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Jacques Prévert

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Jacques-Henri-Marie Prévert

(born Feb. 4, 1900, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France — died April 11, 1977, Omonville-la-Petite) French poet and screenwriter. A shop worker, he began writing after his military service. Influenced by the Symbolist movement, he renewed the ancient tradition of oral poetry, creating "song poems" about Paris street life, collected in the anthology Words (1945). Many were put to music and became extremely popular. His excellent screenplays for Marcel Carné include The Children of Paradise (1945), Spectacle (1951), and Things and Other Things (1972). He also worked for French television and on animated films for children.

For more information on Jacques-Henri-Marie Prévert, visit Britannica.com.

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French Literature Companion: Jacques Prévert
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Prévert, Jacques (1900-77). French poet. Set to music by Kosma, interpreted by Yves Montand, learnt by heart in schools, dissected by academics, Prévert's poems have a uniquely important place in 20th-c. French culture. His is a poetry of the man in the street—essentially oral, often sentimental, disdainful of the high and mighty, respectful towards the underdog. Anarchic and playful, his spirit is pre-political, although the sketches he wrote during his participation in the agit-prop Groupe Octobre, some performed in factories in 1936, and his delightful script for Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, are quintessential expressions of the Popular Front ethos. A fringe member of the Surrealist group from 1925, he soon joined the dissidents along with his friends from the ‘Groupe de la rue du Château’ (Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel, Queneau).

PrÉvert began writing poems in the early 1930s. However, long before the publication of his first collection (Paroles, 1946) he had made his name as writer of film-scripts: Drôle de drame (1937), Quai des brumes (1938), Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), all directed by Marcel Carné and displaying a mixture of realism and poetry allied with a strong sense of character. The great success of Paroles after the war led Prévert to write more poetry (Spectacle, 1951; La Pluie et le beau temps, 1955) mostly of a similar kind, dominated by clever punning, a sense of the marvellous, and an unerring feel for the quality of everyday life.

[Michael Sheringham]

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Jacques Prévert
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Prévert, Jacques (zhäk prāvĕr'), 1900-1977, French poet. One of the most popular of 20th-century French writers, Prévert produced poetry ranging from the humorous to the satiric to the melancholy. Many of his poems and songs were sung in nightclubs before being collected and published. His volumes of poetry include Paroles (1946), Spectacle (1951), and, in English translation, Selections from Paroles (1958) and To Paint the Portrait of a Bird (tr. by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1970). Prévert wrote many important screenplays, including those for Marcel Carné's Le Jour se lève (1939) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945).
Quotes By: Jacques Prevert
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Quotes:

"Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it."

"An orange on the table, your dress on the rug, and you in my bed, sweet present of the present, cool of night, warmth of my life."

"When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today."

 
 
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
French Literature Companion. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more

 

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