Trivia

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1978

In his early shorts La Rentrée des classes (1955), Blue Jeans (1958), and first feature, Adieu Philippine (1963), Jacques Rozier captured the spirit of the younger generation in France in the late 1950s and early 60s, perhaps more successfully than any of his contemporaries.

One notable short is his 1964 work Paparazzi, exploring Brigitte Bardot's relationship with the photographers trying to capture her every move during her time on the Italian island of Capri for the shoot of Godard's classic "Contempt". It was one of the first works to explore the rise of celebrity culture and the loss of privacy that came with international stardom.

Rozier was a French film director and screenwriter.

His work was quintessentially New Wave: freewheeling, naturalistic and spontaneous.

Rozier never achieved the renown of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Claude Chabrol or Eric Rohmer, but his work had its place in the French New Wave and pushed boundaries in ways that laid a path for filmmakers today.

His movie Blue Jeans (1958) played at a short film festival in the city of Tours, where it caught the attention of then-film critic Godard, who highlighted it as one of the stand-out works of the edition alongside shorts by Varda and Demy.

He was one of the lesser-known members of the French New Wave movement and has collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard.

Three of his films have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

His final film "Fifi Martingale", starring Jean Lefebvre as a successful theatre director and writer who rewrite his new comedy to escape the clutches of a cabal with unexpected consequences, premiered in Venice in 2021 but never secured theatrical distribution.

Rozier's first feature Adieu Philippine premiered in the inaugural edition of Cannes Critics' Week in 1962 alongside films such as U.S. director Rick Carrier's Strangers In The City and I Nuovi Angeli by Italy's Ugo Gregoretti.

After studying at the early French cinema school IDHEC, Rozier cut his directing teeth as a TV assistant, while making his own shorts including Rentrée des Classes (1956) and Blue Jeans (1958).

Adieu Philippine (1963), Rozier's feature film debut, was listed as a forgotten masterpiece in the British film magazine Sight & Sound in 2007.

Featuring a young amateur cast scouted on the streets of Paris and characterized by an Italian neo-realist aesthetic, his film 'Adieu Philippine' authentically captured the mood among French youth at the time. This youthful vibe continued in his second film Du Côté d'Orouët (1971), an observational work following three young women on holiday in Brittany.

Rozier only made five features across his career but also kept busy with shorts, music videos and TV series.

In 1996, the La Rochelle International Film Festival paid tribute to Jacques Rozier by devoting a retrospective to him.

In 2002 he received the Carrosse d'or for his entire career.

Rozier revealed the comic talent of actor Bernard Menez.

The fact that few of his film projects came to fruition earned him a reputation as a dilettante. He did, however, make a lot of television films, particularly during the ORTF period.

He was evicted from his accommodation in Neuilly-sur-Seine on the 15th July 2021 , and a petition was launched to help him.

He did an internship on the set of French Cancan by Jean Renoir.

With the money earned on television, he bought film to shoot Back to school (1955). The film, made in 1955, can be considered the first New Wave film.

In 1997, all of his cinematographic work was awarded the René-Clair prize.

He rejected the term 'actor direction' in the sense that he did not claim to direct the actors but simply to be receptive to their interpretation.

He received the Jean-Vigo prize for Maine Océan (1986).

His films, little distributed, did not meet a great public success but all obtained a critical success.

After his studies, he worked as a television assistant with directors like Marcel Bluwal , Stellio Lorenzi and Claude Loursais , who shot dramas in the Buttes Chaumont studios. Rozier said he was impressed and influenced by their speed of execution and their know-how.

From November 2 to 26, 2001, a complete retrospective of Jacques Rozier presented at the Center Pompidou revealed that the director's work is not limited to the five feature films released in theaters. He has in fact produced about thirty works of different formats, different durations and varying length and format for television and cinema.

In 2006, he launched the project to produce a comedy entitled Le Perroquet parisien, initially Le Perroquet bleu, about the world of cinema. Filming was interrupted due to production problems.

He studied at IDHEC in 1948-1949. For his graduation film, he went to the Provence with his reels and a camera and filmed the first images of his future short film "Rentrée des classes".