François Roland Truffaut ( ; 6 February 1932 – 21
October 1984) was an influential
filmmaker
and one of the founders of the
French
New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century,
he remains an icon of the
French
film industry. He was also a
screenwriter,
producer, and
actor
working on over twenty-five films.
Life
Truffaut
was born in Paris
on 6
February 1932, out of wedlock. His
mother was Janine de Monferrand, and he never met his biological
father, Roland Lévy, who was a Jewish dentist. His mother's future
husband Roland Truffaut accepted him as an adopted son and gave him
his surname. He was passed around to live with various nannies and
his grandmother for a number of years. It was his grandmother who
instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with his
grandmother until her death when Truffaut was ten years old. It was
only after his grandmother's death that he lived with his parents
for the first time.
Truffaut would often stay with friends and try to be out of the
house as much as possible. It was the cinema that offered him the
greatest escape from an unsatisfying home life. He was eight years
old when he saw his first movie,
Abel
Gance's
Paradis perdu from 1939. It was there that his
obsession began. He frequently played truant from school and would
sneak into theaters because he didn't have enough money for
admission. After being expelled from several schools, at the age of
fourteen he decided to become self taught. Some of his academic
"goals" were to watch three movies a day and read three books a
week.
Truffaut
frequented Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque
Française
where he was exposed to countless foreign films
from around the world. It was here that he fell in love with
U.S. cinema and such directors as
John
Ford,
Howard Hawks,
Nicholas Ray and
Alfred Hitchcock.
After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met
André Bazin, who would have great impact on
his professional and personal life. Bazin was a critic and the head
of another film society at the time. He became a personal friend of
Truffaut's and helped him out of various financial and criminal
situations during his formative years.
Truffaut joined the
French Army in 1950,
but spent the next two years trying to escape. Truffaut was
arrested for attempting to desert the army. Bazin used his various
political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a
job at his newly formed film magazine
Cahiers du cinema.
Over the next few years, Truffaut became a critic (and later
editor) at
Cahiers. He was notorious for being brutal and
unforgiving in his reviews, especially his take on French cinema of
the day.
He was called "The Gravedigger of French
Cinema" and was even banned from the Cannes Film
Festival
in 1958. He developed one of the most
influential theories of cinema itself, the
auteur theory.
In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article called "
Une Certaine
Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Certain Tendency of French
Cinema"), in which he attacked the current state of French films,
lambasting certain screenwriters and producers. The article
resulted in a storm of controversy. Truffaut later devised the
auteur theory, which stated that the director was the "author" of
his work; that great directors such as Renoir or Hitchcock have
distinct styles and themes that permeate all of their films.
Although his theory was not widely accepted then, it gained some
support in the 1960s from American critic
Andrew Sarris. In 1967, Truffaut published his
book-length interview of Hitchcock,
Hitchcock/Truffaut
(New York:
Simon and
Schuster).
After having been a critic, Truffaut decided to make films of his
own. He started out with the short film
Une Visite in 1955 and followed that up with
Les Mistons in 1957. After
seeing
Orson Welles'
Touch of Evil at the
Expo 58, he was inspired to make his feature film
debut
Les Quatre Cent Coups (The
400 Blows).
Truffaut's grave
Truffaut was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1959 to 1965,
and they had two daughters, Laura (born 1959) and Eva (born 1961).
Madeleine was the daughter of Ignace Morgenstern, managing director
of one of France’s largest film distribution companies, and was
largely responsible for securing funding for Truffaut's first
films. While he had affairs with almost all of his leading ladies,
Truffaut and actress
Fanny Ardant lived
together from 1981 to 1984 and had a daughter, Joséphine Truffaut
(born 28 September 1983).
In 1983, Truffaut was diagnosed with a
brain
tumor. He died on 21 October 1984. At the time of his death, he
still had numerous films in preparation. His goal was to make
thirty films and then retire to write books for his remaining days.
He was five films short of his personal goal.
He is buried in
Montmartre
Cemetery
, Paris.
Work
The 400 Blows was released in
1959 to much critical and commercial acclaim. Truffaut received a
Best Director award from the Cannes Film Festival, the same
festival that had banned him only one year earlier. The film
follows the character of
Antoine
Doinel through his perilous misadventures in school, an unhappy
home life and later reform school. The film is highly
autobiographical. Both Truffaut and Doinel were only children of
loveless marriages; they both committed petty crimes of theft and
truancy from the military. Truffaut cast
Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel.
Léaud was seen as an ordinary boy of 13 who auditioned for the role
after seeing a flyer, but interviews filmed after the film's
release (one is included on the Criterion DVD of the film) reveal
Léaud's natural sophistication and an instinctive understanding of
acting for the camera. Léaud and Truffaut collaborated on several
films over the years. Their most noteworthy collaboration was the
continuation of the Antoine Doinel character in a series of films
called "The Antoine Doinel Cycle".
The primary focus of
The 400 Blows is centered on the life
of a young character by the name of Antoine Doinel. This film
follows this character through his troubled adolescence. He is
caught in between an unstable parental relationship and an isolated
youth. The film focuses on the real life events of the director,
François Truffaut. From birth Truffaut was thrown into an undesired
situation. As he was born out of wedlock, his birth had to remain a
secret because of the social stigma associated with illegitimacy.
He was registered as “A child born to an unknown father” in the
hospital records. He was looked after by a nurse for an extended
period of time. His mother eventually married and her husband
Roland gave his surname, Truffaut, to François.
Although he was legally accepted as a legitimate child, his parents
did not accept him. The Truffauts had another child who died
shortly after birth. This experience saddened them greatly and as a
result they despised François because of the memory of regret that
he represented (Knopf 4 ). He was an outcast from his earliest
years, dismissed as an unwanted child. François was sent to live
with his grandparents. It wasn’t until François’s grandmother’s
death before his parents took him in, much to the dismay of his own
mother. The experiences with his mother were harsh. He recalled
being treated badly by her but he found comfort in his father,
Ronald Truffaut’s laughter and overall spirit. The relationship
with Ronald was more comforting than the one with his own mother.
François had a very depressing childhood after moving in with his
parents. They would leave him alone whenever they would go on
vacations. He even recalled memories of being alone during
Christmas. Being left alone forced François into a sense of
independence, he would often do various tasks around the house in
order to improve it such as painting or changing the electric
outlets. Sadly, these kind gestures often resulted in a
catastrophic event causing him to get scolded by his mother. His
father would mostly laugh them off.
The 400 Blows marked the beginning of the
French New Wave movement, which gave
directors such as
Jean-Luc Godard,
Chabrol and
Jacques Rivette a wider audience. The New
Wave dealt with a self-conscious rejection of traditional cinema
structure. This was a topic on which Truffaut had been writing for
years.
Following the success of
The 400 Blows, Truffaut featured
disjunctive editing and seemingly random voice-overs in his next
film
Shoot the Piano
Player (1960). Truffaut has stated that in the middle of
filming, he realized that he hated gangsters. But since gangsters
were a main part of the story, he toned up the comical aspect of
the characters and made the movie more attuned to his liking. Even
though
Shoot the Piano Player was much appreciated by
critics, it performed poorly at the box office. While the film
focused on two of the French New Wave’s favorite elements, American
Film Noir and themselves, Truffaut never
again experimented as heavily.
In 1962, Truffaut directed his third movie,
Jules and Jim. Over the next decade,
Truffaut had varying degrees of success with his films. In 1965 he
directed the American production of
Ray
Bradbury’s classic sci-fi novel
Fahrenheit 451. It showcased
Truffaut’s love of books. His only English-speaking film was a
great challenge for Truffaut, because he barely spoke English
himself. This was also his first film shot in color. The larger
scale production was difficult for Truffaut, who had worked only
with small crews and budgets.
Truffaut worked on projects with varied subjects.
The Bride Wore Black (1968) is a
brutal tale of revenge,
Mississippi Mermaid (1969) is an
identity-bending romantic thriller,
Stolen Kisses (1968) and
Bed and Board (1970) are continuations of
the Antoine Doinel Cycle, and
The
Wild Child (1970) included Truffaut’s first acting in a
film.
Two English Girls (1971)
is the yin to the
Jules and Jim yang. It is based on a
story written by
Henri-Pierre
Roche, who also wrote
Jules and Jim. It is about a man
who falls equally in love with two sisters, and their love affair
over a period of years.
Day for Night won
Truffaut a
Best Foreign Film
Oscar in 1973. The film is probably his most reflective work.
It is the story of a film crew trying to finish their film while
dealing with all of the personal and professional problems that
accompany making a movie. Truffaut plays the director of the
fictional film being made. This film features scenes shown in his
previous films. It is considered to be his best film since his
earliest work.
Time magazine
placed it on their list of 100 Best Films of the Century (along
with
The 400 Blows).
In 1975, Truffaut gained more notoriety with
The Story of Adele H. Isabelle Adjani in the title role earned a
nomination for an
Best
Actress Oscar. Truffaut's 1976 film
Small Change gained a
Golden Globe
Nomination for Best Foreign Film.
One of Truffaut's final films gave him an international revival. In
1980, his film
The Last
Metro garnered twelve
Cesar
Award nominations with ten wins, including Best Director.
Truffaut's final movie was shot in black and white. It gives his
career almost a sense of having bookends. In 1983
Confidentially Yours is Truffaut’s
tribute to his favorite director,
Alfred Hitchcock. It deals with numerous
Hitchcockian themes, such as private guilt vs. public innocence, a
woman investigating a murder, anonymous locations, etc.
Among Truffaut's films, a series features the character
Antoine Doinel, played by the actor
Jean-Pierre Léaud. He began his
career in
The 400 Blows at
the age of fourteen, and continued as the favorite actor and
"double" of Truffaut. The series continued with
Antoine and Colette (a short film
in the anthology
Love at Twenty),
Stolen Kisses (in which he falls in love
with Christine Darbon alias
Claude
Jade),
Bed and Board
about the married couple Antoine and Christine—and, finally,
Love on the
Run, where the couple going divorces.
In the last movies, Léaud's partner was played by Truffaut's
favorite actress
Claude Jade as his
girlfriend (and then wife), "Christine Darbon."
A keen reader, Truffaut adapted many literary works, including two
novels by
Henri-Pierre
Roché,
Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451,
Henry James' "
The Altar of the Dead", filmed as
The Green Room, and
several American
detective
novels.
Truffaut's other films were from original screenplays, often
co-written by the screenwriters
Suzanne Schiffman or
Jean Gruault. They featured diverse subjects,
the sombre
The Story of Adele
H., inspired by the life of the daughter of
Victor Hugo, with
Isabelle Adjani;
Day for Night,
shot at the
Studio La Victorine
describing the ups and downs of film-making; and
The Last Metro, set during the
German occupation of France, a
film rewarded by ten
César
Awards.
Filmography
Director
Screenwriter only
Actor
Bibliography
- Les 400 Coups (1960) with M. Moussy (English
translation: 400 Blows)
- Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock (1967, second edition
1983) (English translation: Hitchcock and
Hitchcock/Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G.
Scott)
- Les Aventures d'Antoine Doinel (1970) (English
translation: Adventures of Antoine Doinel; translated by
Helen G. Scott)
- Jules et Jim (film script) (1971) (English
translation: Jules and Jim; translated by Nicholas
Fry)
- La Nuit américaine et le Journal de Fahrenheit 451
(1974)
- Le Plaisir des yeux (1975)
- L'Argent de poche (1976) (English title: Small
change: a film novel; translated by Anselm Hollo)
- L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977)
- Les Films de ma vie (1981) (English translation:
Films in my life; translated by Leonard Mayhew)
- (1988) (English translation: Correspondence,
1945-1984; translated by Gilbert Adair)
- Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (1988) edited by
Anne Gillain
- Belle époque (1996) with Jean
Gruault
See also
References
- New Wave Film.com Encyclopedia, Truffaut
biography, accessed Aug 2009.
- AllMovie.com, Truffaut biography, accessed Aug
2009.
External links
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