François Truffaut

A childhood worth a film

Truffaut was born in Paris on 6 February 1932 and never knew his biological father. Raised largely by his grandmother, then returned to a mother and stepfather with little use for him, he skipped school for cinemas and ran away repeatedly. At fifteen he founded a film club; its debts brought him before André Bazin, the critic who ran the rival club — and who, over the next decade, repeatedly saved him.[2]

Bazin got him released from a juvenile detention center and gave him work. When Truffaut enlisted in the army at eighteen, regretted it, and deserted, Bazin extracted him again — and hired him at the magazine he had co-founded, Cahiers du cinéma. Truffaut later called cinema his salvation; the record suggests Bazin was.

The gravedigger of French cinema

From 1953 he was the most feared critic in Paris — so consistently brutal about the French studio product that he acquired the epithet 'gravedigger of French cinema,' and in 1958 the distinction of being the only French critic not invited to the Cannes festival.

The essay that mattered ran in Cahiers no. 31, January 1954, when he was 22: 'Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,' the attack on the polished, screenwriter-driven 'tradition of quality' that proposed the director as a film's true author. The position hardened into the politique des auteurs, the magazine's house doctrine and, later and looser, the world's auteur theory.[3]

The 400 Blows

One year after being banned from Cannes, he returned with a film and won Best Director. Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) turned his own childhood — the truancies, the petty thefts, the reformatory — into Antoine Doinel, played by fourteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, and its success opened the door every other New Wave first feature walked through. The same year he handed Godard the news-item treatment that became Breathless, and lent his newly bankable name to get it financed.[2]

• The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959)

  The film's own page: the Cannes reversal, the making, the freeze-frame.

Léaud grew up on camera as Truffaut's alter ego, across twenty years:

• The 400 Blows (1959)
• Antoine and Colette (1962, a short in Love at Twenty)
• Stolen Kisses (1968)
• Bed and Board (1970)
• Love on the Run (1979)

Twenty-five features in twenty-five years

The critic turned out to be a romantic. Shoot the Piano Player (1960) played with the American genres he had championed; Jules and Jim (1962) made Jeanne Moreau the era's face of impossible love; Fahrenheit 451 (1966) was his first film in English; in The Wild Child (1970) he directed himself as the doctor civilizing a feral boy. Day for Night (1973), his love letter to filmmaking itself, won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film; The Last Metro (1980) took ten Césars; Confidentially Yours (1983) closed the run.

In between he produced one of the essential books on the medium: a week of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, published as Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock in 1966 — the book that did as much as any essay to move Hitchcock from entertainer to artist. Spielberg returned the compliment by casting him as the scientist Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Godard: alliance and rupture

For fifteen years Truffaut and Godard were the movement's twin engines — Cahiers colleagues, co-conspirators on Breathless, and street allies in 1968, when they led the February protests that reinstated Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque and then, that May, shut down the Cannes festival, hanging from the curtain of the Palais while the screening tried to start. Godard lost his glasses in the scuffle; Truffaut was knocked down.

The friendship ended by mail in 1973. After Day for Night opened, Godard wrote accusing Truffaut of dishonesty — of making the kind of lie about filmmaking his younger self would have savaged. Truffaut answered with a letter of some twenty pages, returning every insult with interest. The two never spoke again; the published correspondence preserves the whole exchange, and no reconciliation ever came.[4]

Neuilly, 1984

Truffaut was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1983, while expecting a daughter with the actor Fanny Ardant. He died on 21 October 1984 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, aged 52.

He is buried in Montmartre Cemetery — in the same north-of-Paris streets where Antoine Doinel ran.

Les Films du Carrosse

Truffaut founded his own production company in 1957, before he had directed a feature. He named it Les Films du Carrosse after Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach, and it produced almost everything he made for the rest of his life.[5]

Owning the company was the practical half of the argument he had been making in print. A director who produces his own films answers to nobody about final cut, and Truffaut never worked for a studio that could take a film away from him.

He used it for other people too. The company put money into work by friends and by directors he admired, and it kept operating after his death.[5]

The films between the famous ones

The titles that carry Truffaut's reputation — The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Day for Night, The Last Metro — sit inside a filmography that moved deliberately between genres.[6]

The Bride Wore Black, in 1968, is a revenge thriller made in open homage to Hitchcock, with Jeanne Moreau working through the five men who shot her husband on the church steps. Fahrenheit 451, in 1966, was shot in English in Britain from Ray Bradbury's novel about a fireman whose job is burning books.

The Wild Child, in 1970, is the quietest of them. It is based on the case notes of Jean Itard, the doctor who in 1798 took charge of a boy found living alone in the woods of Aveyron and tried to teach him language. Truffaut played Itard himself.

The Story of Adèle H., in 1975, gave Isabelle Adjani her first great part, as Victor Hugo's daughter following an officer to Nova Scotia and destroying herself over a man who does not want her. Small Change, the following year, went back to children, this time a whole school of them.

The search for his father

Truffaut grew up knowing that Roland Truffaut, who gave him his surname, was not his father. His mother never told him who was.

In 1968 he hired a private detective agency to find out. The answer was a dentist from eastern France named Roland Lévy, who was Jewish. Truffaut never approached him, and he did not make the finding public in his lifetime.[7]

He was thirty-six, and the year is the same one in which he was on the streets over the removal of Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque. Both events reached the films only obliquely, but the pattern of children looking for absent parents runs through the whole body of work.

On the other side of the camera

Truffaut acted, mostly in his own films. He plays Doctor Itard in The Wild Child and the director Ferrand in Day for Night, a part written as a version of himself, deaf in one ear and permanently besieged by problems.

In 1977 he took a substantial role for another director, as the French scientist Claude Lacombe in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He spoke his lines in French, through an interpreter character, and took the job partly because he wanted to see how an American production of that size actually worked.

The performances are of a piece with the criticism. He had spent his twenties arguing that a film belongs to the person directing it. Standing in front of the camera made the same point: the director is a presence in the work, not a technician behind it.