Fran?ois Truffaut Films | Fran?ois Truffaut Filmography | Fran?ois Truffaut Biography | Fran?ois Truffaut Career | Fran?ois Truffaut Awards

Fran?ois Truffaut was one of five young French film critics, writing for Andr? Bazin's Cahiers du cin?ma in the early 1950s, who became the leading French filmmakers of their generation. It was Truffaut who first formulated the politique des auteurs, a view of film history and film art that defended those directors who were ?true men of the cinema"?Renoir, Vigo, and Tati in France; Hawks, Ford, and Welles in America?rather than those more literary, script-oriented film directors and writers associated with the French "tradition of quality.? Truffaut's original term and distinctions were subsequently borrowed and translated by later generations of Anglo-American film critics, including Andrew Sards, Robin Wood, V.F. Perkins, and Dave Kehr. When Truffaut made his first feature in 1959, Les Quatre Cent Coups, he put his ideas of cinema spontaneity into practice with the study of an adolescent, Antoine Doinel, who breaks free from the constrictions of French society to face an uncertain but open future. Since that debut, Truffaut's career has been dominated by an exploration of the Doinel character's future (five films) and by the actor (Jean-Pierre L?aud) whom Truffaut discovered to play him. In Truffaut's twenty-five years of making films, the director, the Doinel character, and L?aud all grew up together.

The rebellious teenager of Les Quatre Cent Coups becomes a tentative, shy, sexually clumsy suitor in the ?Antoine et Colette? episode of Love at Twenty. In Baisers vol?s, Antoine is older but not much wiser at either love or money making. In Domicile conjugal, Antoine has married but is still on the run toward something else?the exotic lure of other sexual adventures. And in L'Amour en fuite, Antoine is still running (running became the essential metaphor for the Doinel character's existence, beginning with the lengthy running sequence that concludes Les Quatre Cent Coups). Although Antoine is now divorced, the novel which he has finally completed has made his literary reputation. That novel, it turns out, is his life itself, the entire Doinel saga as filmed by Truffaut, and Truffaut fills his films with film clips that are both visual and mental recollections of the entire Doinel cycle. Truffaut deliberately collapses the distinction between written fiction and filmed fiction, between the real life of humans and the fictional life of characters. The collapse seems warranted by the personal and professional connections between Truffaut the director, Doinel the character, and L?aud the actor.

Many of Truffaut's non-Doinel films are style pieces that similarly explore the boundaries between art and life, film and fiction. The main character of Tirez sur le pianist tries to turn himself into a fictional character, as does Catherine in Jules et Jim. Both find it difficult to maintain the consistency of fictional characters when faced with the demanding exigencies of real life. La Mari?e ?tait en noir was Truffaut's elegy to Hitchcock, a deliberate style piece in the Hitchcock manner, while Fahrenheit 451, his adaption of Ray Bradbury's novel, explores the lack of freedom in a society in which books?especially works of fiction?are burned. Adele H. in L'Histoire d'Adele H. attempts to convert her passion into a book (her diary), but life can neither requite nor equal her passion; instead, it drives her to madness and a total withdrawal from life into the fantasy of her romantic fiction. In L'Homme qui aimait les femmes, an incurable womanizer translates his desire into a successful novel, but the existence of that work in no way diffuses, alleviates, or sublimates the desire that vivified it. The Green Room is Truffaut's homage to fiction and the novelist's craft?a careful, stylish adaption of a Henry James story.

Given his conscious commitment to film and fiction, it is not surprising that Truffaut devoted one of his films to the subject of filmmaking itself. La Nuit am?ricaine is one of the most loving and revealing films about the business of making films, an exuberant illustration of the ways in which films use artifice to capture and convey the illusion of life. This film, in which Truffaut himself plays a film director, is a comically energetic defense of the joys and pains of filmmaking, a deliberate response to the more tortured visions of Fellini's 8 1/2 or Bergman's Persona.

Those Truffaut films not concerned with the subject of art are frequently about education. L'Enfant sauvage explores the beneficial power and effects of civilization on the savage passions of a child who grew up in the forest, apparently raised by beasts. Truffaut again plays a major role in the film (dedicated to Jean-Pierre L?aud), playing a patient scientist who effects the boy's conversion from savagery to humanity. Like the director he played in La Nuit am?ricaine, Truffaut is the wise and dedicated patriarch, responsible for the well-being of a much larger enterprise. L'Argent de poche examines the child's life at school and the child's relationships with adults and other children. As opposed to the imprisoning restrictions which confined children in the world of Les Quarte Cent Coups, the now adult Truffaut realizes that adults?parents and teachers?treat children with far more care, love, and devotion than the children (like the younger, rebellious Truffaut himself) are able to see.

Unlike his friend and contemporary Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut remained consistently committed to his highly formal themes of art and life, film and fiction, youth and education, and art and education, rather than venturing into radical political critiques of film forms and film imagery. Truffaut seems to state his position in Le Dernier M?tro, his most political film, which examines a theater troupe in Nazified Paris. The film director seems to confess that, like those actors in that period, he can only continue to make art the way he knows how, that his commitment to formal artistic excellence will eventually serve the political purposes that powerful art always serves, and that for him to betray his own artistic powers for political, programmatic purposes would perhaps lead to his making bad art and bad political statements. In this rededication to artistic form, Truffaut is probably restating his affinity with the Jean Renoir he wrote about for Cahiers du cin?ma. Renoir, like Truffaut, progressed from making more rebellious black-and-white films in his youth to more accepting color films in his maturity; Renoir, like Truffaut, played major roles in several of his own films; Renoir, like Truffaut, believed that conflicting human choices could not be condemned according to facile moral or political formulae; and Renoir, like Truffaut, saw the creation of art (and film art) as a genuinely humane and meaningful response to the potentially chaotic disorder of formless reality. Renoir, however, lived much longer than Truffaut, who died of cancer in 1984 at the height of his powers.?GERALD MAST