11. Uluslararası Eskişehir Film Festivali Bertrand Tavernier, one of the master directors of the French cinema, is also known as a cinema historian, film critic, producer and scriptwriter. Tavernier was born in Lyon in 1941. His passion for cinema started when he was thirteen. Admiring the films of such American directors as John Ford, Henry Hataway and William Wellman, Tavernier decided to become a director at childhood. He gave up his law education in Sorbonne because of his inevitable passion for cinema. He issued a cinema magazine entitled “L’etrave” and met famous director Jean-Pierre Melville during one of the interviews he made for the magazine. This meeting turned into a friendship after a while and Tavernier stepped into the world of cinema as Melville’s assistant. However, it was not easy for him to be an apprentice behind the camera. He had to enhance his knowledge and culture on cinema and strengthen his critical viewpoint. He began to write film critics for important cinema magazines of his age, Positif and Cahiers du Cinema. His admiration for the Hollywood cinema attained a new level of awareness with the knowledge and critical perspective he acquired. He conducted research on film language and how to develop this language. Following a long-lasting preparation process which required intensive labor and enhanced knowledge, Tavernier directed his first feature, “L’horloger de SaintPaul/The Clockmaker of St. Paul” (1973), at the age of 32. His intensive labor was not in vain; the film was deemed worthy of “Prix Louis Delluc”, the grand prize of the French cinema. Following this widely appreciated debut film, he directed seventeen more features, including “La passion Béatrice/The Passion of Beatrice”, “Le juge et l'assassin/The Judge and the Assassin”, “Des enfants gâtés/Spoiled Children”, “Que la fete commence/Let Joy Reign Supreme” and “La vie et rien d'autre/Life and Nothing But” which made him an acclaimed and award-winning director not only in France but in the whole world. Tavernier depicts medieval tales as in “The Passion of Beatrice” or the French royalty as in “Let Joy Reign Supreme” or post-World War I as in “Life and Nothing But” and enhances his filmography with diverse themes and contents. With “Un dimanche à la campagne /A Sunday in the Country”, which earned him the Best Director Award at Cannes, he witnesses the life of an ageing painter and expresses his respect for Renoir, and two years later, with “Round Midnight”, he enters into the charming world of jazz and jazz musicians. While recreating in the language of cinema the spectacular world of music and painting, Tavernier does not ignore the world in which we live and its problems. In addition to fictitious works, he produced “La guerre sans nom/The Undeclared War”, a documentary about the Algerian War and “L'appât/The Bait” (1995), a film about the problems of teenagers in France, which earned him the Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival. Although Tavernier films have diverse themes and contents, there is something which establishes a link among all his films and creates a sort of completeness. The importance of visual aesthetics and the search for a competent style are the characteristics of all films. The source of visual aesthetics and style in the films is his admiration for the American cinema; however, the director himself manages to add a sound and sharp reality to this style. The source of this sense of reality is his distinction between cinema and politics or worldview. Tavernier represents the generation which attaches great importance to politics and believes that ideologies can change the world. He cannot tolerate moral desensitization and degeneration of human beings and human values. Believing that cinema, with its theme and content, should never give up fighting against such desensitization and degeneration, Tavernier expresses himself as follows: “Cinema is an art which blends emotion with light. When you shed light on something, you end up with “enlightening” everything improvable. I am impressed by characters that refuse to give up.”
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