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alone beneath the autumnal trees of the town. As the musical score, now melancholic in tone, rises to a crescendo, the camera tilts upwards above her head to end the film with a shot of the trees against the sky which conveys an impression of inconclusiveness and indefinable melancholy. When challenged by Anne Gillain to explain his motives in making Les Mistons (1957) Truffaut was somewhat vague and unhelpful
This book presents a study on François Truffaut's films. It reviews the body of work which foregrounds the main themes and discusses Truffaut's working practices as a director, drawing on his own writing about his film-making. The book commences with an introduction on his first film, Les Mistons. The energy and resilience of children act as vital counters to a morbid preoccupation with death, visible here in the fatal ending to the couple's romantic idyll. By choosing as subject for his film an exploration of the young male's sexual awakening, by situating it in a French provincial town and by adopting the realist mode, Truffaut was making an important statement. The book seeks to situate Truffaut both historically and culturally and the second aiming to give a broad overview of his films and their critical reception. It then provides a closer analysis of one film, Jules et Jim (1961), both as a means to discuss more precisely Truffaut's style of film-making and to provide an example of how a film may be 'read'. The book discusses the 'auteur-genre' tension, the representation of gender, the relationship between paternity and authorship and, finally, the conflict at the heart of the films between the 'absolute' and the 'provisional'. Truffaut's films display mistrust of the institutions that impose social order: school (Les 400 Coups), army (Baisers volés), paternal authority (Adèle H.) and the written language.
A first statement: Les Mistons Truffaut’s attitude to genre and the questions it posed for French film-makers is neatly summed up at a very early point of his career in the juxtapositioning of two short sequences in Les Mistons. Unobtrusive and understated, these sequences nevertheless eloquently express the views of the Nouvelle Vague directors on the subject of the future
provinces from the north ( La Chambre verte )to the south ( La Nuit américaine and Vivement dimanche! )from provincial towns such as Nimes ( Les Mistons )and Thiers ( L’Argent de poche )to the mountains near Grenoble ( Tirez and La Sirène ). In some films, there is considerable movement, an at times frenetic toing and froing as in Jules et Jim (between France and Germany, Paris and the Midi), La
This book In their monographic study of François Truffaut, Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram use their Introduction to comment on one of Truffaut’s key shorts, Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers, 1957). 16 They argue that this short film provides the seed or kernel of the distinctive thematic and stylistic elements which reappear in the rest of Truffaut’s considerable output (three shorts and 22 features
apparent in many of Truffaut’s films, including Les Mistons , in which an adult narrator recalls his childhood, Adèle H. and L’Enfant sauvage , both adapted from the diaries of central characters (Adèle Hugo and Dr Itard), and the Doinel films, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes , and Une Belle fille comme moi , all of which centre around the theme of self-narration or telling one’s own story (see chapter 7 ). The very fact
larger world of American, French and Polish cinema. These films include: Le Sang des bêtes (Georges Franju 1956), On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin 1956), Paragraph Zero (Walerian Borowczyk 1956), Two Men and a Wardrobe (Roman Polanski 1957), Les Mistons (François Truffaut 1957), Le Beau Serge (Claude Chabrol 1958), and Once Upon a Time (Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk 1957). 18 Both Reisz
. When Charlie is wounded in Tirez sur le pianiste , their relative sizes mean that Léna can virtually carry him to safety; visiting a brothel in Domicile conjugal , Antoine selects the tallest of the prostitutes, a woman considerably larger than himself. The size relationship here recalls that between the children of Les Mistons and the taller, adult Bernadette, and that between the adolescent Antoine and his mother
scenarios rather than in the actual process of filming, but the shooting and editing of the brief Une Visite (with Rivette and Resnais) in 1955 confirmed his desire to move behind the camera. The problem of financing the production of a film had first to be overcome. By 1957, Truffaut was planning the making of a short film, Les Mistons , and was also engaged to Madeleine Morgensten, daughter of the managing director of the
is possible to provide a plot summary, most Truffaut films include apparently gratuitous scenes or sequences which can be forced –sometimes only thanks to some critical ingenuity – into the signifying system of the film as a whole, but which at a first viewing of the film seem simply to disturb the film’s trajectory. Sometimes these are comic, as with the passer-by from whom Gerard of Les Mistons requests a light for his