Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) dreamt of becoming a painter and a movie maker. In both cases he managed to produce only a few lasting works: a few canvases demonstrating his talent for colors and four films, the first of which was entitled after one of his most famous songs Je t’aime moi non plus and would also become the most acclaimed. Though his films were deemed controversial, none of them achieved great success. Yet, one thing is certain; each shot had been contemplated, imagined, composed, and put into scene by a man with the aesthetically attuned eye of a photographer. When reading the filmic scenarios, one is surprised to discover that Gainsbourg alloted more painstaking attention to the perfection of focal points, the lens, to movements of the camera, than to the psychology of the characters – whom, in any case, mostly resembled himself, the tortured artist.

William Klein, JL Sieff, Tony Frank, Helmut Newton, Pierre Terrasson, Claude Gassian, Guy Albrecht , Patrick de Spiegelaere, Bert Stern , Xavier Martin, and Alain Trellu