Jacques Demy

23 films · 1951 to 2026
Born 5 June 1931, Pontchâteau, Loire-Atlantique, France · Died 27 October 1990

Jacques Demy was a French director, screenwriter and lyricist. He appeared at the height of the French New Wave alongside contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Demy's films are celebrated for their visual style, which drew upon diverse sources such as classic Hollywood musicals, the plein-air realism of his French New Wave colleagues, fairy tales, jazz, Japanese manga, and the opera. His films contain overlapping continuity (i.e., characters cross over from film to film), lush musical scores (typically composed by Michel Legrand) and motifs like teenage love, labor rights, chance encounters, incest, and the intersection between dreams and reality. He was married to Agnès Varda, another prominent director of the French New Wave.

Biography adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.

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Jacques Demy

Photo: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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