According to French media reports, the famous film critic Jean Douchet died in Paris on November 21, local time, at the age of 90.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Duchet worked for a long time in the French magazine "Film Manual", and together with Houmai, Godard, Truffaut, Levitte and others, he made great contributions to the rise of the "New Wave" of French cinema.
Jean Duchet
Unlike Houmai, Truffaut, and others who first wrote in the "Film Handbook" and later "wrote and directed" in their careers, Jean-Duchet insisted on doing his job as a film critic and film scholar all his life, and only shot a few short films, the most famous of which was called "Saint-Germain-des-Prés", which was used as a six-person platter in 1965 as a six-person platter of Paris vu par. ) was publicly released. furthermore. Duchet also played the role of the boyfriend of the male protagonist's mother in Truffaut's feature film debut Four Hundred Blows, cameo role as a journalist in Godard's feature film debut "Exhausted", and played a small supporting role in films such as Levitte's "Celine and Julie's Voyage".
Born on January 19, 1929 in the small town of Arras in northern France, Jean-Duchet moved to Paris after World War II and began writing film reviews in 1950, with his first article published in gazette du Cinéma, of which Houmae was the editor-in-chief. After completing his military service in 1957, Duchet joined the editorial board of the Film Handbook founded by the famous film critic André Bazin. The following year Bazin died, HouMai took over as editor-in-chief, and Duchet became his right-hand man. In 1963, there was a line struggle within the editorial board of the Film Handbook (one side advocated that film critics should move closer to the theories and new ideas of the times of Lévi Strauss, Roland Barthes and others; the other side insisted on the original line and paid attention to the aesthetic interpretation of classic works), after which Rivit replaced HouMai as editor-in-chief, and Duchey, who was like Houmai, who was partial to the latter, also left his job in anger and went to teach at the film school.
In the mid-1960s, Duchet devoted his spare time to organizing movie-going events. Until the end of his life, he insisted on hosting various screenings in places such as the Paris Film Archive, and his profound film knowledge and unique film taste nourished generations of French fans, including Arnold de Precen, Xavier Bois and others who later became film directors.
Duchet often said that film criticism is an art of love. He later curated various retrospective exhibitions of works by John Ford, Hitchcock, Orson Wells, and Kenji Mizoguchi, and most of them used "The Art of Love" as the title of the festival's activities, and his 1987 film criticism collection was also named "The Art of Love".
Film Critics Collection "The Art of Love"