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Pierre Kast

French film director (1920–1984)

Pierre Kast (22 September 1920 – 20 October 1984) was a French film director, film critic, screenwriter, and novelist. He was a contributor to Cahiers du cinéma from its founding in 1951 and his feature films ranged from witty studies of bourgeois sexual politics to politically inflected science fiction.

A former French Resistance fighter, he remained engaged with left-wing politics throughout his life and published several novels alongside his film work. Kast was born in Paris on 22 September 1920 into a Protestant bourgeois family. He attended the Lycée Henri IV before studying literature at the Sorbonne. During the German occupation of France, he became active in the French Resistance as a member of the Communist Students of Paris, serving as a student leader of the Young Communists. He was one of the organisers of the demonstration of 11 November 1940 in the Latin Quarter against the occupation. Arrested shortly afterwards, he was held at La Santé Prison for five months before going underground. He co-founded the Union of Patriotic Students in 1943 at the instigation of the clandestine French Communist Party, and evaded police searches for four years while participating in armed resistance groups operating in Paris. After the Liberation, Kast founded the University Film Club in 1945 and worked as an assistant to Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française.

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