Alain JessuaLife Upside Down
June 5 to 26, 2025
French genre cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s has yet to undergo any enthusiastic rediscovery. At one time a guarantor of great popular success in cinemas and on television, including in German-speaking territories, the immense weight of the nouvelle vague has degraded it to what seems like a shameful memory. Films by its main protagonists such as Henri Verneuil, Yves Boisset, or Philippe de Broca, all masters of mise-en-scène and auteurs, rarely find their way into the programs of cinematheques or film literature.
The work of the director Alain Jessua (1932-2017) is central to any discourse about the surprising breadth and artistic value of this aspect of French film history. From 1956 to 1997, he created a comparably small oeuvre of 9 features and one short film, proof of the classical phenomenon in genre cinema that films and lead actors are better known than the directors: Traitement de choc (with Alain Delon and Annie Girardot), Les chiens (with Gérard Depardieu), or Paradis pour tous (with Patrick Dewaere and Jacques Dutronc) sound more familiar than the name Alain Jessua. This retrospective hopes to change this definitively.
The child of Jewish parents, Jessua survived the Holocaust. He discovered his love for cinema as a teenager while secretly visiting the set of Julien Duvivier, made possible by Duvivier's nephew, Jessua's schoolmate. The 19-year-old Jessua first worked as an assistant director on Jacques Becker's Casque d'or (1952), followed by formative jobs assisting directors such as Max Ophüls (Madame de.., 1953, and Lola Montès, 1955) and Marcel Carné (Terrain vague, 1960). Shortly after the meteoric breakthrough of Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer, he made his own debut as a feature film director in 1964. As much as La vie à l'envers (1964) breathes the spirit of a new kind of movie, it was not associated with the nouvelle vague – in an interview, Jessua later speculated that for his hands-on film training alone, the "journalist directors" did not acknowledge him. Yet in the sense of the politique des auteurs, as solo or co-author, he found his way to a personal and in some respects unique signature: In the guise of popular cinema, his films are marked by their strong social consciousness, an atypical melancholy, and their examination of the future of humankind in a world which increasingly automates bodies and souls. In his work with actors – he cast French cinema's stars of the day in the lead roles – Jessua found, as he himself said, his greatest joy. With the decline of "classic" genre cinema, his film career also came to an end: His last theatrical film – no longer projectable due to a lack of available prints – only received a meager theatrical release in 1997. In 1999, Jessua turned to writing and published six novels.
The stunning 35mm prints in this retrospective will soon be unavailable. This makes them an even greater invitation to discover Jessua's idiosyncratic and mischievous films, haunting in their characterization, virtuosic in their formal qualities, and strikingly contemporary. (Gary Vanisian / Translation: Ted Fendt)
In collaboration with Filmkollektiv Frankfurt e.V.
French genre cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s has yet to undergo any enthusiastic rediscovery. At one time a guarantor of great popular success in cinemas and on television, including in German-speaking territories, the immense weight of the nouvelle vague has degraded it to what seems like a shameful memory. Films by its main protagonists such as Henri Verneuil, Yves Boisset, or Philippe de Broca, all masters of mise-en-scène and auteurs, rarely find their way into the programs of cinematheques or film literature.
The work of the director Alain Jessua (1932-2017) is central to any discourse about the surprising breadth and artistic value of this aspect of French film history. From 1956 to 1997, he created a comparably small oeuvre of 9 features and one short film, proof of the classical phenomenon in genre cinema that films and lead actors are better known than the directors: Traitement de choc (with Alain Delon and Annie Girardot), Les chiens (with Gérard Depardieu), or Paradis pour tous (with Patrick Dewaere and Jacques Dutronc) sound more familiar than the name Alain Jessua. This retrospective hopes to change this definitively.
The child of Jewish parents, Jessua survived the Holocaust. He discovered his love for cinema as a teenager while secretly visiting the set of Julien Duvivier, made possible by Duvivier's nephew, Jessua's schoolmate. The 19-year-old Jessua first worked as an assistant director on Jacques Becker's Casque d'or (1952), followed by formative jobs assisting directors such as Max Ophüls (Madame de.., 1953, and Lola Montès, 1955) and Marcel Carné (Terrain vague, 1960). Shortly after the meteoric breakthrough of Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer, he made his own debut as a feature film director in 1964. As much as La vie à l'envers (1964) breathes the spirit of a new kind of movie, it was not associated with the nouvelle vague – in an interview, Jessua later speculated that for his hands-on film training alone, the "journalist directors" did not acknowledge him. Yet in the sense of the politique des auteurs, as solo or co-author, he found his way to a personal and in some respects unique signature: In the guise of popular cinema, his films are marked by their strong social consciousness, an atypical melancholy, and their examination of the future of humankind in a world which increasingly automates bodies and souls. In his work with actors – he cast French cinema's stars of the day in the lead roles – Jessua found, as he himself said, his greatest joy. With the decline of "classic" genre cinema, his film career also came to an end: His last theatrical film – no longer projectable due to a lack of available prints – only received a meager theatrical release in 1997. In 1999, Jessua turned to writing and published six novels.
The stunning 35mm prints in this retrospective will soon be unavailable. This makes them an even greater invitation to discover Jessua's idiosyncratic and mischievous films, haunting in their characterization, virtuosic in their formal qualities, and strikingly contemporary. (Gary Vanisian / Translation: Ted Fendt)
In collaboration with Filmkollektiv Frankfurt e.V.
