François Truffaut
François Truffaut was at the forefront of the theory and artistry of movie making. Born in Paris in 1932, Truffaut’s troubled childhood would inform many of his later films. His main joy was watching movies. At the age of fifteen he formed a film club with the proceeds from his job at a grocery store and a stolen typewriter from his stepfather’s office. When his small crime was revealed, his stepfather made him promise to shut down his cinema club. It didn’t work. Neither did a short stint in the French army, from which Truffaut deserted in 1952. To the rescue came Andre Bazin who hired Truffaut to write for his Cahiers du Cinema, which was about to become one of the most important film journals in the world. In 1954, Truffaut wrote a call-to-arms for French cinema: stop mindlessly producing film after film, and instead infuse each film with a director’s personal and defined vision to make it a work of art. Truffaut helped to give birth to the New Wave of French movie-making and to the auteur approach to cinema. He began to test his theories by directing his own films, beginning with Une Visite, a short film in 1954. Three years later, he set up a small film production company to make Les Mistons. The same year that he provided the story for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Truffaut made his own feature film which has become one of cinema’s landmarks, The 400 Blows (1959). Jean-Pierre Leaud plays the lead character Antoine Doinel, a young boy whose family life parallels Truffaut’s own experiences. The mixing of Leaud’s and Truffaut’s lives would continue with the same character through the films Antoine and Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1971), and Love on the Run (1979). Throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Truffaut films were regularly released in France and internationally including Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1961), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) his only English language movie even though Truffaut barely spoke English, Wild Child (1970), Two English Girls (1971), Day for Night (1973) which won an Oscar, The Story of Adele H. (1975), The Man Who Loved Women (1977), The Green Room (1978), The Last Metro (1980), The Woman Next Door (1981), and Confidentially Yours (1983). In addition to his films and journal articles, Truffaut’s books include The Films in My Life and the memorable Hitchcock, compiling his interviews with the British master. An occasional actor in his own films, Truffaut also appears in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Truffaut died in 1984.
