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Francois Truffaut
Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Occupation: Director, screenwriter, critic
Also: Actor, producer
Born: February 6, 1932, Paris, France
Died: October 21, 1984, Neuilly, France
Influential film critic, leading New Wave director and heir to the humanistic cinematic tradition of Jean Renoir, François Truffaut made films that reflected his three professed passions: a love of cinema, an interest in male-female relationships and a fascination with children.
After a troubled childhood, Truffaut joined the French army, deserted and was sentenced to a prison term. Critic André Bazin helped secure his release and encouraged his interest in film. In Bazin's influential journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut published "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Certain Tendency in French Cinema") in 1954, proposing what came to be known as the auteur theory. A reaction against the bloated "Tradition of Quality" cinema in France, the article was a plea for a more personal cinema and an informal manifesto for the New Wave, which had not yet broken on the shores of French film.
As a filmmaker, Truffaut
began by making shorts (Une Visite, 1954, Les Mistons, 1957) and working as an assistant
to Roberto Rossellini. In 1959 he completed his first feature-length film, the
semi-autobiographical childhood story
The Four Hundred Blows, about a troubled adolescent,
Antoine Doinel. Truffaut went on to chronicle Doinel's youth and young adulthood in the
"Antoine and Colette" episode of
Love at Twenty (1962),
Stolen Kisses (1968),
Bed and Board (1970) and
Love on the Run (1979), all films featuring the same actor,
Jean-Pierre Léaud, as Antoine. Two diverging strains characterize most of Truffaut's work
from the early 1960s on. On the one hand, the director celebrated life in the humanistic
tradition of Jean Renoir. These films include that masterwork of 60s cinema,
Jules and Jim
(1961), which defined the modern romantic triangle for a generation - it is the bittersweet
story, not of Jules and Jim, the two men, but of Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the woman who
dominates their lives and is free, at least, to choose;
The Wild Child (1970), an essay in
signs and meaning in which Truffaut himself starred as the historical Dr. Jean Itard,
obsessed with understanding how to establish human communication with a boy raised outside
of society; the ebullient Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1973);
Day for Night (1973), an
exuberant celebration of the joy of filmmaking, the ultimate communal art; the joyous
depiction of childhood,
Small Change (1976); the celebration of women and love in
The Man Who
Loved Women (1977); and the gentle thriller
Confidentially
Yours (1983).
On the other
hand, many of Truffaut's films are fatalistic or even cynical, displaying a Hitchcockian
fascination with life's darker side. This group includes
The Bride Wore
Black (1968), his
most explicit homage to Hitchcock, scored by the master's regular composer, Bernard
Herrmann; Two
English Girls (1972), about a writer (Léaud) and his affairs with two
sisters; The
Story of Adele H. (1975), one of the most
harrowing examinations of unrequited love ever filmed;
The Green Room (1978), about the
love of death; and
The Woman Next Door (1981). Yet another group of films reflect an
uneasy balance of these two divergent tendencies, as in his anatomy of adultery,
The Soft Skin (1964); the romantic but brooding
Mississippi Mermaid (1969), which Truffaut
described as being about "degradation, by love"; and
The Last Metro (1980). "I want a film I watch to express either the joy of making
cinema or the anguish of making cinema," Truffaut once said. "I am not
interested in all the films that don't vibrate."
In 1976, Truffaut accepted the
invitation of the wildly successful young American director Steven Spielberg to star in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the scientist in search of communication with
extra-terrestrials. His stoic portrait in that film is an emblem of Truffaut's pain, the
arduous difficulty a born outsider encounters in communicating. This pain suffuses his
lesser films, and cramps them, but it also lurks never far from the heart of his great
films. It's what makes them "vibrate." Always concerned with the process as well
as the product of his profession, Truffaut maintained his role as critic and commentator
throughout his filmmaking career, as proud of his books as he was of his films. Among his
publications is a book-length interview with Hitchcock, Hitchcock-Truffaut (1967), a
perennial critical classic which he revised in 1983, shortly before his death. His
critical essays were collected in Les Films de ma Vie (1975) and his
letters-posthumously-in François Truffaut Correspondance (1990), with a foreword by
Jean-Luc Godard.
Truffaut died - dramatically, arbitrarily - of a brain tumor in the American
Hospital in Neuilly in 1984. He is the father of Laura Truffaut (b. 1959) and Eva Truffaut
(b. 1961), both of whom appeared in their father's film Small Change
(1976) and whose mother is his former wife, Madeleine Morgenstern; and of Joséphine (b.
1983), whose mother is Fanny Ardant.
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