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Portrait of François Truffaut

Film · European

François Truffaut

1932–1984 · French

French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague)

François Truffaut was the polemicist who helped invent the French New Wave and then its warmest filmmaker. His 1954 essay attacking the French "tradition of quality" laid out the auteur theory; his 1959 debut, drawn from his own delinquent childhood, won Best Director at Cannes a year after he had been banned from the festival. He followed his alter ego Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, through five films across twenty years.

How to spot them

  • ▸The Antoine Doinel cycle — five films, one actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud), from schoolboy to divorcé
  • ▸Freeze-frames, voice-over, and an unembarrassed love of books, women and cinema itself
  • ▸Wrote 'A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema' (1954), the founding polemic of the auteur theory
  • ▸Interviewed Hitchcock over a week in 1962; the resulting book is a fixture of film bibliographies
  • ▸Acted himself: the scientist Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Key films

A neglected Paris schoolboy steals a typewriter, is sent to a reform centre by the sea, and turns to face the camera in a final freeze-frame (1959)

The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) — his debut, and Best Director at Cannes

Two friends and the Austrian woman they both love, racing each other across a footbridge in the years around the Great War (1962)

Jules et Jim — Jeanne Moreau singing 'Le Tourbillon'

A fireman whose job is burning books falls in with people who have each memorised one; his only film in English (1966)

Fahrenheit 451, from Ray Bradbury, with Oskar Werner and Julie Christie

A doctor in the 1790s tries to teach language to a boy found living wild in the woods of Aveyron; the director plays the doctor (1970)

The Wild Child (L'Enfant sauvage) — the true case of Victor of Aveyron

A film about the shooting of a film called Je vous présente Pamela, with the harassed director played by the director (1973)

Day for Night (La Nuit américaine) — won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film

A man who cannot stop falling in love writes his memoirs; only women attend his funeral (1977)

The Man Who Loved Women (L'Homme qui aimait les femmes)

A Paris theatre under the Occupation, kept running by an actress while her Jewish husband hides in the cellar (1980)

The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro) — Deneuve and Depardieu; it won ten Césars

A pianist in a Paris bar is dragged back into his brother's criminal troubles (1960)

Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste), with Charles Aznavour

Key ideas

  • The auteur theory: a director's body of work carries a personal signature as a novelist's does
  • Cinema as autobiography — Antoine Doinel is Truffaut's own childhood, continued in fiction
  • Affection for Hollywood genre cinema, and for Hitchcock above all, against the literary French cinema of the 1950s

Quick-fire facts

  • •His 1954 Cahiers du cinéma essay 'A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema' attacked the scriptwriters of the 'tradition of quality'
  • •Banned from the 1958 Cannes Film Festival as a critic, he won Best Director there in 1959
  • •The Antoine Doinel films are The 400 Blows, the short Antoine and Colette, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board and Love on the Run, all with Jean-Pierre Léaud
  • •His book-length interview Hitchcock (1966) is usually called simply 'Hitchcock/Truffaut'
  • •He played the French scientist Claude Lacombe in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
  • •Day for Night won the 1974 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
  • •The film provoked a furious public break with Godard, who accused him of lying about the film industry
  • •He died of a brain tumour in 1984, aged 52

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources