François Boyer was born on March 30, 1920 at Sézanne in the French Marne region (a part of Champagne-Ardenne). He died on March 24, 2003 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the region of Yvelines, which is situated west of Paris. He attended the “collège“ (high school) at Sézanne, then studied history at the University of Paris. After a […]
In 1954, director François Truffaut published his text “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français“ (“A certain tendency of French cinema“), which formed the theoretical basis of the Nouvelle Vague. The latter became a movement in French cinema that pointed out and went against bourgeois tendencies prevalent in French filmmaking in the first half of the […]
Trying to find information about François Boyer and his life, I took a research trip to Paris in the spring of 2018. One of the most interesting findings in the archives was an original letter by François Boyer, formally addressed to Marcel L’Herbier (1888-1979) via an inititial “Cher monsieur”. It is a letter handwritten and […]
(spoiler alert: this blog post reveals details and the end of the story!) Boyer’s Jeux interdits, published by Editions de Minuit in 1947, is a comparatively short novel with a turbulent history. With its length of only 150 pages (1968 Denoël edition), it might even be better described as a novella. Its protagonists are 9-year-old […]