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When I first met him, I learned what indefatigability is.
We had the last conversation of a long interview day.
He had talked almost more about John Ford and Michael Powell than about the film that was the occasion for our meeting: "Life and nothing else".
It had been an exhausting conversation.
Now he was hungry.
I thought this was the right time to say goodbye.
But I was wrong.
He took me into his kitchen and explained that he had just discovered the sweet French wines and how well they went with Japanese cuisine.
As the devoted gourmet prepared our snack, he continued to share about Ford, Powell, and others who inspired his work, but now anecdotes.
During the delicious meal I finally understood the sources from which his energy was nourished: He fulfilled his obligations out of passion and enjoyment.
Bertrand Tavernier was a miracle of availability.
He was one of those artists whose life and workload fills the viewer with admiration and envy.
He had never learned to make himself scarce.
From 1974 onwards, he not only made three dozen feature and documentary films.
He regularly interfered in the (film) political debates in France and Europe, and was a tireless campaigner for authors' rights.
He was also one of the great mediators of film history, regularly published books, introduced film series and was always there when it came to praising filmmakers admired on podiums or in bonus material on DVDs and rehabilitating underrated filmmakers.
Romy Schneider and Vadim Glowna 1979 in "Death Watch - The Bought Death"
Source: ddp images
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Most recently, he brought out a dime novel by Ernest Haycox in France, which he discovered as a milestone in the Western world.
As President of the Institut Lumière in his native Lyon, he dedicated himself to the care and visualization of the film heritage.
There is a beautiful, sad truth to the fact that his monumental, highly personal documentary “Journey through French Cinema” should remain his last film work.
Born in 1941 as the son of the publicist René Tavernier, he made films out of outrage and respect.
His father had been close to the Resistance;
political engagement was a legacy that Bertrand did not want to turn down.
He went to high school with Volker Schlöndorff.
No matter whether in the genre of the crime film (“The Watchmaker of St. Paul”), the war film (“Capitaine Conan”), the police film (“On the open road”) or the social study (“Beyond the city ring”, “It starts today “), His work always revolved around the responsibility of the individual, moral courage and a sense of community.
Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert in 1981 in "Der Saustall"
Source: picture alliance / United Archives
This lively cinema of consternation, which, despite all the didactic furor, endured polyphony and contradictions, betrayed a deep and demanding humility in front of its respective subject.
He kept in touch with the protagonists of his documentaries - about the Algerian war, integration, life in socially deprived areas - long after the shooting ended, because he wanted not only to win their trust, but to justify them.
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In his films he attacked institutions, not individuals.
His agile camera showed tactful solidarity.
He was one of the few auteur filmmakers who retained a sense of the heroic.
Traces of the western can be found throughout the work, even the dramas about generational conflicts.
He made his films in the third person singular.
They didn't need a narrative “me”, but rather a “he” or “she”.
They came about because he wanted to learn something he didn't know before.
His last feature film "Quai d 'Orsay" was an adaptation of a comic, which is actually about nothing more than the genesis of the fiery speech that Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin gave to the United Nations against the Iraq war.
Tavernier with his leading actor Dexter Gordon in the jazz film "Um Mitternacht" (1986)
Source: ddp images
Tavernier filmed instinctively and reflected at the same time: he always wanted to surprise himself and at the same time be accountable for the ethos of storytelling and his own roots in the cinema.
His genre work checked the viability of the conventions.
Each of his films was a bet against the incompatibility of its elements.
He made war and police films where not a single shot was fired ("In the Electric Mist" with Tommy Lee Jones), lively coat and sword films about the melancholy of aging ("D'Artagnan's daughter") and historical frescoes, in which epochs are completely reconstructed from everyday life (“The pass”, “The Princess of Montpensier”) - and one of the best jazz films of all time, “At midnight”.
That was perhaps his greatest achievement as a filmmaker and historian: making the viewer a contemporary of the past.
No dictatorship is worse, he once said, than that of the present.