Joseph-Marie Lo Duca

Joseph-Marie Lo Duca (French: [lo dyka]; 18 November 1905 or 1910 – 6 August 2004) was an Italian-born journalist, novelist, art critic, and film historian best known as the co-founder in 1951 of the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma with André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Léonide Keigel.

Joseph-Marie Lo Duca (originally Giuseppe Lo Duca) was born in Milan, Italy, in 1905 or 1910 to a family of Sicilian origin. Fascinated from an early age with reading and writing, he published his first novel, La sfera di platino ("The Sphere of Platinum"), in 1927. His later work, translated and published in France, won the enthusiasm of André Breton, Paul Valéry, Marcel Griaule, and Jean Cocteau.

To avoid arrest after a feud with sculptor Arturo Martini, Lo Duca emigrated to Paris in 1935 where he was eventually appointed director of the Centre international de documentation photographique et cinématographique de Paris (International Centre of Photographic and Cinematographic Documentation of Paris). With Paul Valéry, he co-wrote Conversation sur l’histoire along with monographs on painters including Henri Rousseau and Giorgio de Chirico.

In 1942, having assembled a wealth of rare documents and objects related to cinema, Lo Duca established the Musée Canudo at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris with the goal of founding the International Museum of Cinema in Rome. The project for the Rome museum, however, did not survive the war.

In 1948, he published Le dessin animé ("The Animated Cartoon") with a preface by Walt Disney. His Histoire du cinéma (1942) was translated into twelve languages while Technique du cinéma (1948) became a noted reference work.

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