He attended a Marist school and then the Lycée Voltaire, in Paris. He was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative

practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French

television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and thefirst President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC).