Jean Dréville

Jean Dréville (1906-1997) was the director of some forty feature films (La Cage aux Rossignols, La Ferme du Pendu, Copie Conforme, Normandie Niemen, La Fayette…). In his youth, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, Jean Dréville experienced an intense creative period as a photographer, graphic artist, assistant, magazine editor, critic, cameraman and director.

A friend of the avant-garde (Louis Deluc, Germaine Dulac, Epstein, Jean Grémillon among others), he developed a cinematic-photographic language between Pictorialism and Constructivism. Two of his modernist photographs appear among the twenty-four works presented by Pierre Bost in the book Photographies modernes (Librairie des arts décoratifs, Calavas, 1930), along with those of Ivens, Kertesz, Krull, Lotar, Parry, Sougez and Tabard. At the age of just twenty-three he made his first film, the first making-of in the history of cinema: a short film, Autour de l’argent, about Marcel L’Herbier’s feature film, L’Argent (1929).

In 1929, he went to Holland to shoot “Quand les épis se courbent”, an off-camera film, in the middle of nature, the first documentary of its kind, between the stories of Nicolas Bouvier and the films of Raymond Depardon.