Luc Moullet

While little known in the US, Luc Moullet has endured as a "modest master" of French cinema since the late 1950s, admired by fellow filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. In the words of Jean-Marie Straub, he is the “only heir to Luis Buñuel and Jacques Tati.” At the age of 18, Moullet joined the ranks of Cahiers du Cinéma, where he was the first to champion Hollywood B-directors like Samuel Fuller and Edgar G. Ulmer. Along with his other, better-known critic colleagues at Cahiers, Moullet would later turn to filmmaking himself, creating an unclassifiable body of work characterized by its scrappiness, eclecticism, bawdy irreverence, and its rejection of technique and pomposity. His filmography encompasses everything from a Dadaist western with Jean-Pierre Leaud, to Brechtian, burlesque slapstick, to a documentary tracking the distribution of food around the world, all made with next to no money. In addition to his prolific output as a writer and director, Moullet also produced key films by such contemporaries as Marguerite Duras and Jean Eustache. A self-styled "unruly piece of soap," Moullet’s persona is deliberately hard to pin down: he’s both an intellectual and a clown whose mission is “to educate through laughter." Always self-deprecating and profoundly offbeat, often appearing in his films as a talented comic performer, he stands as the true comedian of the Nouvelle Vague. Today, Moullet remains one of the most essential yet unheralded figures of his storied generation of French cineastes.