François Truffaut

French film director and critic

• Born: February 6, 1932
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 21, 1984
• Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

A film critic whose auteur theory helped revolutionize film analysis, Truffaut was a leader of the New Wave directors who changed filmmaking itself.

Early Life

François Truffaut (frah-swah trew-foh) was born in Paris, the only child of Roland Truffaut, a draftsman, and Janine de Montferrand, a typist. Young Truffaut was neglected by his parents, who were either working or engaged in his father’s enthusiasm for camping. Truffaut spent his first eight years with his maternal grandmother, and, when she died, his parents reluctantly took him back. He frequently skipped school with his friend Robert Lachenay to go to see films, and in 1943, he ran away from home but was eventually retrieved by his father.

Truffaut later ran away again and lived with Lachenay for a time. In 1947, they bought a print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and launched a club for film enthusiasts. When this venture failed because of competition from another nearby club, Truffaut met its head, André Bazin, who became the most important influence on his life. They remained inseparable until Bazin’s death at forty on November 10, 1958, the first day of shooting on Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959; The Four Hundred Blows ). Bazin’s club folded shortly after Bazin and Truffaut met because of Bazin’s poor health, and Truffaut became a petty thief. His father sent him to a reform school at Villejuif, but in March, 1948, he was released into the protective custody of Bazin, who had legal responsibility for him thereafter. After being rejected by a young woman, Truffaut joined the French army in December, 1950, but soon deserted. Bazin helped him obtain a dishonorable discharge in 1952.

Truffaut lived in the attic of the home of Bazin and his wife for the next year. Bazin helped Truffaut become film critic of the cultural magazine Arts, and Truffaut also began writing for Cahiers du cinéma, founded by Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze while Truffaut had been in the army and soon to be the world’s most influential film journal. In his articles, Truffaut praised low-budget American films for their honesty and attacked recent French films as pedantic and artificial. These essays established his reputation as a confrontational critic and clearly stated his critical principles, influenced not only by Bazin but also by Henri Langlois, cofounder and director of the Cinémathèque Française. At the Cinémathèque, Truffaut and such friends as Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, all future directors, saw silent films, the works of the German expressionists and the Italian neorealists, and the American films that had been banned during the Nazi Occupation. They were particularly impressed by the American films noirs of the 1940’s.

Truffaut’s passion for the cinema showed in his approach to reviewing, treating each film as if he were personally involved in determining its fate. In Truffaut’s most famous essay, “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” (a certain tendency in French cinema), of January, 1954, he ridiculed the work of such directors as René Clement and Jean Delannoy as being too literary and for failing to recognize the visual aspects of film. According to Doniol-Valcroze, “What many uttered under their breaths he dared to say out loud.” In contrast, Truffaut championed the efforts of such American B-film directors as Samuel Fuller and Edgar G. Ulmer for exploiting the relative freedom that low budgets provide to create films bearing the imprints of the director’s personality and style.

Truffaut’s affection for films was such that criticism could not satisfy him. Truffaut worked briefly for Max Ophüls during the making of Lola Montès (1955) and spent two years collaborating on three unproduced screenplays with Roberto Rossellini, the latter experience particularly helping him make the transition to filmmaker. He was to continue writing about films even after becoming a director. His best-known publication is Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock (1966; Hitchcock, 1967), based on fifty hours of interviews in 1962 with his favorite Hollywood director.

On October 29, 1957, Truffaut married Madeleine Morgenstern, daughter of Ignace Morgenstern, one of the most powerful film distributors in France. Their daughter Laura was born in 1959, and another daughter, Ewa, was born in 1961. They were later divorced.

Life’s Work

After directing two short films and codirecting a third with Godard, Truffaut made his first feature, The Four Hundred Blows, for slightly less than eighty thousand dollars. Because he had criticized people like his father-in-law so much, he was given a third of his budget by Ignace Morgenstern, who challenged him to prove he could make a theatrical film. This highly autobiographical account of the life of a young delinquent won the Grand Prix at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. The Four Hundred Blows stars thirteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, chosen from sixty boys who answered an advertisement in France-Soir. The son of a screenwriter and an actress, Léaud had a difficult childhood and developed a relationship with Truffaut similar to that between the director and Bazin. He was to appear in six additional Truffaut films, playing the Antoine Doinel character from The Four Hundred Blows in four.

Truffaut did not savor this success and that of his friend Godard’s Á bout de souffle (1960; Breathless), which he cowrote, as much as he might have, because of the loss of his mentor. He was depressed by Bazin’s death throughout the making of Tirez sur le pianiste (1960; Shoot the Piano Player), based on an American pulp novel by David Goodis. Packed with allusions to other films, especially American film noir, and more visually experimental than The Four Hundred Blows, Shoot the Piano Player was a commercial failure, disturbing the director, who believed himself in tune with public taste. Truffaut recovered with Jules et Jim (1962; Jules and Jim ), which has since been considered his masterpiece. Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, the film is a very unliterary adaptation, comprising almost a catalog of the visual language of the cinema. This depiction of the tragic relationship between two men and a woman was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for its liberated attitude toward sex and adultery. It was an enormous popular success in France and confirmed Truffaut’s international status as a major director.

Firmly established, Truffaut began imitating the American directors of whom he was so fond by becoming what critic Wheeler Dixon calls “a compulsive movie-maker.” When the shooting of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) was delayed, Truffaut hurriedly made La Peau douce (1964; The Soft Skin), a badly received tale of adultery and murder. Fahrenheit 451 , from the Ray Bradbury novel, was another critical and commercial failure. Truffaut’s only English-language film (made in England), it may have suffered from the director’s discomfort with working in another language. (Truffaut turned down several Hollywood projects during this period because of the language barrier.) La Mariée était en noir (1968; The Bride Wore Black), another uneven film, is his most obvious homage to Hitchcock.

Truffaut recovered somewhat with a return to his autobiographical account of the young adult life of Antoine Doinel in Baisers volés (1968; Stolen Kisses ). He and Léaud had previously continued the character’s story in “Antoine et Colette” as part of the L’Amour à vingt ans (1962; Love at Twenty) anthology. He made the film during afternoons while spending his mornings protesting the firing by the Ministery of Culture of Langlois from the Cinémathèque. The Langlois dismissal helped set off massive student demonstrations against the Charles de Gaulle government in May, 1968, and Truffaut and Godard forced the Cannes Film Festival to close in sympathy with the demonstrators. Truffaut won Langlois’s reinstatement by having other directors threaten to withdraw their films from the Cinémathèque.

After another failure, the glossy romance La Sirène du Mississippi (1969; Mississippi Mermaid), Truffaut realized he was not destined to be a director of commercial entertainments and decided to make only smaller, more personal films. The first of these, L’Enfant sauvage (1970; The Wild Child ), represents a return to the stylistic simplicity and thematic sincerity of The Four Hundred Blows. This account of the education of a boy discovered living wild in a forest tells virtually the same story of alienation, rebellion, and lost innocence as Truffaut’s first film and seems almost a dramatization of the Bazin-Truffaut and Truffaut-Léaud relationships. Like his beloved Jean Renoir, Truffaut turned actor, playing the leading role of the doctor in charge of the boy. Short, thin, dark, intense, Truffaut was a good if limited actor. The Wild Child was better received by the critics than any of the director’s efforts since Jules and Jim, with a new maturity and confidence found in his work.

After Domicile conjugal (1970; Bed and Board), focusing on Antoine Doinel’s marriage and infidelity, Truffaut adapted another Henri-Pierre Roche novel. Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971; Two English Girls) is a somber treatment of doomed love. After Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972; Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me), a low-key black comedy and perhaps his weakest film, Truffaut followed with one of his masterpieces, La Nuit américaine (1973; Day for Night ). This story, loosely based on his experience with Mississippi Mermaid of the travails of making a hack film in a Nice studio with insecure, temperamental actors, is considered the best and most accurate film about filmmaking. Truffaut, who plays the director, uses the film to express his belief that films and life are inseparable, that he is alive only when making films. In spirit, if not in details, it is as autobiographical as The Four Hundred Blows. Day for Night won the Academy Award as best foreign-language film of 1973.

Alternating between light and dark attitudes toward humanity, Truffaut next made L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975; The Story of Adèle H.), an account of the obsessive love of Victor Hugo’s daughter for a soldier. After making L’Argent de poche (1976; Small Change), a much brighter picture of childhood than The Four Hundred Blows, and playing a scientist (speaking French only) in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), he made L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977; The Man Who Loved Women), a romantic comedy; La Chambre verte (1978; The Green Room), an adaptation of Henry James’s “The Altar of the Dead,” with Truffaut as a man obsessed with death; L’Amour en fuite (1979; Love on the Run), the last and slightest of the Doinel series; Le Dernier Métro (1980; The Last Métro), a look at a Paris theatrical group during the Nazi Occupation; Le Femme d’ à côté (1981; The Woman Next Door), another tale of adultery; and Vivement dimanche (1983; Confidentially Yours), a light tribute to films noirs. Truffaut spent his last years with Fanny Ardant, star of his final two films, and their daughter, Joséphine, was born in 1983. As with Bazin’s fatal illness, he kept the fact that he was suffering from brain cancer from all but his closest friends. Truffaut died on October 21, 1984, at Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Significance

By helping to create the auteur theory, Truffaut pioneered recognition of the contribution of the film director to both obviously artistic films and low-budget genre films, bringing a new seriousness to film criticism. As auteur criticism became the most legitimate way of looking at films and works by Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, and others in the New Wave showed the benefits of allowing directors the freedom to make personal statements, a new respect for the film director was created. The enthusiasm and humanity in such films as The Four Hundred Blows and Jules and Jim have had a profound influence on directors throughout the world.

Except for his actions of 1968, Truffaut was a relatively nonpolitical person, saying he never voted because he did not think of himself as a citizen. His films have been attacked, especially in France, for lacking any political context. He has also been justifiably criticized for being too indiscriminate in his choice of material, for making more mediocre films than great ones. Ironically, despite the freedom he espoused for directors, Truffaut may have preferred working in the old Hollywood studio system in which he could have risen to the challenge of imposing his personality on formula films. He was being modest only to a degree when he called himself “the least modern and the least intellectual of all the New Wave directors.”

Truffaut is clearly an auteur himself. The predominant theme in his films is his sympathy for outsiders. According to Truffaut, his “characters are on the edge of society” and he wants them “to testify to human fragility.” His films illustrate how people, especially those in love, fail to make the necessary connections that could bring them happiness. Of all French directors, Truffaut most admired Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, and Robert Bresson. The compassion for human frailties in his films has made him their equal.

Bibliography

Allen, Don. Finally Truffaut. New York: Beaufort Books, 1985. An analysis of Truffaut’s films combined with biographical details. Based on fifteen years of interviews with the director.

Crisp, C. G. François Truffaut. New York: Praeger, 1972. A commentary on Truffaut’s films emphasizing the autobiographical element, providing considerable information about the director’s life. Sees Truffaut’s characters as torn between dream and reality, art and life, savagery and civilization. Includes critical essays by Truffaut.

De Gramont, Sanche. “Life Style of Homo Cinematicus.” The New York Times Magazine, June 15, 1969, 12-13, 34-47. An excellent profile revealing details of Truffaut’s life, method of making films, and personality.

Dixon, Wheeler. “François Truffaut: A Life in Film.” Films in Review 36 (1985): 331-336, 413-417. An excellent biographical sketch. One of the best sources of details about Truffaut’s life.

LeBerre, Carole. François Truffaut at Work. Translated by Bill Krohn. New York: Phaidon Press, 2005. A comprehensive examination of Truffaut’s career, including information about his filmmaking methods.

Monaco, James. The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Analysis of Truffaut’s films in the context of the New Wave movement. Includes biographical details of his early life.

Roud, Richard. A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française. New York: Viking, 1983. A biography of one of the most significant influences on Truffaut’s life and career. Gives details of Truffaut’s successful effort to save Langlois’s job.

Stam, Robert. François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Explores the relationship of Truffaut and French writer Henri-Pierre Roche, whose novels Trauffaut adapted for his films Jules and Jim, Two English Girls and the Continent, and The Man Who Loved Women.

Truffaut, François. The Films in My Life. Translated by Leonard Mayhew. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. A collection of Truffaut’s reviews and essays written between 1954 and 1974. This is the best source of examples of his passion for American films. The introduction summarizes his career as a critic.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Truffaut by Truffaut. Compiled by Dominique Rabourdin. Translated by Robert E. Wolf. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987. An illustrated account of Truffaut’s career. Includes interviews with the director and essays, reviews, and letters by him.