Jacques Prévert

Biography: life and films

Of all the writers who contributed to French cinema in the 1930s and '40s, perhaps none had a greater impact than Jacques Prévert. It was through his fruitful collaboration with film director Marcel Carné that Prévert developed a new style of cinema, poetic realism, which, with its doom-laden fatalism, would have a strong influence on American film noir of the 1940s. As Carné's reputation came under fire from the critics (notably those on the review magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma) in the 1950s, Prévert prospered, both as a screenwriter and as an internationally acclaimed poet.

Jacques Prévert was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, on 4th February 1900. From an early age, young Jacques showed a keen interest in literature and poetry, which was nurtured by his mother and his father, the drama critic André Prévert. A rebellious adolescent, Prévert left school after completing his primary education and began working in a department store in Paris, the first in a succession of odd jobs that gave him an income to help support his family.

In 1918, Prévert began his military service and, after a period in Tunisia, was stationed in Constantinople, Turkey, where he met Marcel Duhamel, who would later become a well-known writer. It was Duhamel who provided Prévert with accommodation on his return to Paris, at 54 Rue du Château in 1922, which became the meeting place for the surrealist movement, led by André Breton. Prévert was an active participant in the group, although he left the movement after an acrimonious falling out with Breton in 1930.

It was in 1932 that Jacques Prévert founded Le Groupe Octobre, a travelling theatre company with Communist sympathies for which he wrote various stage plays. It was around this time that Prévert began appearing in films (as a bit player) and writing screenplays. His first film script was for L'affaire est dans le sac (1932), directed by his younger brother Pierre. A few years later, he would write the dialogue for Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935). It was around this time that Prévert met Joseph Kosma, an impoverished Hungarian musician who would become a close personal friend.

In 1936, the year after dissolving Le Groupe Octobre, Prévert began his collaboration with Marcel Carné, the most successful professional relationship of his career. Although their first film Jenny (1936) was not a great success and is largely overlooked today, it provided the foundation for what was to follow. After the bizarre black comedy Drôle de drame (1937), the Carné-Prévert partnership delivered a series of masterworks of poetic realism: Quai des brumes (1938), Hôtel du Nord (1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939).

The outbreak of the second world war brought a temporary end to Prévert's association with Carné. Having been dismissed from the French army in 1940, Prévert left Paris and settled in the South of France, where he continued working as a screenwriter, along with his friends Alexandre Trauner, the renowned designer, and musician Joseph Kosma.

Over the following decade, Prévert worked with many distinguished filmmakers, including Christian-Jaque, Jean Grémillion and André Cayatte and Paul Grimault. However, it was with his former collaborator Marcel Carné that he would deliver his finest achievement for the cinema, the screenplay for the monumental Les Enfants du paradis (1945), regarded by many as the greatest of all French films.

Whilst working as a screenwriter, Jacques Prévert was also occupied writing poetry. In 1945, he published his first collection of poems, in a book entitled Paroles, which sold two million copies. Several of Prévert's poems (including Les Feuilles Mortes) were set to music by Joseph Kosma and became well-known popular songs, interpreted by such stars as Edith Piaf, Juliette Gréco and Yves Montand.

After the war, Carné and Prévert completed one last film together, Les Portes de la Nuit (1946). Their partnership ended in 1948 when their film La Fleur de L'âge was aborted mid-way through production. Whilst Carné's film career languished (thanks to a protracted onslaught from the critics), Prévert's flourished and he continued working on screenplays throughout the 50s and 60s, including Albert Lamorisse's acclaimed short film Bim (1950) and Jean Delannoy's prestigious production Notre Dame de Paris (1956).

In the last two decades of his life, Jacques Prévert devoted more of his time to his poetry and published many collections of his works, often to great acclaim. In 1971, he moved to Omonville-la-Petite in Normandy, where he lived until his death in 1977. He died from lung cancer at the age of 77 and was survived by his daughter, Michèle. Today, Jacques Prévert's cultural legacy is immense and highly valued. His poems are well known throughout the world and studied in French schools, whilst most of the films that he worked on have become all-time classics and include some of the greatest that French cinema has given us.

Filmography

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