Pierre Kast

Early life and the Resistance

Kast was born in Paris on 22 September 1920 into a Protestant bourgeois family. He attended the Lycée Henri IV before studying literature at the Sorbonne.^[1] During the German occupation of France, he became active in the French Resistance as a member of the Communist Students of Paris, serving as a student leader of the Young Communists.^[1] He was one of the organisers of the demonstration of 11 November 1940 in the Latin Quarter against the occupation.^[1] Arrested shortly afterwards, he was held at La Santé Prison for five months before going underground. He co-founded the Union of Patriotic Students in 1943 at the instigation of the clandestine French Communist Party, and evaded police searches for four years while participating in armed resistance groups operating in Paris.^[1]

Career

After the Liberation, Kast founded the University Film Club in 1945 and worked as an assistant to Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française.^[1][2] He began writing film criticism for Action and for Le Patriote Résistant, a magazine published by the National Federation of Deported and Interned Resistance Fighters.^[1][3] Alongside the writer Boris Vian and the novelist Raymond Queneau, he co-founded the Club des Savanturiers on 26 December 1951, a discussion group dedicated to American science fiction.^[4]

He was a contributor to Cahiers du cinéma from its first issue in 1951 and wrote regularly for the journal throughout the decade.^[5] His criticism focused on mise-en-scène as the locus of directorial authorship, and he was among the earliest French critics to champion American genre directors such as Robert Aldrich.^[6] He was also an early voice on the question of women's representation in the film industry; in issue no. 30 of Cahiers, he published an essay attacking the systematic exclusion of women from directing.^[7]

Concurrently with his critical work, Kast built a career as an assistant director, working with Jean Grémillon on Pattes blanches (1949) and L'Étrange Madame X (1951), with René Clément on Jeux interdits (1952), with Jean Renoir on French Cancan (1955), and with Preston Sturges on The Diary of Major Thompson (1955).^[8] With Grémillon, he also co-directed the short film Les Charmes de l'existence (1949).^[2] He was a co-signatory of the Groupe des Trente manifesto advocating for short filmmaking in France, and directed a number of acclaimed shorts during the 1950s, including Les Désastres de la guerre (1951) and architectural documentaries on Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Le Corbusier.^[8]

His first feature film was the fantasy comedy Un amour de poche (1957). His subsequent features pursued two distinct veins: literate examinations of romantic and sexual relationships among the bourgeoisie — a mode sometimes described as marivaudage — and politically inflected science fiction. Le Bel Âge (1960), co-written with fellow Cahiers critic Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, was an episodic exploration of sexual relationships. Vacances portugaises (1963) followed a group of wealthy friends as their romantic illusions collapsed over a weekend in Portugal. Les Soleils de l'Île de Pâques (1972) was a mystical science fiction film in which six individuals across the globe receive telepathic transmissions drawing them to Easter Island. La Guérilléra (1982) was a historical drama centred on armed resistance and political violence.^[8][1] Though often grouped with the French New Wave, his literary sensibility and political commitments also placed him in proximity to the Left Bank filmmakers.^[9]

Kast was also a novelist. His works include Les Vampires de l'Alfama (1975), set in eighteenth-century Portugal during the rule of the Marquis of Pombal, which used vampire fiction as an allegory for political and sexual oppression.^[2]

From the late 1960s he found it increasingly difficult to finance the original projects he favoured.^[1] His final film, L'Herbe rouge (1985), was a television adaptation of the novel by Boris Vian.^[1] On 20 October 1984, having been injured in an accident on a set at Cinecittà in Rome, Kast died of a cardiac arrest during his medical repatriation by air to Paris. He was 64. His death occurred one day before that of François Truffaut.^[1]

As director

As screenwriter only

As assistant director