"The Films in My Life", François Truffaut

François Truffaut (1931-1984) was the passionate film critic whose love for cinema was so strong that it could only lead him to eventually exchange the pen for the camera. A protégée of the influential film theorist André Bazin (1918-1958), in his writings for Cahiers du Cinéma he changed forever the way of seeing films, namely in his review of Jacques Becker's Ali Baba et les Quarante Vouleurs (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, 1954) where he presented the known la politique des auteurs (translated later by Andrew Sarris as “the auteur theory”). In it, Truffaut invoked the Giraudoux’s aphorism “there are no works, only auteurs” and applied that statement into cinematic terms, that is, a failed film from a great director will always be better than a successful one by a mediocre director (“the worst Hawks is more interesting than Huston’s best”, as he once stated), due to a personal vision of the world that is consistent along the auteur’s oeuvre, mainly expressed through the mise en scène. As a critic he became also known for his attacks on la tradition de qualité (“quality tradition”), that is, a canon of filmmakers whose films were successful mainly due to a literal merit than a visual one, as stated in his famous 1954 essay Une Certain Tendance du Cinéma Français ("A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema"). His filmic enthusiasm also led to his extensive and influential book Hitchcock / Truffaut, that gathered a series of interviews that he made to the British filmmaker. 

As a film director, the history is well known. With his friends from the Cahiers (Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, among others) he made some shorts and with his first feature film, Les 400 Coups (The Four Hundred Blows, 1959), he gained international acclaim as well as attention to the Nouvelle Vague movement that had begun earlier with Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958). With this semi-autobiographical film of a misfit teenager, young directors were inspired to make personal statements full of vitality on film, outside the complex industrial system associated to the cinematic art. Following that, he never made the same picture twice and experimented a bit of several genres, as science-fiction (Fahrenheit 451, 1966), thriller (La Mariée était en noir, 1968) and comedy (La Nuit Américain, 1973) as well as a long list of romantic and passionate dramas that went from the celebrated Jules et Jim (1962) to the more melodramatic La Femme du Cotée (1981). After all, the one theme that is permanent along his body of work is this: women. Either Truffaut’s films are centered on feminine characters (La Sirène du Mississipi, L’Histoire d’Adèle H.) or tormented by them (the Antoine Doinel series, L’Homme Qui Aimait les Femmes) reflecting the filmmaker’s obsession with the opposite sex in whole its splendor, charm and seduction. An obsession only equated with the one he had with cinema.

The Films in My Life, originally published in 1975, is an anthology of more than one hundred of Truffaut's essays, gathered by the French director himself, from his early years at the Cahiers to the mid-70s, when he was already established as a popular filmmaker.

Excerpts:
"When I was a critic, I thought that a successful film had simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema; La Règle du Jeu and Citizen Kane corresponded to this definition perfectly. Today, I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse." From the book's preface, written by Truffaut himself. Translated by Leonard Mayhew.

"La Tour de Nesle is, if you will, the least good of Abel Gance's films. But, since Gance is a genius, it also is a film of genius. Gance does not possess genius, he is possessed by genius. If you gave him a portable camera and set him in the midst of twenty other newsreel makers outside the Palais Bourbon or at the entrance to the Parc des Princes, he alone would deliver a masterpiece, a few hundred inches of film in which each shot, each image, each sixteenth or twenty-fourth of a second would bear the mark of genius, invisible and present, visible and omnipresent. How would it have been done? Only he would know. To tell the truth, I think that even he would not know how he did it." From the review of La Tour de Nesle (1955, Abel Gance). Translated by Leonard Mayhew.

"Cinema is an art of the woman, that is, of the actress. The director's work consists in getting pretty women to do pretty things. For me, the great moments of cinema are when the director's gifts mesh with the gifts of an actress: Griffith and Lillian Gish, Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang and Joan Bennett, Renoir and Simone Simon, Hitchcock and Joan Fontaine, Rossellini and Anna Magnani, Ophuls and Danielle Darrieux, Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Vadim and Brigitte Bardot. Now we can add Preminger and Jean Seberg to the list." From the review of Bonjour Tristesse (1958, Otto Preminger). Translated by Leonard Mayhew.

Link to the complete book in PDF:

François Truffaut on the set of Fahrenheit 451.

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