Bertrand Tavernier, prodigious French filmmaker and American film scholar, dies at 79

Bertrand Tavernier, in Rome in 2019, Pacific Press

With the death today of the French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (Lyon, 1941) at the age of 79, two fundamental personalities for the cinema of the last half century disappear.

On the one hand, the filmmaker, director, screenwriter and producer, creator of a powerful filmography made up of some thirty films in which his love for the

(French policeman) and his ability to create polyhedral, truly human characters stands out.

On the other hand, the cinephile, one of the scholars of the seventh art, co-author in 1991 of the monumental

alongside Jean-Pierre Coursodon, a book devoured by generations of fans.

Tavernier not only knew about cinema: he was also an eminence in literature, gastronomy or music, for example.

A close friend of another walking encyclopedia of cinema, Martin Scorsese, legend has it that both used the Concorde Paris-New York flight to exchange video tapes, when getting a movie was complicated, and there were no video stores.

Tavernier has left films like

(1980);

the documentary

(1983);

the fascinating

(1986), with saxophonist Dexter Gordon;

(1989), about the trail of pain left by World War I;

(1992), a policeman stuck to the street;

(1995);

(1996);

(1999), about a teacher from the provinces;

the comedy

(2013) or

(2016), his last review of the cinema that marked him, because Tavernier was born in Lyon, a very Catholic city also cradle of cinema.

“When I was little, in the cinemas of Lyon there were

shows

.

They preceded the newscasts that ran just before the movie.

Lyon is a very Catholic city and it was shocking to face this kind of spectacle: it was incredible to experience in the same session the experience of doing something sinful and forbidden and discovering a cinematographic masterpiece:

and a

number

were a combination memorable of revolution and eroticism.

It would be interesting to see a film as religious as

, by Martin Scorsese, with a

number

”, he told Jordi Costa in an interview for that film.

For Tavernier, the best that could be said for a creator was Jacques Rivette's praise for Howard Hawks: "Someone who knew how to place the camera at the height of the man."

“This art of cinema is the perfect mirror to understand a country.

American cinema gives you a perfect image of what the United States is, and I hope this film will do the same with my country and its society ”, he told at the San Sebastián festival in 2016. He won five César awards (three as screenwriter for

and

and two in the direction of

and

and the award for best director in Cannes 1984 for