Bertrand Tavernier
Bertrand Tavernier (1941–2021) was a French filmmaker, screenwriter, and tireless cinephile-historian whose career ranged across social-realist drama, period epic, war film, jazz portrait, and book-length scholarship. Born in Lyon to the writer René Tavernier (himself a longtime president of French PEN), he founded a film club at the Sorbonne and dropped out after Jean-Pierre Melville hired him as an assistant. He directed his first feature, The Clockmaker, in 1974, won Best Director at Cannes for A Sunday in the Country (1984), and made the elegiac Round Midnight (1986) — a portrait of an aged American tenor sax player exiled in Paris, played by Dexter Gordon — which won an Academy Award for Herbie Hancock's score. His later work includes Life and Nothing But, L.627, Captain Conan, the historical comedy The Princess of Montpensier, and the encyclopedic documentary My Journey Through French Cinema.