Despite a career that stretched from the silent cinema to the brink of the French New Wave, Jean Grémillon (1902–59) remains among the least known of the great French directors. A musician by training, Grémillon began his involvement with the medium as an accompanist for silent movies. An interest in editing led him to work in documentaries and avant-garde films, and it was the critical success of one of his works of “cinéma pur” that led to his first features. While the two silent films he made were popular and critical successes, the failure of his first sound work, the melodrama La petite Lise (1930), forced the director into artistic exile. He made a film in Spain and worked for several years at the Ufa studios in Germany, where his Gueule d’amour (1937) and L’etrange Monsieur Victor (1938) finally ended his fallow period. Back in France during the German occupation, he completed his masterpieces Lumière d’été (1943) and Le ciel est à vous (1944), which indirectly criticized the Vichy government. While he managed to complete some notable works in the decade following the war, Grémillon was forced to return to documentary production, where he ended his career by making films on art.