François Truffaut

Born in the French capital on February 6, 1932, François Truffaut was the son of a single mother and it took him many years to meet his real father. The architect and decorator Roland Truffaut – sentimental partner of his mother – registered him in his registry as his son. Apparently, the little boy always had a rather cold relationship with his mother, who left him in the care of a nanny, until he was rescued by his grandmother, who passed on his love for literature and music. . Upon her death, he has to return to live with his mother and his partner, but given their lack of affection, he takes refuge in literature and cinema, which he began to attend regularly from childhood. childhood. “When I was eleven or twelve years old, what I did was go to the movies while my parents went to the theater. I was cheating on them. I knew that if I went to a movie theater close to home, I could get into bed before they got back. But obviously, he was afraid. Many times I had to leave before the end because I was nervous, my heart was pounding and I was afraid of being found out; I left the cinema, undressed and got into bed”, commented the filmmaker in an interview. He wasn’t exactly a model student – ​​he used to run away and lie, especially to keep going to the movies – and he ended up becoming a troubled teenager who never stopped getting into trouble. He seemed predestined to the juvie, where he was confined after being turned over to the police by his own stepfather. Many times I had to leave before the end because I was nervous, my heart was pounding and I was afraid of being found out; I left the cinema, undressed and got into bed”, commented the filmmaker in an interview. He wasn’t exactly a model student – ​​he used to run away and lie, especially to keep going to the movies – and he ended up becoming a troubled teenager who never stopped getting into trouble. He seemed predestined to the juvie, where he was confined after being turned over to the police by his own stepfather. Many times I had to leave before the end because I was nervous, my heart was pounding and I was afraid of being found out; I left the cinema, undressed and got into bed”, commented the filmmaker in an interview. He wasn’t exactly a model student – ​​he used to run away and lie, especially to keep going to the movies – and he ended up becoming a troubled teenager who never stopped getting into trouble. He seemed predestined to the juvie, where he was confined after being turned over to the police by his own stepfather. and ended up becoming a troubled teenager who never stopped getting into trouble. He seemed predestined to the juvie, where he was confined after being turned over to the police by his own stepfather. and ended up becoming a troubled teenager who never stopped getting into trouble. He seemed predestined to the juvie, where he was confined after being turned over to the police by his own stepfather.

Providential for Truffaut was his meeting with André Bazin, the patriarch of French criticism. The boy had created his own film club, ‘Le Cercle Cinémanie’, which he financed thanks to his work as a messenger and boy for everything in a market. His sessions were not as successful as expected because they coincided with Professor Bazin’s film club. Without thinking twice, the boy – who was 16 years old – went to see Bazin, to demand that he change the day of his screenings! He liked her, became his protector, and hired him as his personal secretary and to write for his magazines, a job that would free him from reform school. “It provided me with my first interesting job, that is, linked to cinema (…). I can affirm that I owe him everything good that has happened to me since then. Bazin taught me to write, he corrected my first articles in ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’, and progressively led me to directing. When he passed away on November 11, 1958, the day before I had started filming my first film,The four hundred blows . He just got to read the script,” Truffaut explained.

The place where Truffaut would learn the most about cinema was the National Cinematheque in Paris. There he would devour gargantuan amounts of cinema, although the great classics of American cinema marked him especially, especially John Ford , Howard Hawks , Nicholas Ray and Alfred Hitchcock , to whom he would later dedicate a legendary book. In the magazine ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ –co-founded by Bazin in 1951–, Truffaut would collaborate with Jacques Rivette , Jean-Luc Godard , Claude Chabrol, with Eric Rohmerfrom publisher. All these talented young people would change French cinema forever, because they would become the promoters of the movement known as the Nouvelle Vague.

At the beginning of 1954, Truffaut wrote his most famous article in ‘Cahiers’, ‘Une certaine tendency du cinéma française’ (A certain tendency in French cinema), the starting point of the theories of the Nouvelle Vague. The writing attacked above all the literary adaptations and stuffy productions of French cinema, which only dealt with the ‘qualité’ but forgot to provide the director’s personal point of view to the film.

In 1954, Truffaut felt the need to make films himself, and made his behind-the-camera debut with the short film Une visite , followed by Les Mistons . He helped him obtain financing and continue making films when he married Madeleine Morgenstern, daughter of an important distributor, in 1957. Although he had two daughters with her, he ended up divorcing in 1965. While the marriage lasted, his father-in-law financed the production of his first feature film, The Four Hundred Blows , based on his own youth, and which would become one of the first feature films of the Nouvelle Vague, after The Beautiful Sergio , by Claude Chabrol. Truffaut was very clear that the protagonist had to be a boy who looked a lot like him. To recruit him, he put an ad in the newspaper to which hundreds of kids responded. He finally chose Jean-Pierre Léaud, the son of an actress and a scriptwriter’s assistant, who was as conflicted and a bad student as he was. “I asked them quite simple questions, since my objective was to find a more moral than physical resemblance to the child I thought I had been,” Truffaut wrote in ‘Les adventures d’Antoine Doinel’. With the film, which received the best director award at Cannes, analysts began to talk about a break in French cinema and the new movement became fashionable. Dozens of followers appear who were filming in the street, camera in hand, films that were intended above all to reflect reality.

In his second job as director, Shoot the Pianist , Truffaut had decided to abandon the autobiographical theme, and undertake the adaptation of a novel by David Goodis , which pays homage to the film noir that had given him so much joy on the big screen. However, it did not have the same success as his debut, especially since the public fled en masse from the Nouvelle Vague films, which they identified as excessively intellectual. Apparently, viewers preferred to go see precisely the films of the directors attacked by the Nouvelle Vague. In the end, the movement disintegrates, above all due to the rivalry between its own members, who mostly end up joining the more commercial French cinema.

Obsessed with analyzing the effects of a childhood as disastrous as his own, Truffaut began a saga of films starring Antoine Doinel, Léaud’s character in The Four Hundred Blows . The director shows the character discovering love in Antoine and Colette , one of the shorts that make up Love at 20 . In Stolen Kisses , Doinel fell in love with a girl who belonged to a stable family, the prototype of the one he had always wanted, both the character and Truffaut himself. In search of his own home, in Marital Home , the character marries and has a son. Perhaps the least interesting in the series is the latest installment, Love on the Run ., where Doinel himself has destroyed his family stability, has divorced and has a new partner with whom things are not going very well.

Truffaut recovered the theme of lost childhood in one of his best films: The Wild Child . There, he analyzes the lack of affection and human communication in a boy who was abandoned and who has survived by his own means in a forest. Truffaut himself was awarded the role of Dr. Itard, who strives to communicate with the protagonist, and integrate him into society. The relationship between educators and children is also dealt with by Truffaut in La piel dura , which follows in the footsteps of the students of a school.

The filmmaker paid tribute to his cultural passions. For example, he recreates the world of cinema in The American Night , which reconstructs a set. He also paid tribute to theater in The Last Metro , about a troupe of actors during the Nazi occupation. Truffaut – who remained a compulsive reader all his life – vindicates the value of the book in Fahrenheit 451 , an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury novel that presents a futuristic society where reading is prohibited. He had already paid homage to his beloved Balzac in The Four Hundred Blows –where the protagonist dedicates an altar to the writer–, while Intimate Diary of Adele H. recreates the true story of the daughter ofVictor Hugo . Truffaut would also be the author of correct literary adaptations, such as The Two Englishwomen and Love , The Mississippi Mermaid , The Green Room or Vividly on Sunday , his last work.

Truffaut had not quite found love stability, he had numerous failed relationships, and was romantically linked to the actress Fanny Ardant , with whom he had two other daughters, and whom he directed in The Woman Next Door and Vividly on Sunday . The search for love and sentimental relationships are themes that are very present in films such as Jules and Jim , which presents a love triangle, Smooth Skin –about adultery– and above all The Lover of Love , about a guy who ends up after his failed marriage. becoming an obsessed man who monopolizes numerous lovers.

Although Truffaut became an established director, he did not stop writing about cinema. In 1965, his encounters with Alfred Hitchcock became one of the most famous books on the Seventh Art, ‘Cinema according to Hitchcock’, which helped to dismantle the theories of film intellectuals who, until Truffaut’s arrival, had railed against the Hollywood filmmakers, whom they considered too commercial. In 1962, when I was in New York to present Jules and Jim , I realized that every journalist asked me the same question: Why do the critics at Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock seriously? He’s rich, he’s successful, but his movies lack substance. One of those American critics, to whom I had just praised, for an hour, ofRear Window , he replied this outrageous thing: You like Rear Window because, not being a regular in New York, you don’t know Greenwich Village well. I replied: Rear Window is not a film about the city, but simply a film about cinema. And I know the cinema”, comments Truffaut in the prologue of the book.

The admirer of great American directors became in turn an inspiration for the Hollywood filmmakers who came later. Especially for Steven Spielberg , who declared himself a follower of his, and hired him to play the scientist in Encounters in the Third Kind , who was trying to communicate with aliens, just as his character in The Little Wild One did the same with the child protagonist.

The director died prematurely, at the age of 52, as a result of a brain tumor, on October 21, 1984, near Paris. He had been in a coma for ten days, during which time he was accompanied by Fanny Ardant .