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François Truffaut

François Truffaut was cinema’s most devoted son and one of its most natural directors, which is a rare combination. He had a deprived, difficult childhood in which films were the primary available warmth, the Cinémathèque the place he felt most at home, and Bazin the first adult who took him seriously. When he became a critic and then a director, the films he made were saturated with that love in ways that never became sentimental, because he was also clear-eyed enough about cinema, and about himself, to know what he was doing.

The 400 Blows arrived in 1959 and was immediately, obviously, a masterpiece, not in the retrospective way that reputation confers that word, but immediately, in the year of its release, at Cannes, where it won Best Director. It remains one of the great films about childhood and one of the great films about the relationship between a director and his own past, the freeze frame at the sea’s edge functioning as both an ending and a refusal to end, a figure caught between what he’s escaped and what he’s heading toward.

He returned to Antoine Doinel four more times across twenty years, which is the most sustained act of autobiographical cinema in French film history. Léaud ageing as Doinel ages, the relationship between director and character becomes increasingly complicated and increasingly honest, until Love on the Run, which acknowledges that neither of them quite knows how to let go.

The other Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, The Wild Child, Day for Night, The Story of Adele H., The Last Metro) shows a director of genuine range who could do several things at the highest level. Day for Night, in particular, is the most generous film ever made about filmmaking, which is a strange thing to say about something so honest about how difficult and sometimes fraudulent the process is. But that’s Truffaut, the love and the clarity together.

He died in 1984 at fifty-two, which is the great theft of French cinema.

Still from Bed and Board (1970)Still from Truffaut

François Truffaut (1932 – 1984)

  • 1957 – Les Mistons
  • 1959 – The 400 Blows
  • 1960 – Shoot the Piano Player
  • 1962 – Antoine et Colette
  • 1962 – Jules et Jim
  • 1964 – The Soft Skin
  • 1966 – Fahrenheit 451
  • 1968 – The Bride Wore Black
  • 1968 – Stolen Kisses
  • 1969 – Mississippi Mermaid
  • 1970 – Bed & Board
  • 1970 – The Wild Child
  • 1971 – Two English Girls
  • 1972 – A Gorgeous Girl Like Me
  • 1973 – Day for Night
  • 1975 – The Story of Adele H
  • 1976 – Small Change
  • 1977 – The Man Who Loved Women
  • 1978 – The Green Room
  • 1978 – Love on the Run
  • 1980 – The Last Metro
  • 1981 – The Woman Next Door
  • 1983 – Confidentially Yours

  • Autobiography as Method: The Antoine Doinel cycle is the most explicit version, but the autobiographical impulse runs through everything: the difficult childhood, the reformatory, the obsession with cinema, the complicated relationships with women. Truffaut didn’t fictionalise his life to process it; he made films about it directly, and the honesty of that is what gives the work its emotional authority.
  • Cinema as Love Object: Day for Night is the fullest statement, but the cinephilia is everywhere; in the references, in the formal choices, in the profound sense that making films and watching films are related acts of devotion.
  • Childhood as a Moral Category: Children in Truffaut’s films are observed with an accuracy and a respect that most directors don’t manage. Small Change and The Wild Child in particular treat the child’s experience as genuinely serious, not as preparation for the adult story. The conviction seems to be that how a society treats its children is the measure of everything else.
  • The Freeze Frame and the Arrested Moment: The ending of The 400 Blows is the iconic instance, but the impulse to stop time, to hold an image at the moment of maximum significance, recurs throughout. It’s a formal tic that is also a philosophical position about what cinema can do that life can’t.
  • Love as Complication: The romantic films are not romantic in the reassuring sense – Jules and Jim, Two English Girls, The Woman Next Door all treat love as something that damages the people who feel it, that creates impossible situations, that doesn’t resolve. The warmth of his films coexists with a fairly bleak view of what desire does to people, and the combination is what makes them last.

Biography

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