Death of Jean-François Davy, author of a pornographic and personal work

There was undoubtedly a time in the history of French cinema when the margins could also be at the center, and the center at the margins. Jean-François Davy perfectly embodied this paradox. The director-producer died at the age of 79 on Friday, May 2, in Paris, of a heart attack.

He was born in Paris on May 3, 1945, to a teacher father and a catechism teacher mother. The cinephilia virus took hold of him from his adolescence. While still a high school student, he created an association of amateur filmmakers. He was an assistant on the first film directed by Luc Moullet, critic for Cahiers du cinéma , Brigitte et Brigitte . L'Attentat , in 1966, was his first feature film, which he was able to make thanks to a subscription launched by the actor Claude Melki.

Deeply influenced by the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the film, not without its clumsiness, describes the wanderings of a pinball machine repairman, a wishful writer, obsessed with the idea of ​​detonating a bomb in the Saint-Lazare train station. The Attack was not released in theaters. He then directed the thriller Traquenards (1968), a detective film that its producer wanted to tinge with eroticism. The Threshold of the Void , in 1971, is an ambitious fantasy story co-written with André Ruellan based on one of his novels. The film was not released for another three years.

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