White shirt under a V-neck sweater, cigarette dangling from lips framed by the beard of an Arab prince, sheet music in hand... Gabriel Yared strikes a pose against a black background, on the jacket of the soundtrack to Every Man for Himself by Jean-Luc Godard (1980). Thanks to this collaboration, Yared, who was one of the most brilliant arrangers and composers of Chanson Française of the 1970s (for Françoise Hardy, certainly) was propelled into the world of the big screen. Godard's name, as well as the famous photograph, in which he could easily be mistaken for an intellectual Varsity type from Vincennes, gave him the image of a cerebral composer who specialised in auteur cinema.
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