Jean-Daniel Pollet

A foundry in Perche was established in 1876. This is a final homage paid to the ancestral occupation of foundrymen, whose actions have been repeated innumerable times through the years and which are now going to disappear forever.

He inhabits the world just like he inhabits his house: motionless. A serious accident nailed him there: in a house in the middle of a large garden. No longer can he dash around the world: day after day, he contemplates it from his house. He’s a filmmaker. He’s only ever lived to make movies.

Six vignettes set in different sections of Paris, by six directors. St. Germain des Pres (Douchet), Gare du Nord (Rouch), Rue St. Denis (Pollet), and Montparnasse et Levallois (Godard) are stories of love, flirtation and prostitution; Place d'Etoile (Rohmer) concerns a haberdasher and his umbrella; and La Muette (Chabrol), a bourgeois family and earplugs.

As a rereading of his films, "Contretemps" (in the fight against time), Jean-Daniel Pollet brings together excerpts of his films and a report by Jean Baronnet. The author Philippe Sollers and philosopher Julia Kristeva voice their thoughts.

Spinoza, attempting to discover why his son committed suicide, meets his girlfriend and his rival for her affections.

[Here] Pollet made a work that is the very definition of what French critics like to call an ovni or ufo (as in ‘unidentified filmic object’). [It] has been described as being ‘like a comet in the sky of French cinema,’ an ‘unknown masterpiece,’ and an ‘unprecedented’ work that refuses interpretation even as it has provoked reams of critical writing. Its rhythmic collage of images – a girl on a gurney, a fisherman, Greek ruins, a Sicilian garden, a Spanish corrida – is accompanied by an abstract commentary written by Sollers, and only the somber lyricism of Antoine Duhamel’s score holds the film’s elements together. At first viewing, you fear that [it] might fly apart into incoherent fragments. Instead, over the course of its 45 minutes it invents its own rules, and you realize you’re watching something like the filmic channeling of an ancient ritual.

A man who lives by himself becomes increasingly concerned that he is not alone. Based on the short story by Guy de Maupassant.

From Provence to Greece, a journey on the mortal remains and ruins of ancient civilizations.

A more polished version of Pourvu, set in a black cha-cha nightclub. Relying more upon looks, faces, and unease, rather than gags or dialogue, Pollet sets the cool elegance of the club's manager against the decidedly uncool Melki and his sartorial inadequacies.

In 1944, in Paris, the leader of a resistance network is looking for the traitor who gave away a radio operator.

About images and photographs of real estate and specific objects of the urban landscape, a voice speaks to us of the search for something that is unknown and hidden from the view of everyone in Paris. The film starts from the disappearance of the Bièvre river to talk about the pollution problems.

In a cul-de-sac in the Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, Leon shares two rooms with his sister Marie. In one, he receives his clients: he is a tailor. In the other, Marie receives her own: she is a clairvoyant. Leon was happy until he learned what Marie was hiding from him. She is actually a prostitute, and Maxime, her supposed fiancé, is her pimp. On the same day, Leon also discovers love in the form of Arlette, a provincial young woman picked up by Marie.

Francesco, a young Sicilian aristocrat, scars an aging gangster who has set out to take away his property. The gangster vows to obtain vengeance, and Francesco is forced to flee across Greece with his girl friend, pursued by his antagonist's vicious henchmen.

Leon who works as a bathhouse attendant discovers a passion for the tango that will change his life. He falls in love with Fumée, a young and pretty prostitute who becomes his partner in tango contests.

A homage to journalist Francis Ponge in a film that its author regarded as “natural.”

Pollet provides an insight into life on the leper colony of Spinalonga, an island off Crete, through the eyes of Raimondakis, who tells the story of his life to the camera after having been excluded from his community to spend years of his life on the island with his fellow sufferers. Themes addressed include love, community, companionship and death and the importance of these values to all people whatever their state of health.

In a big isolated house, Mikael, a musician, is composing a psalm. A young woman, Linda, comes to retreive a suitcase belonging to Sébastien, her companion and Mikael's friend. It contains hundreds of photographs from all over the world. While he is travelling, Sébastien has asked Linda to organise the photographs with a view to an exhibition. Mikael invites Linda to reside with him. She accepts. That is the heart of the film – an intertwining of photographs which, juxtaposed by Linda, begin to speak. In parallel with this, Linda receives cassette-letters from Sébastien. A subtle relationship is established between Linda, the young debutante, and Mikael, the man of experience. Mikael goes off to direct his psalm, Linda stays alone. The walls become covered with photographs – wall of happiness, wall of misery – the fight between Good and Evil. Linda learns of the accidental death of Sébastien and stays alone.

This film is dedicated to Mas-Félipe Delavouët, the poet discovered by Lawrence Durrell, who wrote 14,000 verses in Provençal over a period of thirty years, and who died on November 18, 1990. "The sky, history and Mediterranean and Provençal myths are the inexhaustable wellspring of this man rooted down there, near Salon-de-Provence" (J.-D. Pollet). "Mas-Félipe Delavouët wrote five books in Provençal, 14,000 verses. A sort of "Odyssey". Of myths. What is stunning in him is that he always talks of disappearances. Cities, works, men, writings, television, etc., everything has to disappear. In order to be reborn. No pain. A sort of hand-to-hand of man and nature. During the filming, I would simply throw out some words... For example, one time I said "creation" and he said: "creation doesn't exist..., creation is before me..., I can only read creation"; this sentence describes Delavouët perfectly (J.-D. Pollet, 1989 and 1993).

A lonely dishwasher hires a prostitute and brings her to his dingy apartment to enliven his dreary life for a night.

This documentary about the cod fishing industry was filmed on a fishing boat near the Arctic Circle.

An alien, with the ability to travel through time, visits our planet at various eras.

"I was interested by the fact that some old guy, after the Parthenon’s glamour, devoted himself in a much smaller temple, where there was no white marble, no nothing. All Greek temples are dedicated to Apollo etc, and this particular one was not dedicated to anyone and is in a place where there never was a city nearby, in a kind of wasteland, in a ditch. But, just by going up a bit –you are in the centre of Peloponissos- on a clear day, you can see the sea on both your left and right. I went back there, at least six, seven or eight times, as if I wanted to think or find myself. So, at the temple in Bassae, I made a short 10 minute film and I was lucky enough to encounter two days of clouds and mist between the columns."

A cinematographic poem in the form of variations around the theme of Robinson, a utopian fable freely inspired by Daniel Defoe's novel, which speaks above all of solitude: the immense weakness of today's man in the face of loneliness is no longer that of the hero of the eighteenth century.

In 1971, Jean-Daniel Pollet & Guy Seligmann directed for French TV a documentary about French artist César Baldaccini. It was part of L'invité du dimanche show.