Bruno Dumont

Bruno Dumont (French: [dymɔ̃]; born 14 March 1958) is a French film director and screenwriter. To date, he has directed ten feature films, all of which border somewhere between realistic drama and the avant-garde. His films have won several awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Two of Dumont's films have won the Grand Prix award: both L'Humanité (1999)^[1] and Flandres (2006).^[2] Dumont's Hadewijch won the 2009 Prize of the International Critics (FIPRESCI Prize) for Special Presentation at the Toronto Film Festival.

Life and career

Dumont has a background of Greek and German (Western) philosophy, and of corporate video.^[3] His early films show the ugliness of extreme violence and provocative sexual behavior, and are usually classified as art films. Later films bring novel twists to other movie genres like comedy or musicals. Dumont has himself likened his films to visual arts, and he typically uses long takes, close-ups of people's bodies, and story lines involving extreme emotions. Dumont does not write traditional scripts for his films. Instead, he writes complete novels which are then the basis for his filmmaking.

Dumont is known to cast nonprofessional actors in his films. In a 2019 interview for the Criterion Channel, Dumont explained: "If I believed in the ideal, I'd hire a professional actor, and I'd tell them, 'Act like this because this is the truth. Since I don't believe in the ideal, I hire nonprofessional actors...because I believe that anyone is a holder of the truth."^[4] He says that some of his favorite filmmakers are Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini, and Abbas Kiarostami. He is frequently considered an artistic heir to Robert Bresson.

His often polarizing work has been connected to a recent French cinéma du corps/cinema of the body, encompassing contemporary films by Claire Denis, Marina de Van, Gaspar Noé, Diane Bertrand, and François Ozon, among others. According to Tim Palmer, this trajectory includes a focus on states of corporeality in and of themselves, independent of narrative exposition or character psychology.^[5] In a more pejorative vein, James Quandt has also talked of some of this group of filmmakers, as the so-called New French Extremity.^[6]

His 2011 film Hors Satan premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.^[7][8] His 2013 film Camille Claudel 1915 premiered in competition at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.^[9]

Dumont is an atheist.^[10]

Filmography

Feature films

• La vie de Jésus / The Life of Jesus (1997)^[11]
• Humanité / Humanity (1999)
• Twentynine Palms (2003)
• Flandres / Flanders (2006)
• Hadewijch (2009)
• Hors Satan (2011)
• Camille Claudel 1915 (2013)
• P'tit Quinquin / L'il Quinquin (2014)
• Slack Bay / Ma Loute (2016)
• Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017)
• Coincoin and the Extra-Humans / Coincoin et les z'inhumains (2018)
• Joan of Arc / Jeanne (2019)^[12]
• France (2021)
• The Empire (2024)

Short films

• Paris (1993)
• P'tit Quinquin / Li'l Quinquin (1993)
• Marie et Freddy / Marie and Freddy (1994)

Interviews and articles

• Kinok 14 September 2003
• Film de Culte (French)
• Village Voice 30 March 2004
• Cineuropa 23 May 2006
• Fluctuat 1 March 2012 (French)
• Premiere 28 August 2006 (French)^{[permanent dead link]}
• Telerama 2 September 2006 (French)
• DVDrama 24 September 2006 (French)
• Film de Culte September 2006 (French)
• Photos of Bruno Dumont from The San Sebastian Film Festival, October 2009

References

External links

• Official site
• Bruno Dumont at IMDb
• Flandres official site
• Twentynine Palms official site
• Masters of Cinema article