paradise is shown as a lush wooded beach patrolled by US Marines.

Godard's latest film, Film Socialisme, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. It was released theatrically in France in May 2010.

He is rumored to be considering directing a film adaptation of Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," an award-winning book about the Holocaust.

Tributes

" From Hollywood to the Third World, from the mainstream to the Avant-Garde, Godard's name is perhaps the only one that occurs wherever cinema is discussed or produced." – Colin Myles MacCabe

" Like Picasso, Godard reveals to us throughout his work his world as source and subject; the artist's studio, the objects of his daily life, the references to and repetitions of his own works, the layering of words and images, the women he has loved, the horrors of war." – Mary Lea Bandy.

" Godard's is an art of plastic age, of fluent, pliable, putty characters." – Raymond Durgnat

" Godard's importance lies in his development of an authentic modernist cinema in opposition to (though, during the early period, at the same time within) mainstream cinema: it is with his work that film becomes central to our century's major aesthetic debate, the controversy developed through such figues as Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno as to whether realism or modernism is the more progressive form." – Robin Wood.

Filmography

References

Steritt, David. 1998. "Jean-Luc Godard Interviews". Mississippi: University Press.

Further reading

Godard, Jean-Luc. 2012 ''Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television''. Montreal: caboose. ISBN 978-0-9811941-1-6

Brody, Richard. 2008. ''Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard''. ISBN 978-0-8050-6886-3

Temple, Michael. Williams, James S. Witt, Michael. (eds) 2007. ''For Ever Godard''. London: Black Dog Publishing

Morrey, Douglas. 2005. ''Jean-Luc Godard''. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6759-6

MacCabe, Colin. 2003. ''Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70''. London: Bloomsbury.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. ''The Films of Jean-Luc Godard''. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Godard, Jean-Luc: ''The Future(s) of Film''. Three Interviews 2000/01. Bern — Berlin: Verlag Gachnang & Springer, 2002. ISBN 978-3-906127-62-0

Loshitzky, Yosefa. ''The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci''.

MacCabe, Colin. 1980. ''Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics''. London: Macmillan.

Silverman, Kaja and Farocki, Harun. 1998. ''Speaking About Godard''. New York: New York University Press.

Sterrit, David. 1999. ''The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Temple, Michael and Williams, James S. (eds). 2000. ''The Cinema alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000''. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Almeida, Jane. Dziga Vertov Group. São Paulo: witz, 2005. ISBN 85-98100-05-6.

Nicole Brenez, David Faroult, Michael Temple, James E. Williams, Michael Witt (eds), ''Jean-Luc Godard:Documents'', Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007

Godard Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)

Diane Stevenson, "Godard and Bazin" in the Andre Bazin special issue, Jeffrey Crouse (ed.), ''Film International'', Issue 30, Vol. 5, No. 6, 2007, pp. 32–40.

External links

Detailed filmography of Jean-Luc Godard on unifrance.org

Jean-Luc Godard at the Criterion Collection

Biography at newwavefilm.com

Jean-luc Godard Timeline

Jean-Luc Godard at ''The Guardian Film''

Jean-Luc Godard at ''The New York Times Movies''

''Guardian'' Interview (04/2005)

Video dialog -in french- between Godard and the french writer Stéphane Zagdanski about Literature and Cinema, November 2004

The Language of Emotion in Godard's Films, Anuja Madan, ''Cineaction'' 80, 2010

Category:1930 births Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:ECM artists Category:French experimental filmmakers Category:French film critics Category:French film directors Category:French Marxists Category:French people of Swiss descent Category:French screenwriters Category:Living people Category:Writers from Paris Category:European Film Awards winners (people) Category:Silver Bear for Best Director recipients Category:University of Paris alumni Category:Short film directors Category:Article Feedback Pilot

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Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
birth date	September 22, 1964
birth place	Namur, Belgium
occupation	Actor
website	}}

Benoît Poelvoorde (born 22 September 1964, in Namur, Belgium) is a Belgian actor and comedian who often associates cynicism, humour and drama in his movies. His mother was a grocer and his father a driver, who died when Poelvoorde was still young. He studied at the Jesuit boarding school of Godinne) and then left home at 17 to take classes at the Félicien Rops Technical Institute in Namur (Belgium) where he met Rémy Belvaux. He developed a passion for theater and became noted for his atypical interpretations. Not only he was destined to become a draughtsman, he also developed a second activity as a photographer. During his graphic design studies at the Ecole de la recherche graphique in Brussels, he also became friend with André Bonzel and, together with Rémy Belvaux, realized in 1988 ''Pas de C4 pour Daniel Daniel'', his first movie, a short student film (which he co-directed and co-wrote). It was a stylized trailer for a mock-spy film.

In 1992, Poelvoorde, Delvaux and Bonzel directed together their first long feature ''C'est arrivé près de chez vous'' (''Man Bites Dog'' internationally) originally a low-budget school graduation project (1992) and a kind of cynical "noir" movie, inspired from the famous Belgian series "Strip-Tease"'' ''which went on to become a critically acclaimed cult movie''.

Poelvoorde subsequently starred in two series on the French pay-channel Canal+ and several movies such as ''Les Randonneurs'', ''Le Boulet'' and ''Podium'', which made him famous in France and Belgium. In 2001, he starred in ''Le Vélo de Ghislain Lambert'', a funny and touching movie about one of his passions, bicycling. In 2002, he received the Jean Gabin Prize, which recognized the most hopeful young talents. Poelvoorde became member of the Cannes Film Festival Jury in 2004, on Quentin Tarantino's request, a big fan of ''Man Bites Dog'', who presided over the Jury, that year.

In 2005 he ranked in 7th place in the Walloon version of the Greatest Belgian. In the Flemish version he came in at nr. 400 outside the official list of nominations.

In 2008, his performance in the movie ''Astérix aux Jeux olympiques'' won him critical acclaim by both film critics and the public at large. His recurrent character as a pretentious person and a sore loser that he masters to perfection has drawn comparisons between him and the beloved French comic Louis de Funès. Poelvoorde does not confine himself to goofy characters, he also played tortured roles. He has starred in 2009 as Etienne Balsan in ''Coco avant Chanel'' by Anne Fontain, with Audrey Tautou; as Jean-René in 2010 with Isabelle Carré in a charming comedy by Jean-Pierre Améris '' Émotifs anonymes'' about two extremely shy persons who fall in love, and also as August Maquet in ''L'autre Dumas'' by Safy Nebbou, alongside Gérard Depardieu and Dominique Blanc, a movie about the creative ghostwriter, Maquet, whose played a crucial role in the production of French writer Alexandre Dumas' ''Three Musketeers''.

The actor mentioned in interviews, including in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir (February 6, 2010 "Oui, je suis bipolaire") that he suffered from bipolar disorder.

Filmography

2011 : ''Mon Pire Cauchemar'' by Anne Fontaine

2010 : ''Romantics Anonymous'' by Jean-Pierre Améris

2010 : ''Nothing to Declare'' by Dany Boon

2010 : ''Mammuth''

2010 : ''Dumas''

2009 : ''La guerre des miss by Patrick Leconte

2009 : ''Coco avant Chanel'' by Anne Fontaine

2008 : ''Asterix at the Olympic Games'' by Thomas Langmann and Frédéric Forestier

2007 : ''Louise Michel'' by Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine

2007 : ''Les Deux mondes'' by Daniel Cohen

2007 : ''Cowboy'' by Benoît Mariage

2006 : ''Selon Charlie'' by Nicole Garcia

2006 : ''Jean-Philippe'' by Laurent Tuel

2006 : ''Du jour au lendemain'' by Philippe Le Guay

2005 : ''Entre ses mains'' by Anne Fontaine

2005 : ''Akoibon'' by Édouard Baer

2004 : ''Podium'' by Yann Moix

2004 : ''Narco'' by Tristan Aurouet and Gilles Lellouche

2004 : ''Cinéastes à tout prix'' by Frédéric Sojcher

2004 : ''Atomik Circus'' by Didier Poiraud and Thierry Poiraud

2004 : ''Aaltra'' by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern

2002 : ''Rire et châtiment'' by Isabelle Doval

2002 : ''Le Boulet'' by Alain Berbérian

2002 : ''La Vie politique des Belges'' by Jan Bucquoy

2001 : ''Le Vélo de Ghislain Lambert'' by Philippe Harel

2000 : ''Les Portes de la gloire'' by Christian Merret-Palmair

1998 : ''Les Convoyeurs attendent'' by Benoît Mariage

1997 : ''Les Randonneurs'' by Philippe Harel

1992 : ''C'est arrivé près de chez vous'' (''Man Bites Dog'') by Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel

Voice acting

2009 : ''A Town Called Panic''

Short films

1997 : ''Le Signaleur''

1988 : ''Pas de C4 pour Daniel Daniel'' by Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel

External links

Theatre acting career summary (from ''L'Annuaire du Spectacle'' on the ''Centre de recherche et de documentation littéraires et théâtrales de la Communauté française de Belgique'' web site)

Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:Belgian actors Category:People from Namur (city) Category:Walloon people

de:Benoît Poelvoorde eo:Benoît Poelvoorde fr:Benoît Poelvoorde it:Benoît Poelvoorde nl:Benoît Poelvoorde ja:ブノワ・ポールヴールド pl:Benoît Poelvoorde ru:Пульворд, Бенуа