Marja Warehime 
Maurice Pialat 

One of the most gifted directors of the post New Wave, Maurice Pialat is frequently compared to such legendary filmmakers as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson. A quintessentially realist filmmaker, who, like Bresson, was also trained as a painter, Pialat s particular form of realism influenced an entire generation of young filmmakers in the 1990s. This volume is the first book-length study of Pialat s cinema in English. It provides an introduction to a complex and difficult director, who saw himself as a marginal and marginalised filmmaker, but whose films are deeply rooted in French society and culture. Pialat was long considered the only major filmmaker to portray la France profonde , the heart of France – the people who, as he put it, take the subway . Taken as a whole, Pialat s work can be seen both as an oblique autobiography and the portrait of a fundamental institution – the family – over several generations. – .