Pierre Rissient was a director, screenwriter and associate producer. He has also taken the role as press officer and artistic consultant. He began to show interest in literature, theater, and film in 1951. By the mid-1950s, he was a well-known figure in French film clubs as he began programming the Mac Mahon Cinema on 1954. He served as Assistant Director for both, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard in 1958 and 1959, respectively. He founded the Mac Mahon Club in 1960, and directed two shorts La Passe de Trois and Les Genoux d’Ariane in 1961. In 1963, while in charge of Mac Mahon Distribution, he revealed new directors such as Joseph Losey and Samuel Fuller amongst many others, and reassessed by then neglected pioneers such as Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, King Vidor, and Jacques Tourneur. At the same time, in partnership with Bertrand Tavernier, he was in charge of the promotion of films of Altman, Coppola, Boorman, Scorsese, Schatzberg, Rafelson, Forman, amongst many many others. In the early seventies, he discovered Asian cinema and brought Touch of Zen and Lino Brocka’s Insiang to Cannes in 1975 and 1978, respectively. He had a close relationship with Clint Eastwood and Jane Campion, which lead to his work as an executive for Ciby 2000 and Pathé.
Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara
