June 20 - Jean-Daniel Pollet

Happy Birthday, Jean-Daniel Pollet! Born today in 1936, this French screenwriter and film director was most active in the 1960s and 1970s. 

 
Born to an haut bourgeois family, Pollet studied political science in the mid-1950s in Paris, where he frequented the Cinémathèque Française. 

 
He also later fell in with two groups of Young Turks: the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd (a French film magazine) and those attached to the French avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel.  

 
Pollet 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 essayist and poet Francis Ponge. 

 
In the early 1960s, Pollet began exploring another approach to filmmaking with the work that he is best known for directing. This was the 1963 French short/experimental film 'Méditerranée', documenting the seas and shores of the Mediterranean Sea. 

 
Shot in color, Pollet had worked on the film for over two years with German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff ('The Tin Drum').  

 
'Méditerranée' was also produced by Iranian-born Swiss film director and producer Barbet Schroeder ('Reversal of Fortune'), with music written by French composer, orchestra conductor and music teacher Antoine Duhamel. 

 
With a runtime of only forty-five minutes, 'Méditerranée' is cited as one of Pollet's most influential films.  

 
According to American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, it directly influenced French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 French-Italian Technicolor drama/romance film 'Le Mepris' ('Contempt), released later the same year. 

 
While Godard was preparing 'Contempt', he saw 'Méditerranée' and wrote a short piece in Cahiers. 

 
In it, he described the film as “smooth, round shots abandoned on the screen like a pebble on the shore,” and sequences inspired by Pollet’s film found their way into the multiple intertextual weave of Godard’s own modernist take on the ancients. 

 
Footage for 'Méditerranée' was shot around the Mediterranean, including at a Greek temple, a Sicilian garden, the sea, idols, a fisherman, a bullfighter, and a girl on an operating table. 

 
Pollet had also tried to create a form of poetic film, using texts and commentaries by writers such as Ponge, French writer and critic Philippe Sollers and French writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and translator Jean Thibaudeau. 

 
Pollet would describe himself as “the younger brother of the New Wave.” The link between the worlds of literature and film would become a constant feature of his work. 

 
All that remains is for this New Wave extremist to learn how to tell stories or to get by without them,” Cahiers observed. “In any case, Pollet is certainly the one whose future orientation seems the least predictable.”

Among his films, Pollet is also known for 'Line of Sight'('La ligne de mire') (1960),'Une balle au coeur' ('Devil at my Heels' (1966), and 'L'acrobate' ('The Acrobat')(1976).  

 
In the 1990s, Pollet was paralyzed after a train accident, and so he filmed his last works in the areas around his house in the French town of Cadenet.  

 
In 2004, when Pollet realized that his death was approaching, he wrote his last screenplay. The was for his 2006 French documentary film 'Jour après jour' ('Day After Day'). It was later finished by French film director Jean-Paul Fargier.  

 
Pollet passed on in Cadenet, Vaucluse, France on September 9, 2004. He was 68. 

 
Pollet had been active from 1958–2000. 

 
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