Director

Jean Grémillon

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Lumière d'été

Jean Grémillon · 1943

Made in 1943 under German occupation, Jean Grémillon’s Lumière d’été is a restrained French drama set in a rural Limousin house over a summer. Written by Jacques Prévert and starring Madeleine Renaud, Pierre Brasseur and Madeleine Robinson, it observes quiet tensions among a group of relatives and guests. Shot at Victorine Studios and on location in Soursac, with sets by André Barsacq and cinematography by Louis Page, the film relies on subtlety of gesture, layered sound design and deliberate pacing to explore inheritance, memory and unspoken desire.

13:00

Stormy Waters

Jean Grémillon · 1941

Stormy Waters (1941), directed by Jean Grémillon, follows tugboat captain André Laurent as his devotion to salvage work strains his marriage and draws him into a fraught relationship with a woman he rescues at sea. Shot on location in Brittany and at Billancourt Studios, it blends poetic realism with maritime procedural, anchored by Jean Gabin’s restrained performance and Armand Thirard’s atmospheric cinematography.

13:00

The Woman Who Dared

Jean Grémillon · 1944

Jean Grémillon’s 1944 drama follows Thérèse Gauthier, a mechanic’s wife displaced by airport expansion, who gradually reclaims agency — first as a dealership manager, then as a pilot. Madeleine Renaud and Charles Vanel anchor a film that privileges procedural realism over psychological exposition, showing aspiration as re-attunement to one’s own capacities rather than rupture from circumstance.