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Jacques Demy (1931 - 1990) is a French realizer, also scenario writer, dialogist and lyric writer, producer and actor.

Biographical elements

Jacques Demy was born the June 5th 1931 with Pontchâteau close to Nantes in Loire-Atlantique (France). He is deceased the October 27th 1990 with Paris of a Brain hemorrhage. Jacques Demy is buried with Paris, with the Cimetière of Montparnasse (the 9th division).

He was married with Agnès Varda which paid homage to him through its films: Jacquot of Nantes (1991), the Young ladies was 25 years old (1993), the Universe of Jacques Demy (1995). Mathieu Demy is their son.

One of its characteristics is that its films are for the majority of sung films, sometimes entirely for two of them.

The cinema of Jacques Demy

The films of Jacques Demy grant a great place to the music and several of its films are in sung (according to the promotion of the Parapluies of Cherbourg ). It often called upon Michel Legrand to compose the musics, him even being harnessed with the texts, and going even on two occasions until carrying out entirely sung films: Umbrellas of Cherbourg and a room downtown . These two films of the remainder dissociate its fairy-like universe paradoxically to explore the sentimental one in a social description meticulous person. He is probably the only realizer apart from the the United States to have obtained an international success in the field of the musical comedy with the Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Palm of Gold to the Cannes festival) and the Young ladies of Rochefort .

The tales, the legends, even the fairy-like one, are very present in its films: Skin of Ass according to Charles Perrault, the player of flute in the legend of the player of flute of Hamelin, Carpark according to the myth of Orphée   ; in the Young ladies of Rochefort , he plays with the artifices of the tale, by modernizing it for serving best.

The border between reality and tale is also found in the localization of its films. Child of the seaside, many those occur in a port, border place between ground and sea, reality and dream, daily newspaper and escape, and space of meeting between several horizons: Lola and a room downtown in Nantes  ; Umbrellas of Cherbourg   ; Young ladies of Rochefort   ; the Bay of the Angels in Nice  ; Three Places for the 26 in Marseilles. It is in the latter film that it offered to Yves Montand his only role singing and dancing with the cinema.

Jacques Demy inserts winks into his preceding films in certain feature-length films, as if they formed together a cut out long story. For example Roland Cassard, diamond cutter in love with Lola Genevieve wife in Umbrellas of Cherbourg, after having made fortune with the the United States . In the same way, the mother and former dancer whom it meets in Nantes, before she leave to find her daughter in Cherbourg in her brother-in-law hairdresser, is cut out of pieces in Young ladies of Rochefort . By peeling his films, one realizes that no meeting is unimportant.

Creator of a work having marked several generations of spectators, it was not anybody to continue his way, except homages, sometimes parodic. Nevertheless, Jeanne and the formidable boy in 1998, takes again the bases of them by adapting them at the time.

Catalog of films

Short films

Feature-length films

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