Bertrand Tavernier, a French director best known in the United States for “’Round Midnight”, the 1986 film that earned Dexter Gordon an Oscar nomination for his performance as a New York jazz musician trying to put his life and career on track in Paris, died on Thursday in Sainte-Maxime, in southeastern France. He was 79 years old.
The Institut Lumiere, a Lyon film organization of which he was president, posted the news of his death on Facebook. The cause was not given.
Mr. Tavernier made about 30 feature films and documentaries and was a regular on the film festival circuit, winning the award for best director in Cannes in 1984 for “A Sunday in the Country”, what Roger Ebert called “a story elegant and delicate about the hidden currents in a family ”headed by an elderly painter who lives outside Paris.
Tavernier worked mainly as a film critic and publicist until 1974, when he directed his first feature, “O Relojoeiro de São Paulo”, the story of a man whose son is accused of murder. The film, more character study than police drama, quickly established it in France and garnered praise abroad.
“The Watchmaker” is an extraordinary film, “wrote Ebert,” all the more because it tries to show us the very complicated functioning of the human personality, and to do it with grace, a little humor and a lot of style. “
French actor Philippe Noiret played his father in that film. The two worked together frequently and got together again in 1976 in another story about a murderer, “The judge and the murderer”, with Noiret playing the judge. The cast also included Isabelle Huppert, who would appear in other Tavernier films.
Mr. Tavernier soon started working with international casts. “Death Watch”, a 1980s science fiction thriller, starred Harvey Keitel as a television reporter who had an eye replaced by a camera in order to secretly film the last days of a woman – played by Romy Schneider – who appears to have a terminal illness.
“‘Round Midnight” featured a cast full of musicians – not only Mr. Gordon, a noted saxophonist, but also Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and others, including Herbie Hancock, who won an Oscar for his original soundtrack.
“The script, by Mr. Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is rich and relaxed, with a style that blends perfectly with that of the musicians,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “Part of the conversation may well be improvised, but nothing seems improvised, but nothing seems forced, and the film remains effortlessly idiosyncratic all the time.”
Bertrand Tavernier was born on April 25, 1941, in Lyon, to René and Ginette Tavernier. His father was a noted writer and poet. In a 1990 interview with The Times, Mr. Tavernier described an isolated childhood.
“My childhood was marked by loneliness because my parents didn’t get along,” he said. “And it’s coming out in every movie. I have practically never had a couple in my films ”.
He mentioned the impact of his hometown.
“It is a very secret city,” he explained. “My father used to say that in Lyon you learn that you should never lie, but always pretend, and that is part of my films. Characters are often oblique in their relationships. Then, there will be brief moments when they will reveal themselves. “
He was interested in cinema from a very young age, and his first jobs in the film industry included a press officer for Georges de Beauregard, a famous French New Wave producer. He also wrote about films for Les Cahiers du Cinéma and other publications, and continued to write throughout his career – essays, books and more. As a film historian, he was known for defending films, directors and screenwriters who had been mistreated by others.
In the foreword to Stephen Hay’s 2001 biography, “Bertrand Tavernier: The Film-maker of Lyon”, Thelma Schoonmaker, the famous film editor and widow of director Michael Powell, attributed it to Tavernier for resurrecting Powell’s reputation for “Peeping” Tom ”, who was condemned when it was released in 1960, but is now highly regarded by many moviegoers.
“Bertrand’s desire to correct the mistakes of film history has a direct connection with the themes of justice that permeate his own films,” she wrote.
Thierry Frémaux, director of the Cannes festival and the Institut Lumière, said that Tavernier has been tireless in his defense.
“Bertrand Tavernier built the body of the work we know, but he built something else: to be at the service of the history of cinema, of all cinemas,” said Frémaux by e-mail. “He wrote books, edited other people’s books, did an extraordinary amount of film interviews, tributes to everyone he admired, film performances.”
“I’m not sure if there are other examples in the art history of a creator so dedicated to the work of others,” he added.
Tavernier’s own films sometimes define personal stories in the midst of sweeping moments in history. “Life and Nothing But” (1989), set in 1920, was set against the backdrop of the search for hundreds of thousands of French soldiers still missing in action from the First World War. “Safe Conduct” (2002) was about French filmmakers who worked during the German occupation in World War II.
But Mr. Tavernier was not interested in the historical spectacle itself.
“Many times people come to me and say that you should make a film about the French Resistance, but I say that this is not an issue, it is vague,” he told Variety in 2019. “Tell me about a character who he was one of the first members of the Resistance and did things that people later, in 1945, say should be tried as crimes. So I have a character and an emotion that I can deal with. “
His survivors include his wife, Sarah, and two children, Nils and Tiffany Tavernier.
Mr. Tavernier slipped humor in his films, even a serious one like “Life and Nothing But”, which had a scene – with some basis in reality, he said – in which a desperate army captain had to quickly find an “unknown soldier” “to be placed below the Arc de Triomphe.
“The rush to find the Unknown Soldier is totally true, although we had to guess how it happened,” said Tavernier. “Imagine: how do you find a body that is impossible to identify and still be sure that it is French?”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.