Jacques Rozier, the last figure of the “real” New Wave

Filmmaker of the great outdoors and the open sea, Jacques Rozier, who died at the age of 96, became thanks to a handful of films only a figure of the New Wave, admired by his peers and by critics. He notably received the Jean Vigo prize in 1986 for Maine Océan, the René Clair prize in 1997 for all of his work, the Carrosse d'or 2002 at Cannes, he directed Adieu Philippine (1962), Du Côté d' Orouët (1973) and The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976).

Four films in more than half a century... He shot two others, Fifi martingale (2001), never released in theaters, and Le parroquet parisien (2007), which remained unfinished.

Anar with a tender heart, a lover of crossroads, a sometimes uncontrollable director, sometimes a dabbler, but also an obsessive researcher of the right image, he has also shot around twenty short films, often noticed, and worked for television.

In 2019, Jean-Luc Godard (since deceased) welcomed the trace left by Jacques Rozier in French cinema: “When Agnès Varda died, I thought: the real New Wave, there are only two of us left. Me and (...) Jacques Rozier who started a little before me». The New Wave movement, born at the end of the 1950s, intended to break with classic cinematographic techniques in favor of experimentation and an individualistic, even iconoclastic approach. Besides Jacques Rozier, its most emblematic figures are Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy and Éric Rohmer. “Of New Wave filmmakers, Rozier is the one who wanders. He who likes everything to go wrong, to better fuel his very particular sense of dramaturgy (…)”, welcomed the announcement of his death to the Cinémathèque française.

He was born on November 10, 1926 in Paris. A graduate of IDHEC (the film school that became Fémis) in 1947, he was Jean Renoir's assistant for French Cancan (1955), directed short films such as Paparazzi and Le Parti des choses (both in 1963) on behind the scenes of the filming of Contempt by Godard. In 1962, his first feature film, Adieu Philippine, was released. A bittersweet chronicle of French youth against a backdrop of the Algerian war, it became one of the flagship films of the New Wave.

François Truffaut and Godard support him. However, he had little success. The same fate for the next film, eleven years later, On the side of Orouët, the story (filmed in 16 mm initially) of a middle-class family on vacation.

Jacques Rozier calls on Pierre Richard, then star of French cinema, to play in The Castaways of Turtle Island. The film works a little better. We find there his humor tinged with cynicism and a taste for dreamlike atmospheres. It tells the story of two employees of a travel agency who launch a new tourist concept à la Robinson Crusoé. In the end, it's a fiasco. Maine Océan (1985) recounts the journey, or rather the pataphysical trip to the west of France, of eccentric characters: a Brazilian singer, two train conductors (Bernard Menez and Luis Rego), a hysterical lawyer and an irascible fisherman .

Your films “have the false lightness, the freshness that one finds only in the first films (...). All your films look like first films”, said the young filmmaker Guillaume Brac in 2019 during a meeting organized by Télérama with the old master. "The French directors following in your wake, I'm thinking of Sophie Letourneur, Justine Triet and myself, have in common that they wrote and shot their first film in a few weeks, with a script that was rarely complete, a extremely limited funding. Conditions that go against the current norm where writing can take years,” he added. To which Jacques Rozier, still lively despite his age, had replied: “As soon as I hear someone tell me that he has been refining his screenplay for two years, I want to tell him to keep it for himself. Cinema is about risk and desire. Like love".