As a journalist Douchet wrote extensively about New Wave filmmakers, as well as such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Kenji Mizoguchi, Vincente Minnelli, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Daniel Pollet.

He also acted in small roles for such directors as Godard, Rohmer, François Truffaut, Jean Eustache, Jacques Rivette, Jean Pierre Lefebvre and François Ozon.

He taught at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques and his students included Ozon, Émilie Deleuze and Xavier Beauvois.

For the Cinémathèque's 2010 tribute to the then recently deceased Éric Rohmer he made the documentary Claude et Éric, an interview with Claude Chabrol about Rohmer's early days at Cahiers du cinéma.

[3][4][5][6][7][8] On 22 November 2019 the Cinémathèque Française announced that Jean Douchet had died at age 90.