At the end of the 1950s, the film director Jean-Daniel Pollet, who has died aged 68, was considered one of the most talented of the group of young filmmakers who were beginning to form the Nouvelle Vague. But Pollet, some years younger than Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, took a decidedly personal path that led him out of the spotlight that shone on his contemporaries.
Born near Lille, Pollet was studying philosophy when he saw John Ford's The Quiet Man, and immediately decided to make films. It was while doing his military service in 1957, aged 21, in the French army film section, that he learned the techniques of cinema. A little later, he was an assistant to Julien Duvivier on the set of The Man In The Raincoat, starring Fernandel, an experience from which Pollet said he learned "everything that you shouldn't do". He, like many of the other young cinéastes at the time, was reacting against the classical French cinema.
While filming at a Parisian suburban dancehall, Pollet noticed a small, lugubrious young man dancing in a very singular manner. His name was Claude Melki, an apprentice tailor, and, in him, Pollet had found his alter ego. He decided to build his first film, a short, Pourvu Qu'on Ait L'ivresse (As Long As The Drink Lasts, 1958) around him. Melki played a timid man trying to pick up girls in the dancehall. The film blended fiction (the sad and comic attempts by the protagonist) and documentary, the real dancehall and its patrons.
It was the first of six films Pollet made with Melki, who gained the reputation of a French Buster Keaton. Of their collaboration, Pollet said, "He did everything for me - he spoke, he played, he danced. He was gifted. However, he was incapable of acting in the films of others. He needed me as a father."
In 1963, before he embarked on features, Pollet made Méditerranée, a 45-minute, 16mm film from a text by the avant-garde writer Philippe Sollers. Pollet said that he wanted to make "a descriptive film, passing from the cinema to the novel, to link the two where words and images cross". The film, which followed a four-month journey around the Mediterranean - showing the towns, statues, temples and nature - took three years to edit, and established Pollet's reputation as a cinépoet or, according to one critic, "the most concrete of the abstract filmmakers".
In 1965, at the height of the New Wave, Pollet (joining Chabrol, Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch and Jean Douchet) directed one of six fictional episodes of Paris Vu Par, with each story set in a different part of Paris. Pollet chose the louche Rue St Denis, in which Melki, as a timid dishwasher, brings a prostitute (Micheline Dax) back to his small room.
L'amour C'est Gai, L'amour C'est Triste (Love Is Happy, Love Is Sad, 1968) was a bitter-sweet comedy, in which Melki and his sister (Bernadette Lafont) share an apartment. He plays a naive tailor receiving his clients in one room as his sister, a prostitute, receives her clients in another - though Melki's character thinks they are there to have their palms read. After he discovers the truth, and falls for a young provincial girl (Chantal Goya), recruited by his sister's pimp, he sends away her potential customers with a variety of excuses.
After May 1968, Pollet tried making a number of experimental films, for example, L'Ordre (1973), an investigation into leprosy in Greece, but few were seen in the cinemas. In 1976, he returned to narrative cinema, and the Rue St Denis, with The Acrobat (1976), in which Melki is a bath attendant who discovers a passion for the tango that changes his life.
Dance permeated Pollet's films; ordinary people dancing for the simple pleasures while carrying out social and sexual rites. He went on to make further impressionistic semi-documentaries, mostly shot in his beloved Greece. In 1989, while filming on the side of a railway track in France, he was hit by a carriage and suffered 27 fractures.
After that, he led the life of an invalid at his farm in Provence, which he seldom left. He still had a passion for cinema, and managed to make two films in his garden - Dieu Sait Quoi (God Knows What, 1996), based on poems by Francis Ponge, and Ceux D'en Face (Those Opposite, 2000), both with the sobering voice and presence of the actor Michel Lonsdale. Absence, solitude and the chaos of the world were at the heart of the work of this rare artist of cinema.
· Jean-Daniel Pollet, film director, born June 20 1936; died September 9 2004
