François Truffaut

For more information on François Truffaut, visit Britannica.com.

The French film director and critic François Truffaut (1932-1984), together with Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, created the "New Wave" in French motion picture production in the late 1950s.

François Truffaut as film maker and esthetician was instrumental in formulating a new cinema language. In its visual spontaneity and narrative discontinuity, the style he helped to originate provided a sharp contrast to the studied academicism of older and established directors. Although elements of his innovative methods can be found in works by his brilliant colleague and early collaborator Jean Luc Godard and in later productions by other directors, few have been able to capture the lyrical warmth, infectious exuberance, and textual luminosity that distinguish the finest of Truffaut's efforts.

Truffaut was born in Paris and spent much of his unhappy childhood working in menial factory and office jobs. Sent by a juvenile court to a reformatory when he was 15 years old, he was rescued from prolonged confinement by the noted film critic André Bazin, who had been impressed with the youth's enthusiasm for motion pictures and his regular attendance at local cinema clubs. After completing service in the French armed forces, Truffaut was introduced by Bazin to the editors of the influential cinema review Cahiers du cinéma, where he worked as a critic for the next 8 years.

Truffaut attacked all that was stale and conventional in French films and admired the low-budget American productions that could be undertaken with less pressure on the director from "businessmen." In 1954 he made his directorial debut with a short, Une Visite, followed in 1957 by another short, Les Mistons, a technically adventurous lyrical idyll of childhood innocence. In collaboration with Godard, he then composed the script for and directed Une Historie d'eau (1958), a slapstick comedy reminiscent of early Mack Sennett silents.

The 400 Blows (1959), Truffaut's first full-length film, established him among the most subtly evocative and imaginatively inspired creators of cinema. A touching yet deliberately unsentimental autobiographical work, of an unwanted 13-year-old boy driven to desperation by insensitive parents and tyrannical officials, The 400 Blows alternates between subjective lyricism and cinéma vérité objectivity. That same year Truffaut provided the original story for Godard's intellectual crime thriller Breathless. In 1960 Shoot the Piano Player represented Truffaut's tribute to the Hollywood gangster movies of the 1930s. The sardonically amusing plot - a lonely barroom piano player tries to save his two brothers from mobsters they have double-crossed - contains a compendium of "New Wave" cinematic techniques. The film's technical exuberance - such devices as the frozen take, the iris shot, and comic-strip images were employed - reflects a portion of the work's moral and philosophical statement.

With Jules and Jim (1961) Truffaut produced the film that most critics consider his finest effort and a cinematic masterpiece. A tragically humorous story of an endearing love triangle, suffused with the nostalgia of its early-20th-century Parisian setting, the film projected, wrote critic Stanley Kauffmann, "an exhilaration, tenderness, wonderful rhythmic variation, understatement, and an un-American innocence-in-sex, " which young audiences accepted as a way of life as well as a style of film making.

The Soft Skin (1964), a romantic melodrama about a professor of literature who leaves his wife for an airline stewardess he loves, contained some striking sequences but could not transcend its banality of theme. Even more disappointing was Fahrenheit 451 (1966), an uninspired science-fiction parable about a future society in which reading is prohibited. The Bride Wore Black (1968), a revenge tale, was a rather depressing tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. In 1967 Truffaut published Hitchcock, an illuminating analysis of his fellow auteur.

Stolen Kisses (1968) was a sequel to The 400 Blows and successfully recaptured much of the earlier film's incandescent charm. This film history of the character Antoine Donel was continued in Bed and Board (1971), another charming and lightly mocking semiautobiographical effort. The year before, Truffaut wrote, directed, and performed in an austere film relating a doctor's attempts to civilize a child who had grown up in the forest. Based on a true incident, The Wild Child was resoundingly successful, showing a new facet of Truffaut's versatile talent.

Truffaut was acclaimed for his rich characterizations of two females in Two English Girls (1971), which deals with the relationship between making art and suffering love. Day for Night (1973) won an Oscar for Truffaut as a homage to filmmaking. In 1975, he produced The Story of Adele H., in which the daughter of Victor Hugo tells her story, and two years later released The Man Who Loved Women, about a hopelessly adolescent hero who encounters sympathetic women. In 1979, Truffaut returned to his series featuring the character Antoine Donel in a movie entitled Love on the Run.

Truffaut produced several films in the 1980s, including The Last Metro (1980), the story of a theater troupe in Paris during the German occupation. Two films, The Woman Next Door (1981) and Vivement Dimache (1983) were very heavily influenced by Truffaut's admiration of Alfred Hitchcock, and included the ingredients of suspense, murder and obsessive love.

Truffaut died on Oct. 21, 1984, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.

Further Reading

The most perceptive criticism of Truffaut can be found in Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (1965) and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968); Stanley Kauffmann, A World on Film (1966); the sections on Truffaut in John Russell Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (1964) and Dwight MacDonald, Dwight MacDonald on Movies (1969); and Annette Insdorf's François Truffaut (1979).

Truffaut, François (1932-84). French film-maker, one of the pillars of the Nouvelle Vague. Beginning as a critic, he was a founder member of Cahiers du cinéma in 1951. His films can be grouped in three main categories: films about Antoine Doinel, fairly autobiographical in nature (e.g. Les 400 Coups, 1959; Domicile conjugal, 1970); the film noir series, frequently playful homages to Hitchcock (e.g. Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960; Vivement dimanche, 1983); films about love (e.g. Jules et Jim, 1961; La Femme d'à côté, 1981). All have in common the difficulty of human relationships; solitude is a hallmark of his narratives. His films are tightly structured, often in the form of diptychs, with the opening sequence foreshadowing the rest of the film.

[Susan Hayward]

Quotes:

"All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance."

"When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful."

• Born: Feb 06, 1932 in Paris, France
• Died: Oct 21, 1984 in Neuilly, France
• Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
• Active: '60s-'80s
• Major Genres: Drama, Comedy Drama
• Career Highlights: Jules and Jim, Breathless, The 400 Blows
• First Major Screen Credit: Les Mistons (1957)

Biography

Movie historian Leslie Halliwell has quoted French filmmaker François Truffaut as observing "I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man." It is difficult to believe that there exists a film that Truffaut didn't see as a youth.

The product of an unhappy, loveless home, Truffaut began using films to escape the exigencies of reality at age seven, virtually living in various Parisian movie houses. He left school to go to work at 14, and, one year later, founded a film club, which brought him to the attention of influential cinema critic Andre Bazin. Over the next few years, Bazin both financed and protected Truffaut, helping the young cineaste weather such crises as his arrest for nonpayment of debts and his 1951 public humiliation following his desertion from the Army. In 1953, Bazin hired Truffaut as a critic/essayist for Cahiers du Cinema. It was in the January 1954 edition that Truffaut published his landmark essay "A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema," in which he attacked directors who merely ground out films without any personal cinematic vision; he also propounded the auteur theory, which opined that the only directors worth serious consideration were those who left their own individual signatures on each of their films.

Forever marching to his own drummer, Truffaut parted company with his mentor Bazin over certain directors, including William Wyler, whom Truffaut found too bound to "theatricality" for his tastes. In later years, Truffaut noted that writing critiques enabled him to understand why he loved films and to rationalize his reasons for liking them. Hoping to put his auteur theory to practical use, Truffaut decided to direct a short film, 1954's Une Visite. In 1957, the same year he married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of a major film distributor, Truffaut set up his own production company, Les Films du Carosse (named in honor of the Jean Renoir film Le Carrosse d'Or). He garnered critical acclaim for his 1957 short subject Les Mistons, and two years later he made his first feature, the intensely autobiographical The 400 Blows. Cast as Truffaut alter-ego Antoine Doinel was young Jean-Pierre Leaud, who went on to play Doinel at various later stages of his life in Truffaut's four follow-ups to 400 Blows.

In 1961, Truffaut directed what many consider his masterpiece, and what not a few observers regard as the finest film of its year: Jules et Jim, a hauntingly beautiful tale of a lingering romantic triangle. Though in the vanguard of the French New Wave (he contributed to the scripts of such groundbreaking films as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless), Truffaut was never a hard-to-fathom aesthete, but, instead, the most successful filmmaker in France, as popular with casual fans as serious film students. He also differed from his New Wave colleagues by avoiding overt political statements: Even his most "politicized" film, 1980's The Last Metro, was more in the romantic tradition of Renoir than the tract-like pronouncements of Godard.

In developing a style of his own, Truffaut was heavily influenced by his idols Jean Vigo, Jacques Tati, and especially Renoir, whom Truffaut admired for his ability to simultaneously depict the realities of life and "improve" upon them. "To make a film is to improve upon life, to arrange it to suit oneself, to prolong the games of childhood, to construct something that is at once a new toy and a vase in which one can arrange in a permanent way the ideas one feels in the morning." Like Renoir, Truffaut endeavored to make films that approximated real life, but were romanticized enough to be entertainment. Truffaut also admired such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. Echoes of Hawks and Welles would persist throughout Truffaut's career, while Hitchcock was imitated outright in 1967's The Bride Wore Black. His love affair with Hollywood films was manifested in his frequent employment of Tinseltown stalwarts like novelist/screenwriters David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich, and composer Bernard Herrmann. Curiously, despite his affection for American films, Truffaut remained monolingual throughout his life; his inability to communicate in English has been cited as the major reason for the comparative failure of his only English-language effort, Fahrenheit 451 (1966).

As he matured professionally, Truffaut's previous attention-getting techniques grew less pronounced, and he began favoring the "invisible camera" à la John Ford. After finishing his Oscar-winning Day for Night (1973) -- a film about the making of movies -- Truffaut announced his retirement from directing, but, within a year, was back on the job. In addition to his directorial activities, Truffaut also produced the works of others, and occasionally dabbled in acting, first in his own films (The Wild Child, Day for Night, etc.) and later in the leading role of French scientist Claude Lecombe in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). At the time of his death from cancer at the age of 52, Truffaut was busily preparing a distaff variation of The 400 Blows: The Little Thief. The project would ultimately be completed by Truffaut's protégé/collaborator Claude Miller.

Truffaut's extensive published works include Les Films De Ma Vie, Hitchcock, and various collections of his letters and magazine articles. In addition to his Oscar for Day for Night (which also earned citations from such groups as the New York Film Critics and the British Film Academy), Truffaut was honored with the Cannes Film Festival Best Director prize for The 400 Blows, a Best Director César for Le Dernier Metro (1980), and the Prix Louis Delluc and National Society of Film Critics Award for Stolen Kisses (1968). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Green Room Buy this Movie	Close Encounters of the Third Kind Buy this Movie	The Man Who Loved Women Buy this Movie	Small Change Buy this Movie
The Story of Adele H. Buy this Movie	Day for Night Buy this Movie	Two English Girls Buy this Movie	The Wild Child Buy this Movie

Show More Movies Show Fewer Movies