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Jules et Jim , Truffaut’s third full-length film, is generally agreed to be one of his greatest. By tracing the film’s genesis from little-known literary source to film classic, and by ‘reading’ the film in terms of structure, signifying techniques and themes, we hope to demonstrate more closely the specificity of Truffaut’s method and style, briefly outlined above in the chronological survey of his
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.
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’. On these foundations rests the wide-ranging analysis of the four remaining chapters. A chronological, if easily referenced, account of the films has been rejected in favour of a thematic approach organised around issues that are central to the whole of Truffaut’s work: the
’s attention with his score for François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961). Although neither could speak the other’s language, they got on instantly. Clayton would play music in the places where he felt the film would need it and show the film to Delerue with those, as an indication of the mood he was after. (For Judith Hearne , for example, he put on pieces from Our Mother’s House and The Pumpkin Eater as a guide to
passage of a young man in a specific social context (echoes of Rastignac, central protagonist of Balzac’s Comédie humaine ), and at the same time evoke some of the most profound conflicts of growing up: the formative drama of maternal/ filial love and separation, the contradictory drives towards social integration and anarchic freedom. Other films strike different chords: Jules et Jim (1961), La Peau douce (1964), Les Deux
. Some of Truffaut’s early films stemmed from original ideas, such as Les Quatre Cents Coups/The 400 Blows (1959) and La Peau douce/Soft Skin (1964); others began from literary adaptations, such as Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (1962). In both cases, the preparation could involve a slow process of collecting and classifying, during which
’échafaud (1957) and Les Amants (1958), as well as François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961), made her the embodiment of a new type of French femininity and sexuality, generally categorised as cerebral and sensual rather than purely physical. Paula Reed describes Moreau as ‘an intellectual sex symbol’ and ‘the Nouvelle Vague incarnate’ (1960s 24). For Vincendeau, too, Moreau is ‘the archetypal New Wave star’ (Stars 121). Like all the women associated with it, Moreau’s persona reflected the New Wave ideology as described by Vincendeau: ‘authenticity, modernity and sensuality
colour, both intensify the film’s emotional power and simultaneously maintain the spectator’s awareness of her or his role in the fictional process. Six films ( Les Mistons, Jules et Jim, Antoine et Colette, Les Deux Anglaises, Adèle H., Le Dernier Métro )employ the device of the extra-diegetic narrator, an unidentified voice-over supplementing and commenting on the narrative action, and a further three ( L
perfectly possible for a filmmaker to use genre as a vehicle for communication of a personal world-view. Hitchcock, and Truffaut in his genre films, provide evidence for the legitimacy of this fusion. Truffaut had firm views on genre as on most other aspects of cinema. As demonstrated above, he made no qualitative distinction between a film such as Jules et Jim which, on the surface, dealt with the complexities of a triangular
seen externally, through the lens of male desire, is one that recurs in Truffaut’s work. It is powerfully at work in Jules et Jim where the mysterious, enigmatic Catherine is visually and diegetically at the heart of the film – but Catherine’s seductive power depends upon a refusal to see her as subject, on the insistence that she transcends (and therefore lacks) normal humanity. The film opens with an energetic and