In the autumn of 1984, as François Truffaut was dying, a stream of visitors came to see him: Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Claude Miller, Marcel Ophuls, Leslie Caron. Later came Jean-José Richer. Every name on that list is famous except his.

Richer was a Cahiers du cinéma critic of the 1950s who became one of the New Wave’s longest-serving crew members and producers. He acted in Truffaut’s first film, was assistant director on two more, managed the production of a fourth, and helped produce La Petite Voleuse, the script Truffaut didn’t live to shoot. He directed one film of his own, which almost nobody has seen.

Rodez, Doniol and Cahiers

Richer was born in Rodez, in the Aveyron, on 19 August 1927. Despite the provincial birthplace, the family was Parisian: his father, Marcel, was an engineer and industrialist, and his grandfather, Joseph Hild, a barrister at the Paris bar.

He came to Cahiers du cinéma as a protégé of Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, from what Antoine de Baecque describes as the worldly, festival-going side of the magazine rather than the young Turks’ camp. His first signed pieces are two short notes in no. 8 (January 1952), on Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and Chicago Digest, about nine months after the magazine launched and a year before Truffaut’s first piece in no. 21.

After that, he had something in nearly every issue until 1956, writing around thirty pieces in all. Most interesting among them is “Dimensions et proportions” in no. 25 (July 1953), written with Michel Dorsday, on the new widescreen formats. It opens by declaring the ways of progress impenetrable, argues that “seules sont changées les dimensions et les proportions”, and insists that Bazin’s idea of the frame as a mask is a convention and will remain one. In other words, it pushes back against Bazin in Bazin’s own magazine. Two years later, Richer co-signed the magazine’s Cannes report, which mocked its own auteurist orthodoxy.

Une visite (1954)

At the end of 1954, François Truffaut made his first short film, a silent 16mm film shot in the Doniol-Valcroze apartment on the rue de Douai, with Jacques Rivette behind the camera and Robert Lachenay producing. Truffaut cast Richer as the co-lead, playing the young woman’s brother-in-law, who drops off his small daughter for the weekend (Florence Doniol-Valcroze, then two and a half), clowns about puffing cigarette smoke like a locomotive, and tries without success to flirt with her. Truffaut was so unhappy with the result that he showed it to nobody and wanted to destroy it. The reel sat in a cupboard on the rue de Douai until 1982, and it remains inaccessible today.

Assistant Director, 1957–67

When Doniol-Valcroze moved from criticism into directing, Richer went with him, and for the next decade Doniol’s films were the backbone of his career. He was assistant on Doniol’s short Les Surmenés (1958), written by Truffaut, and then on his first feature, L’Eau à la bouche (1960), a light erotic comedy set in a château, with a score by Serge Gainsbourg, which became one of the early commercial successes of the New Wave. Richer also co-adapted it, his most substantial writing credit. He stayed with Doniol through Le Cœur battant (1960), La Dénonciation (1962) and Le Viol (1967), with Bibi Andersson.

The other director he kept returning to was Jean Aurel, a documentary-maker best known for his First World War compilation 14-18 (1963), who turned to fiction with two Stendhal adaptations, De l’amour (1964) and Lamiel (1967), the second starring Anna Karina. Richer assisted on both. He also worked on Nadine Trintignant’s Mon amour, mon amour (1967), and took one-off jobs ranging from Pierre Chevalier to Jean Rouch.

Lettre à Carla

His one film as director, Lettre à Carla, an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, was shot in 1965 as a French–Romanian–Belgian co-production and shown at the Rencontres du jeune cinéma in Hyères in 1967, where Positif and Cinéma 67 reviewed it.

In Positif (no. 86, July 1967), Roger Tailleur calls it a likeable debut, a kind of improved version of Astruc’s Le Rideau cramoisi, though hampered by a lack of money and an ending as abrupt as it was badly prepared. Richer, Tailleur writes, kept faithfully to Hawthorne’s wild Romanticism and its whole ritual: mysterious houses and secret gardens, a mad scientist and poisonous plants, virginal heroines, talisman daggers and chastity belts, stormy nights and evil laboratories. José Varela and Anna Gaël starred, and Tailleur ended by calling it a classic attempt at genre cinema, made with a respect and care that commanded esteem. Beyond those two reviews, the film has left no trace.

After Carla: Truffaut, 1968–1980

The year after Hyères, Truffaut brought him back. For Baisers volés (1968), the third Antoine Doinel film, Truffaut assembled an almost entirely new crew, and Richer came in as first assistant director. He stayed for La Sirène du Mississipi (1969), with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. In the same years he was first assistant on Aurel’s Manon 70 (1968, according to IMDb) and Nadine Trintignant’s Le Voleur de crimes (1969), and in 1972 on Pierre Kast’s Les Soleils de l’île de Pâques.

A decade later Truffaut called on him again, this time as production manager on Le Dernier Métro (1980), Truffaut’s biggest success, which won ten Césars. Richer also has a small part in it.

Producer, 1972–1994

From the early 1970s Richer moved into production management, and the director he worked with most was Jean Yanne, the comic actor whose own satires were big popular hits: Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil (1972), Moi y’en a vouloir des sous (1973), Les Chinois à Paris (1973) and Chobizenesse (1975). He followed them with Alain Jessua’s thriller Armaguedon (1977), starring Alain Delon and Yanne, and, after Le Dernier Métro, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), the Berlin-set horror film with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill.

From 1986 to 1994 he was line producer for Jean-Louis Livi’s Orly Films, starting with Francis Veber’s comedy hit Les Fugitifs, with Gérard Depardieu and Pierre Richard, and Alain Corneau’s Le Môme (both 1986). The most poignant of these is La Petite Voleuse (1988), a script Truffaut had written with Claude de Givray and never lived to shoot, directed by Claude Miller. The man who had clowned through Truffaut’s first film, and visited him in his last weeks, helped make his last script.

From 2006 to 2016 he managed Aura Films, Michel Fano’s sound company. As far as public records show, he is still alive; he turned 99 in August.

Filmography

Compiled from Unifrance and IMDb.

Year	Film	Director	Role
1954	Une visite	François Truffaut	Actor
1958	Les Surmenés	Jacques Doniol-Valcroze	Assistant director
1960	L’Eau à la bouche	Jacques Doniol-Valcroze	Co-writer, assistant director
1960	Le Cœur battant	Jacques Doniol-Valcroze	Assistant director
1962	La Dénonciation	Jacques Doniol-Valcroze	Assistant director
1962	Clémentine chérie	Pierre Chevalier	Assistant director
1964	De l’amour	Jean Aurel	Assistant director
1964	Les Veuves de quinze ans	Jean Rouch	First assistant director
1967	Lettre à Carla	Jean-José Richer	Director
1967	Mon amour, mon amour	Nadine Trintignant	Assistant director
1967	Le Viol	Jacques Doniol-Valcroze	Assistant director
1967	Lamiel	Jean Aurel	Assistant director
1968	Baisers volés	François Truffaut	First assistant director
1968	Manon 70	Jean Aurel	First assistant director
1969	Le Voleur de crimes	Nadine Trintignant	Assistant director
1969	La Sirène du Mississipi	François Truffaut	Assistant director
1972	Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil	Jean Yanne	Production manager
1972	Les Soleils de l’île de Pâques	Pierre Kast	Assistant director
1973	Moi y’en a vouloir des sous	Jean Yanne	Production manager
1973	Les Chinois à Paris	Jean Yanne	Production manager
1975	Chobizenesse	Jean Yanne	Production manager
1977	Armaguedon	Alain Jessua	Production manager
1979	French Postcards	Willard Huyck	Production manager, actor
1980	Le Dernier Métro	François Truffaut	Production manager, actor
1981	Possession	Andrzej Żuławski	Production manager
1983	Le Démon dans l’île	Francis Leroi	Actor
1984	Staline	Jean Aurel	Line producer
1986	Le Môme	Alain Corneau	Line producer
1986	Les Fugitifs	Francis Veber	Line producer
1987	Chronicle of a Death Foretold	Francesco Rosi	Executive producer (France)
1988	La Petite Voleuse	Claude Miller	Line producer
1990	Génial, mes parents divorcent !	Patrick Braoudé	Actor
1992	L’Accompagnatrice	Claude Miller	Line producer
1994	Neuf mois	Patrick Braoudé	Actor
1994	Le Sourire	Claude Miller	Line producer

Les Veuves de quinze ans, Manon 70, French Postcards, Le Démon dans l’île and Chronicle of a Death Foretold appear only on IMDb, not Unifrance. Lettre à Carla is missing from Unifrance entirely; IMDb lists Richer only as its writer.

Sources

• Les Gens du cinéma (online database)
• Journal de l’Aveyron, birth notice, 28 August 1927
• Le Figaro, 20 December 1937
• Cahiers du cinéma
• Michel Dorsday and Jean-José Richer, “Dimensions et proportions”, Cahiers du cinéma no. 25, July 1953
• Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma : histoire d’une revue, 1991
• Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut, 1996 (English translation, Truffaut: A Biography, 1999)
• Roger Tailleur, in “Le Mistral et le méchoui : Hyères 1967”, Positif no. 86, July 1967
• Unifrance and IMDb credit listings