François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut (French IPA: [tʀyˈfo]) (February 6, 1932 – October 21, 1984) was one of the founders of the French "New Wave" in filmmaking, and remains an icon of the French film industry. He began as a film critic and reviewer, writing for the French film journal Les Cahiers du cinéma and other French publications, and was noted for scathing and highly opinionated articles attacking many of the most prominent French directors, screenwriters, and critics of French cinema, and for preferring many American directors and their films. He went on to set up his own film company and make his own films, and, in a film career lasting just over a quarter of a century, he fulfilled the functions of screenwriter, director, producer or actor in over twenty-five films. Many of his films won international acclaim, and Truffaut is one of the hundred or so most important and influential figures in the history of world cinema.
Early Life
Truffaut was a "secret child," born out of wedlock in Paris to Janine de Monferrand—she was nineteen at the time. Twenty months after his birth and two weeks before marrying Janine, Roland Truffaut adopted the young François and gave him his name. The maternal grandparents, Jean and Geneviève de Monferrand, Catholics and of minor nobility, had known of their daughter's pregnancy only for the last three months, and she was sent away to a different neighborhood to have the baby. François was raised by his mother and his adoptive father, both of whom were devout Catholics. He did not know until his adolescence that Roland was not his father, and he never met his biological father, who was a Jewish dentist.
Truffaut had an unhappy and emotionally neglected childhood, and turned to a life of delinquency, nonattendance at school (with frequent expulsion), and petty crime. He ended up in reform school, but was rescued in his teenage years by his discovering cinema and becoming a cinema devotee; he later said, "I feel it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that cinema saved my life." He also loved books, and had a special affection for Balzac. During his teen years he also established a film club, with his best friend Robert Lachenay. Through his film enthusiasm he came to know the writer and critic André Bazin, who became his elective father; Bazin would go on to found the influential French film journal Les Cahiers du cinéma. By the age of fourteen, Truffaut's crusade had already taken shape: he would defend "auteur films," as he later called them.
The extent to which Truffaut's film The 400 Blows (1959) is autobiographical has been in dispute; Truffaut reported at the time the film opened that it is, but under bitter assault from his adoptive father and his mother, he denied that it showed their lives or their treatment of him.
In October 1950, Truffaut enlisted in the French army and at the end of the year went to join the French occupation troops in Germany. But in just a few days he began to regret his enlistment, and in 1951, when he was about to be sent to Saigon, he became a deserter. He ended up sick with syphilis, and in military prison. Only the extraordinary efforts of Bazin and others resulted in his eventually being dishonorably discharged, after more time in military prison. His de-enlistment from the army is recounted in his later film Stolen Kisses.
Truffaut came to filmmaking only after an early career as one of the most outspoken film critics in France, writing for the French magazine Elle, for Bazin's les Cahiers du cinéma (he became an editor of the review in 1953), and for other publications. Cahiers at this time had a group of "young Turks: Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Charles Bitsch and sometimes others. These younger writers were intensely critical of post-war French cinema; they saw it as overtly literary. Instead, they praised American directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock', Nicholas Ray, and Howard Hawks, then often dismissed as mere genre film makers. Truffaut also especially honored Jean Renoir—the one whose films Truffaut's most resemble—and Robert Bresson. Truffaut also sent letters to Preston Sturges, Luis Buňuel, Max Ophuls, Abel Gance, Roberto Rossellin, Fritz Lang, and Nicholas Ray, saying, "I admire you; I would like to meet you; I would like to write about you and give you exposure in the press...." (Quoted in De Baecque and Toubiana, p. 90.)
Truffaut was especially noted for an article in Cahiers entitled "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," published in January 1954, attacking the received tradition in French film. This article also laid the foundation for Truffaut's politique des auteurs, or what came to be known as the auteur theory; this view—now more or less universally accepted by film critics and students—holds that the director is the author of the film, and that, for Truffaut anyway, for a director one admires all of that director's films must be considered and defended. This article provoked a storm of praise and counterattack, and was the central point of discussion in French film circles for more than a year. It also changed Truffaut's life. Truffaut became the most prolific and sought after film critic in France and the leader of the Cahiers critics, deciding who got to write what. In addition, he wrote hundreds of articles himself—often using a pseudonym so that he wouldn't seem to be writing everything—for Cahiers and other journals in the years from 1953 to 1985 and following.
Truffaut's criticism was not necessarily fair or just. But it was provocative. As De Baecque and Toubiana put it:
Truffaut, then, had sired a new form of film criticism—frank, direct, violent, sectarian, founded in value judgments, always detailed but often provocative and scathing, with no qualms about being preemptory and unfair. This new breed of criticism preached by the Young Turks came to dominate Cahiers du cinéma and Arts [another journal for which Truffaut wrote], but thoughout critical circles at the time, there was great shock. (p. 83)
In addition to that, Truffaut's own attitude was more politically and socially right wing and he wrote for publications that were more rightist in tone and attitude, whereas the dominant intellectual culture in Paris and France at the time—just a decade after the end of World War II, and dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre and his ilk—was leftist and Communist.
As a result of the severity of his critiques, Truffaut was refused a press pass to the 1958 Cannes film festival.
Marriage and The 400 Blows
On October 29, 1957, Truffaut married Madeleine Morgenstern at the City Hall in Paris. with whom he had two children, Laura (b. January 22, 1959) and Eva (b. June 29, 1961). His father-in-law, a film producer and distributor, helped to get Truffaut's career off the ground, by financing the making of his first film, the short Les Mistons (1958). He and Morgenstern divorced in 1965. In 1983, he had a daughter with actress and constant companion, Fanny Ardant, Joséphine Truffaut who was born on September 28, 1983, a year before his death.
The dynamics of relationships are a common thread throughout most of his films.
Truffaut was an expert on Sir Alfred Hitchcock, even publishing a book Hitchcock (1962, also known as Hitchcock/Truffaut) which recorded interviews and conversations with Hitchcock. His last film Confidentially Yours, a comedy thriller in black and white, could be considered to be a "fake Hitchcock".
Truffaut's 1973 production of La Nuit américaine (known in the US as Day for Night) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Also an actor, he sometimes played in his own films, and appeared in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Truffaut suffered from a brain tumour which was diagnosed in 1983. He died shortly thereafter in the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine at the age of 52. He was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris.
Work
Among Truffaut's films one can discern a series featuring the character Antoine Doinel, played by the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud who began his career in The 400 Blows at the age of fourteen, continuing as the favourite actor and "double" of Truffaut himself. The series would continue with Antoine and Colette (a short film in the anthology Love at Twenty), Stolen Kisses, Bed & Board and finally Love on the Run
In most of these movies, Léaud's partner is Truffaut's favourite actress Claude Jade as his girlfriend (and then wife), "Christine Darbon".
A keen reader, Truffaut filmed many novels:
- American detective novels
- The Bride Wore Black by William Irish
- Mississippi Mermaid by William Irish
- The Long Saturday Night (filmed as Confidentially Yours) by Charles Williams
- Shoot the Piano Player by David Goodis
- Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me by Henry Farrell
- Novels by Henri-Pierre Roché
- Jules et Jim
- Two English Girls
- Henry James' short story "The Altar of the Dead", filmed as The Green Room, considered by some to be his deepest and most serious film
- Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451
Truffaut's other films result from original screenplays, often co-written by the screenwriters Suzanne Schiffman or Jean Gruault, films on very diverse subjects, the sombre The Story of Adele H., inspired by the life of the daughter of Victor Hugo, with Isabelle Adjani, or La Nuit américaine (or "The American Night" which is both the English translation and the French version of the cinema technique known as "Day For Night" which is the English title of the film), shot at the Studio La Victorine describing the ups and downs of film-making, or The Last Metro, set during the German occupation of France, a film rewarded by ten César Awards.
Filmography
As a director
| Year | Original French title | English title | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1955 | Une Visite | ||
| 1957 | Les Mistons | The Misfits | |
| 1958 | Une Histoire d'eau | The Story of Water | Co-directed with Jean-Luc Godard |
| 1959 | Les Quatre cents coups | The 400 Blows | Antoine Doinel series |
| 1960 | Tirez sur le pianiste | Shoot the Piano Player | |
| 1962 | Jules et Jim | Jules and Jim | |
| 1962 | Antoine et Colette | Antoine and Colette | Antoine Doinel series, from L'Amour à vingt ans (Love at Twenty) |
| 1964 | La Peau douce | The Soft Skin | |
| 1965 | Fahrenheit 451 | Filmed in English | |
| 1967 | La Mariée était en noir | The Bride Wore Black | |
| 1968 | Baisers volés | Stolen Kisses | Antoine Doinel series |
| 1969 | La Sirène du Mississippi | Mississippi Mermaid | |
| 1970 | L'Enfant sauvage | The Wild Child / The Wild Boy | |
| 1970 | Domicile conjugal | Bed and Board | Antoine Doinel series |
| 1971 | Les Deux anglaises et le continent | Two English Girls | |
| 1972 | Une belle fille comme moi | Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me / A Gorgeous Bird Like Me | |
| 1973 | La Nuit américaine | Day for Night | Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film |
| 1975 | L'Histoire d'Adèle H. | The Story of Adele H. | |
| 1976 | L'Argent de poche | Small Change | |
| 1977 | L'Homme qui aimait les femmes | The Man Who Loved Women | |
| 1978 | La Chambre verte | The Green Room | |
| 1979 | L'Amour en fuite | Love on the Run | Antoine Doinel series |
| 1980 | Le Dernier métro | The Last Metro | |
| 1981 | La Femme d'à côté | The Woman Next Door | |
| 1983 | Vivement dimanche! | Confidentially Yours |
As an actor only
| Year | Original French title | English title | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1977 | Close Encounters of the Third Kind | Directed by Stephen Spielberg |
As screenwriter only
| Year | Original French title | English title | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | À bout de souffle | Breathless | Directed by Jean-Luc Godard |
| 1983 | Breathless | English-language remake of À bout de souffle | |
| 1988 | La petite voleuse | The Little Thief | Directed by Claude Miller |
| 1995 | Belle Époque | Television series |
Bibliography
- Les 400 Coups (1960) with M. Moussy
- Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock (1967, second edition 1983)
- Les Aventures d'Antoine Doinel (1970)
- Jules et Jim (film script) (1971)
- La Nuit américaine et le Journal de Fahrenheit 451 (1974)
- Le Plaisir des yeux (1975)
- L'Argent de poche (1976)
- L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977)
- Les Films de ma vie (1981)
- Correspondance (1988)
- Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (1988) edited by Anne Gillain
- Belle époque (1996) with Jean Gruault
Quotes
- "The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them. It may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation...and it will be enjoyable because it will be true, and new...The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love." — François Truffaut, published in Arts magazine, May 1957 Source: Miami New Times
- "Film lovers are sick people."
- "In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs."
- "Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings."
- "An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal — falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox." Source: [1]
- "Is the cinema more important than life?"
- "I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself."
- "Taste is a result of a thousand distastes." Source: [2]
See also
- List of notable brain tumor patients
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Eric Pace. "Francois Truffaut, New Wave Director, Dies." The New York Times. October 22, 1984. A1.
External links
- François Truffaut at the Internet Movie Database
- Senses Of Cinema: François Truffaut
- Legendary interview with Truffaut from 1970
Credits
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