Truffaut, François

Truf·faut (tro͞o-fōʹ), François. 1932-1984.

French New Wave filmmaker whose works include The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules and Jim (1961).

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born Feb. 6, 1932, Paris, France

died Oct. 21, 1984, Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris

French film director and critic.

As a film critic for the avant-garde Cahiers du Cinéma, he advocated the auteur theory and helped establish the New Wave movement. His first feature film was the semi-autobiographical The 400 Blows (1959), a portrait of a delinquent boy, that won him international acclaim. Influenced by Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, he made varied and admired movies such as Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1961), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Stolen Kisses (1968), The Wild Child (1969), Day for Night (1973, Academy Award), The Story of Adèle H. (1975), and The Last Metro (1980). His films record life's grayness and flatness with a sense of resignation quite distinct from platitude or petulant nihilism.

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▪ French director

Introduction

born February 6, 1932, Paris, France

died October 21, 1984, Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris

      French film critic, director, and producer whose attacks on established filmmaking techniques paved the way for the movement known as the Nouvelle Vague ( New Wave).

Early works

      Truffaut was born into a working-class home. His own troubled childhood provided the inspiration for Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959; The 400 Blows), a semiautobiographical study of a working-class delinquent. It is the first of the Antoine Doinel trilogy, tracing its hero's evolution from an antisocial anguish to a happy and settled domesticity. When it won the best direction prize at the 1959 Cannes film festival, Truffaut was established as a leader of the French cinema's New Wave—a term for the simultaneous presentation of first feature films by a number of French directors—a tendency that profoundly influenced the rising generation of filmmakers around the world.

      The New Wave marked a reaction against the commercial production system: the well-constructed plot, the limitations of a merely craftsmanlike approach, and the French tradition of quality with its heavy reliance on literary sources. Its aesthetic (aesthetics) theory required every detail of a film's style to reflect its director's sensibility as intimately as a novelist's prose style retraces the workings in depth of his mind—hence the term le camera-stylo (“camera-pen”). The emphasis lay on visual nuance, for, in keeping with a general denigration of the preconceived and the literary, the script was often treated less as a ground plan for a dramatic structure than as merely a theme for improvisation. Improvised scenes were filmed, deploying the visual flexibility of newly developed television equipment (e.g., the handheld camera) and techniques (e.g., extensive postsynchronization of dialogue). The minimization of costs encouraged producers to gamble on unknown talents, and the simplicity of means gave the director close control over every aspect of the creative process, hence Truffaut's term auteur (auteur theory), or film author.

      Outside his art, Truffaut was reticent about his private life, although it is known that he was sent to a reformatory before leaving school at age 14 to work in a factory. His interest in the cinema, however, brought him to the attention of the critic André Bazin, doyen of the monthly avant-garde film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, who incorporated him into the staff. For eight years Truffaut asserted himself as the most truculent critic of the contemporary French cinema, which he considered stale and conventional, and advocated a cinema that would allow the director to write dialogue, invent stories, and, in general, produce a film as an artistic whole in his own style. Thus, he was influential in the cinema world before he actually made a film. Like his leading character in Baisers volés (1969; Stolen Kisses), another film in the Doinel series, he deserted from his military service, being committed to various prisons until he was able to resume his journalistic career and, eventually, put his ideas into creative practice. Again like Doinel in Domicile conjugale (1970; Bed and Board), he married and became the father of two daughters.

      Truffaut's initial creative effort, the short piece Les Mistons (1958; The Mischief Makers), depicted a gang of boys who thoughtlessly persecute two young lovers. His second short, Une Histoire d'eau (1959; A Story of Water), was a slapstick comedy for which Jean-Luc Godard (Godard, Jean-Luc) developed the conclusion. Both films met with sufficient appreciation to facilitate his first feature-length film, Les Quatre Cents Coups. An evocation of the adolescent's pursuit of independence from a staid adult world of conformity and protocol, for which Truffaut evinced a romantic sympathy, the film proved to be one of the most popular New Wave films, especially in England and the United States. Two tenderly pessimistic studies in sexual tragedy followed—Tirez sur le pianiste (1960; Shoot the Piano Player), adapted from a U.S. thriller (Down There by David Goodis), a genre for which Truffaut displayed great admiration, and Jules et Jim (1962).

Later works

      After this burst of creativity, he seemed to have a period of hesitation. All of his later works, however, were intensely personal and explored one of two themes: studies in forlorn childhoods—e.g., the Doinel trilogy and L'Enfant sauvage (1969; The Wild Child), the chronicle of an 18th-century doctor who attempts to domesticate an uncivilized child—and sensitive melodramas sadly celebrating disastrous confrontations between shy heroes and boldly emancipated or possessive women. The first theme shows the influence of filmmaker Jean Vigo (Vigo, Jean), in its uncompromising stance against authority of any kind, and of Jean Renoir (Renoir, Jean), in its feeling for place and atmosphere and its mingling of the nostalgic with sudden outbursts of blatant humour, as well as of Truffaut's personal experience. The second owes much to the American roman noir, or “black novel,” the diverse manifestations of which, from the morally disintegrated heroes of William Faulkner (Faulkner, William) to the sadistic gangsters of Mickey Spillane (Spillane, Mickey), have fascinated French novelists from Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, Jean-Paul) to the present. A certain hero worship, also, is discernible in Truffaut's long published conversations with the veteran British American filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock, Sir Alfred) (Hitchcock, rev. ed. 1984), whose work he admired in complete defiance of his earlier theories. Of Truffaut's features only Fahrenheit 451 (1966), a film version of Ray Bradbury's science-fiction novel, falls outside these categories, though it relates to the American style and the poetic-melodramatic form. Through his production company, Les Films du Carrosse, Truffaut coproduced, among other films, Godard's first feature and Jean Cocteau (Cocteau, Jean)'s last. His own later films include La Nuit américaine (1972; Day for Night), for which he was awarded an Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Le Dernier Métro (1980; The Last Metro); and Vivement dimanche (1983; Confidentially Yours).

      For Truffaut, the cinema had to be, on the one hand, personal and, on the other, a splendid spectacle. The style of his first three films, at once delicate, lyrical, and exceptionally fertile in cinematographic invention, has become, partly by choice, more prosaic and conventional. Controversy has centred on the extent to which his films involve a militant conservatism—whether, for example, Truffaut in L'Enfant sauvage deplores, documents, feels nostalgic for, or positively and without reservation approves the narrow, strict rigidities with which its psychologist (played by Truffaut himself) sets about civilizing the abandoned autistic child. It may be that Truffaut's earlier inspiration was rooted in the nostalgias and despairs of his childhood, and as with success he matured into adult and father, so his films lost in lyricism while maintaining their fidelity to life's prosaic side. But life's grayness and flatness were recorded with a sense of resignation and quiet achievement quite distinct from platitude or petulant nihilism. Two autobiographical books, Les Films de ma vie (1975; The Films of My Life) and Truffaut par Truffaut (1985; Truffaut by Truffaut), shed further light on Truffaut's philosophy and modus operandi.

Raymond E. Durgnat

Additional Reading

A full biography is Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut (2000; originally published in French), trans. by Catherine Temerson. Studies include Robert Ingram, Truffaut: The Complete Films (2003); Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut, rev. and updated ed. (1994); David Nicholls, François Truffaut (1993); Don Allen, François Truffaut (1974); C.G. Crisp, François Truffaut (1972); and Graham Petrie, The Cinema of François Truffaut (1970).

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