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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.
8.1 Antoine Doinel and Christine Darbon (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade) in Stolen Kisses (François Truffaut, 1968) ‘Each person is constructed through the encounter with another’: we have seen this statement time and time again in this book. A variation on this claim was introduced in the
The films as autobiography Truffaut’s work invites biographical readings. His first full-length film, Les 400 Coups (1959), told a story of growing up in Paris so close to the facts of his own childhood that the fictional Antoine Doinel became confused in the popular imagination with the real François Truffaut. The subsequent appearance of four sequels, charting Doinel
almost unanimously positive, and has remained so. References De Baecque , Antoine and Toubiana , Serge ( 1996 ), François Truffaut, Paris , Gallimard Gillain , Anne ( 1988 ), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut , Paris , Flammarion . Insdorf , Annette ( 1994 ), François Truffaut , Cambridge , Cambridge University Press . Roché
‘ 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’. References Gillain , Anne ( 1988 ), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut , Paris , Flammarion . 1 ‘It follows Maurice
), Shoot the Piano Player , Oxford , Roundhouse Publishing . Cahoreau , Gilles ( 1989 ), François Truffaut 1932 – 84 , Paris , Julliard . Dyer , P. J. ( 1960–61 ), Tirez sur le pianiste, Sight and Sound , 30 : 1 , p. 18 . Fairlamb , A. ( 1996 ), Tough Guys and Fairy–Tales: a case–study of the influence of the films of Nicholas Ray upon Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste
Press . Armes , Roy ( 1985 ), French Cinema , London , Seeker & Warburg . Canby , Vincent ( 1975 ), TrufFaut’s clear-eyed quest, New York Times , September 14, p. 13 . Cook , Pam ( 1985 ), The Cinema Book , London , BFI . Desjardins , Aline ( 1973 ), Aline Desjardins s’entretient avec François Truffaut , Ottawa , Collection Les Beaux
Bonds of Love. Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination , London , Virago . Gillain , Anne ( 1991 ), François Truffaut: Le Secret perdu , Paris , Hatier . Hayward , Susan ( 1994 ), Truffaut auteurou imposteur , in G. Harris (ed.), Truffaut TenYears On , Salford , ESRI Conference Proceedings . Insdorf , Annette ( 1989 ), François Truffaut , New
wider figurative sense of the older male figure who represents a model, a teacher, an initiator into the social world – and whose authority may need to be contested if the son (or daughter) is to forge an individual identity. The director’s own life predisposed him to a concern with the question of paternity: François Truffaut learnt of his own illegitimacy around the age of twelve, the identity of his biological father remained a
François 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. Truffaut's exploitation of genre is not as straightforward as it at first appears. If his genre films are, with one exception, films noirs or thrillers, this is attributable in large part to the influence of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The first two films, Les Mistons and Les 400 Coups, although they contain references to genre, are resistant to classification by genre. Tirezis the first of his genre films, it is equally one of his most artistically successful and one of his most innovative. The last of the three genre films which Truffaut produced between 1964 and 1967 was another film noir, La Marìée était en noir (the second film in the group, Fahrenheit 451).