At the beginning of the 1980s, European cinema was on the brink.

Suddenly what the films told was less important than how they told it: the form, the genre, the style.

It was in France, where cinema had traditionally placed more emphasis on form than elsewhere, that this shift in mood first came to fruition.

It was the hour of the directors who wanted to get more out of the cinematic than the illustration of a story, who wanted to use the camera to conjure and enchant.

It was the hour of Jean-Jacques Beineix.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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If you think back to his films today, you're surprised that he didn't shoot any advertising or video clips, so many of their scenes are so close to the visual language of the consumer aesthetics of the time. But Beineix didn't come from advertising, he had started in the classic way with the old masters of French film, with Jean Becker, whom he helped as an assistant director on a television series, and then with Claude Berri and Claude Zidi. When his first feature film "Diva" came out in 1981, Beineix was a blank slate. But this debut contained everything that made up the special quality of Jean-Jacques Beineix's cinema: the poetry, the exaggeration, the exuberance, the beauty bordering on kitsch. The story of the postman who gets sucked into a gangster intriguewhen he wanted to bring home his sound recording of an opera diva, became an international success because the film not only had a new look, but also a new basic mood: melancholy and cleverness, naivety and romance, the mood of a decade that saw great historical developments apparently had behind. Eight years later we knew better.

In this way, Beineix once again hit the mood of the times, in 1985 with "Betty Blue", a film in which southern France looked like California, the Mediterranean like the Pacific and the love story of two misfits like a drama by Nicholas Ray or Elia Kazan relocated to Europe . One could learn how to create atmosphere with colors, camera movements and backdrops from Beinix like no other French director of his generation, not even from Luc Besson, who achieved greater box office success with less aesthetic commitment, or Leos Carax, whom the critics for loved his Nouvelle Vague quotes. Bergeix, on the other hand, wanted to bring Hollywood to France, but a Hollywood that had never existed like this before, a world like a snow globe in which love and crime followed their own laws.That's why most of his films seem strangely without surroundings, cut off from everyday reality - such as the dockworker love story "The Moon in the Gutter" with Nastassja Kinski and Gérard Depardieu or the circus fairy tale "Roselyne and the Lions", both of which were made in the 1980s , or the psychological thriller "Mortel transfert", with which Beineix attempted a kind of comeback in 2001 after a long break. All three films failed at the box office, and because Beinix was heavily in debt for Mortel Transfert, the commercial fiasco was also a personal one. He hasn't made a film in the last twenty years, instead he wrote his memoirs at the age of sixty.cut off from everyday reality - such as the dockworker love story "The Moon in the Gutter" with Nastassja Kinski and Gérard Depardieu or the circus fairy tale "Roselyne and the Lions", both of which were created in the 1980s, or the psychological thriller "Mortel Transfert", with which Bergeix attempted a kind of comeback in 2001 after a long break. All three films failed at the box office, and because Beinix was heavily in debt for Mortel Transfert, the commercial fiasco was also a personal one. He hasn't made a film in the last twenty years, instead he wrote his memoirs at the age of sixty.cut off from everyday reality - such as the dockworker love story "The Moon in the Gutter" with Nastassja Kinski and Gérard Depardieu or the circus fairy tale "Roselyne and the Lions", both of which were created in the 1980s, or the psychological thriller "Mortel Transfert", with which Bergeix attempted a kind of comeback in 2001 after a long break. All three films failed at the box office, and because Beinix was heavily in debt for Mortel Transfert, the commercial fiasco was also a personal one. He hasn't made a film in the last twenty years, instead he wrote his memoirs at the age of sixty.with which Bergeix attempted a kind of comeback in 2001 after a long break. All three films failed at the box office, and because Beinix was heavily in debt for Mortel Transfert, the commercial fiasco was also a personal one. He hasn't made a film in the last twenty years, instead he wrote his memoirs at the age of sixty.with which Bergeix attempted a kind of comeback in 2001 after a long break. All three films failed at the box office, and because Beinix was heavily in debt for Mortel Transfert, the commercial fiasco was also a personal one. He hasn't made a film in the last twenty years, instead he wrote his memoirs at the age of sixty.

A film whose production was overshadowed by tragedy played a special role in it. In November 1991, shortly before the end of the shooting of "IP 5 - the island of the pachyderms", Beineix' leading actor Yves Montand died of a heart attack. The film was supposed to be about two teenagers traveling through France with an old adventurer, and since the character of Montand was also to die of a heart attack, Montand's death seemed like a wicked joke of fate. A double filled in for him, but the story was never the same, the film remained a fragment. The cinema narrator Baixix never recovered from this blow. Jean-Jacques Beineix himself has now died in Paris at the age of seventy-five. His cinematic oeuvre is small. But the magicthat he brought to the big screen with "Diva" and "Betty Blue" will stay.