A Companion to François Truffaut

Dudley Andrew, Anne Gillain, Dudley Andrew, Anne Gillain

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118321201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to François Truffaut

"An unprecedented critical tribute to the director who, in France, wound up becoming the most controversial figure of the New Wave he helped found."
Raymond Bellour, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

"This exciting collection breaks through the widely held critical view that Truffaut abandoned the iconoclasm of his early work for an academicism he had consistently railed against in his own film criticism. Indeed, if 'fever' and 'fire' were Truffaut's most consistent motifs, the essays in this collection live up to his lifelong, burning passion for the cinema. Written by world-famous scholars, the essays exhaustively explore the themes and styles of the films, as well as Truffaut's relationships to André Bazin, Alfred Hitchcock, and the directors of the New Wave, his ground-breaking and controversial film criticism, and his position in the complex politics of French cultural life from the Popular Front to 1968 and after."
Angelo Restivo, Georgia State University

Although the New Wave, one of the most influential aesthetic revolutions in the history of cinema, might not have existed without him, François Truffaut has largely been ignored by film scholars since his death almost thirty years ago. As an innovative theoretician, an influential critic, and a celebrated filmmaker, Truffaut formulated, disseminated, and illustrated the ideals of the New Wave with exceptional energy and distinction. Yet no book in recent years has focused on Truffaut's value, and his overall contribution to cinema deserves to be redefined not only to reinstate him in his proper place but to let us rethink how cinema developed during his lifetime.

In this new Companion, thirty-four original essays by leading film scholars offer new readings of individual films and original perspectives on the filmmaker's background, influences, and consequence. Hugely influential around the globe, Truffaut is assessed by international contributors who delve into the unique quality of his narratives and establish the depth of his distinctively styled work.

An extended interview with French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin tracks Truffaut's controversial stature within French cinema and vividly identifies how he thinks and works as a director, adding an irreplaceable perspective to this essential volume.

Part I

La Planète Truffaut

1

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

Truffaut and His Position

Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew

Paris, June 18, 2010

“Je suis un converti”

Q: When did you start watching Truffaut’s films? In your childhood?

D: No. Quite late, quite late. I remember a screening of Les 400 Coups [1959] when I was twenty-nine, something like that.

Q: Before that you had not seen any of his films?

D: Oh no, I saw all of them, for sure, but they didn’t register with me, since these are films which belong to my father’s generation, not mine. You know, I really hate the idea of showing films to kids. So, sure, they showed Truffaut at school, but it left no impression. … Perhaps it wasn’t Les 400 Coups. It was L’Enfant ­sauvage [1970]; yes. I remember, I saw that one when I was still in primary school. It was part of the social life of every young pupil. So I knew of them early but hadn’t really seen them, not till I was twenty-nine. Till then I was stupid. I love to admit I was stupid, because it means that something happened in my life to have changed me. For me at twenty-nine something happened.

Q: What were the circumstances?

D: It was at film school. A bunch of us were discussing what it meant to be a ­director when watching films. We were mainly thinking of Pialat and the films of the generation after the New Wave: Eustache, Garrel, Doillon. As for the New Wave itself, I mean for us it was already just history. Perhaps I remember so clearly this screening of Les 400 Coups because I hadn’t seen the film on a screen since I was twelve. I knew it by heart, but through video. Then came this ­big-screen experience, and perhaps I was mature enough then to be able to see how each raccord, each cut was shocking. There was something brutal and subtle in the filmmaking that I missed before because I thought I knew what cinema was about, yet I was so wrong. After that, from say 1990, I started to see all his films again, and to work on them, and to see how they were made. But I couldn’t see all this when I was young. I just didn’t see it. So, je suis un converti. That’s why I’m such a fanatic. [laughs]

Q: What did you like about the films, what struck you?

D: There was something, in every cut, that allowed each shot to exist of its own volition. Usually when you link two shots, you’re putting them in the service of a story, but here, on the contrary, the shots retain their integrity, their will. Every shot is a unit of thought: “We are going to film that!” You see a woman, you see her face, you see her directly for a certain time. You see the mother. You see the table. You see everything, including the filmmaking. You see the tracking camera. You see all the angles, very clearly. Sometimes it can be extremely subtle, but not in Les 400 Coups, where it is obvious: chaque plan existe comme une volonté. You don’t find that in Pialat.

Q: Nothing is gratuitous?

D: Yes, there is a dramaturgical thought each time. The entire screen is occupied by this dramaturgical thought nothing is given to some vague naturalism, ­nothing to chance, nothing to the plot. … There’s only cinema, nothing but that. Everything is called for, even the weaknesses are called for whatever is there is wanted, wanted for support, just as beautiful as in Howard Hawks or The Searchers [John Ford, 1956]. All at once, I managed to really sense with each shot how he was going to show this or that. I could see each shot and what he was doing. He would say, “I’m going to make a shot very simple like that.” I could see all the shots individually and as they fit together. Well, I was stupefied, because I had never seen this before.

Q: Why has his work not really been valued at its proper level? It’s underestimated particularly in the US, but also in France, where it is sometimes considered ­bourgeois, not advanced enough. Why this reaction?

D: The other day I was rereading the book of interviews you assembled, Anne, Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut.¹ It’s like the Bible to me, just as useful as the Hitchcock/Truffaut. It’s so technical. It’s amazingly useful. And you had this great idea to group the interviews around each film and include the years, so the reader can see the development of his thinking: what he thinks of a film he has just made in ’68, then what he thinks of the same film a year later, then later still. It’s so great to have this. There are very few books useful to directors. There’s the big illustrated Scorsese,² which is very good. There’s the Hitchcock/Truffaut and then there’s Le Cinéma selon Truffaut. I reread the section yesterday on Tirez sur le pianiste [1960]. What he says at the outset is magnifique. Going back to the success of Les 400 Coups, he says, “Les 400 Coups belonged to the public who doesn’t really like cinema, to the spectator who goes to the movies twice a year.” Now this is so mean, so mean! “It belonged to the audience of René Clair or of The Bridge on the River Kwai [David Lean, 1957] which is the audience I fear most in the world.” (I too don’t like those choosey guys who just go to the ­movies twice a year to see a talked-about film. Nowadays they decide to go see, let’s say, the new film by Haneke. This is the audience I myself fear.) And this is what he was thinking about when he knew Tirez sur le pianiste would fail.
He says, “I felt watched by this audience and their expectations; so I was glad to send everyone and his father packing,” which is a joke … “everyone and his brother.” And so he made a film, Tirez sur le pianiste, against the public, which is a sin, and we all know that it’s a sin, but he’s saying, “I committed that sin. I’ve made a film against a sort of audience that I don’t like. The people who don’t really love cinema.” So I guess this is part of my answer, the fact that you have to accept the idea that Truffaut’s work is pure cinema. We know that the audience for true cinema is smaller and smaller. Each year it’s shrinking. Perhaps that’s one reason.

Q: One would have thought that precisely this diminishing group, the elitist cinephiles, rejected Truffaut the most. L’Argent de poche [1976] was very badly received by American intellectuals. They found it a minor film, charming but insignificant.

D: But L’Argent de poche is not an easy film for me. It has this mania for story, ­actually for a series of small stories. Each shot is a story. It seems to be a realist and naturalist movie, but each shot goes against naturalism and realism. Each shot is an absolute story, as if Truffaut thought, how can I make it shorter, briefer, neater, stronger? And the actors, because he can’t guide them since they’re just kids, turn it into pure life. First Truffaut brings the forms – these short stories which are so neat – and into this neat drawing he welcomes the pure, raw, life, brought by the kids, with all their disorder. Remember the long scene where the boy throws the cat out the window; you can’t direct kids or pets. The way that it’s shot and organized and edited, is like a classical narrative film from 1937 or so, but using very different materials, so there is a strong ­contrast between the formality of the filmmaking and the material which is used, which is pure life. Organizing pure life into a shape which belongs to the late thirties, we have to admire that; if not we are blind.
I was guilty of this elitist view of Truffaut myself. I’m saying that I was stupid; I admit it (which means that I’m still stupid, and will discover in ten years I am stupid now). So I made that elitist mistake, which I think is something that belongs mainly, but not only, to the French. It’s also a generational thing. I know that when I was, say, between fourteen and twenty-five or something like that – let’s say twenty-two – I thought that the New Wave was Pialat and Eustache. … I didn’t know exactly the dates of the real New Wave, or what their goal was; plus I didn’t know the books – you know, Bazin – and I didn’t know the history of Cahiers du Cinéma, because, again, this was not my generation, it was my father’s.

The New Wave and Modernity

Q: So your prejudice against Truffaut came from a prejudice against the New Wave?

D: In fact, the reason is even more stupid. We are talking about why Truffaut is ignored and about the received ideas circulating in France, and therefore also in the United States and therefore also in Japan. “How come I don’t feel like ­seeing a ‘French film’?” The clichéd answer is, “Because it is going to be some New Wave thing.” What people mean by “New Wave” here is: a political subject, social implications, no camera work, and it is going to be boring. But actually, if you take all the New Wave films, there is not a single social topic really addressed; there is only fiction, inspired by Balzac, or by the American detective novel, never inspired by political stuff and not aiming at naturalism, which is their enemy. Even Resnais, who dealt with massive political and historical issues, he’s such a formalist! Why does everyone revert to such commonplace notions, such clichés, when they talk of him?

Q: Why is such a well-known movement not better understood?

D: Actually, another thing which misled so many people: the New Wave guys were such cinephiles, which meant that they promoted whoever did the ­contrary of what they were doing. Sure they liked what they themselves were doing, but they accepted the idea of the opposite and were curious to see the next generation. Truffaut was so generous because he had been raised by Bazin in the idea of loving all kinds of cinema. Godard is bitter, so this question is ­different in relation to him, but it still operates. What this means is that as soon as new guys arrive on the scene with ideas opposite to the idea of the New Wave, they were still accepted. “I will be modern, I will put modernity in my film,” says Garrel; or “I will be political, I will be social,” says another; or “I will be linked to the new American cinema;” or “I will be linked to the political engagement of British cinema.” Truffaut bankrolled these ideas; he was ready for new blood, new methods. … Why not? He said, “Let’s do it, yeah. This new guy’s a terrific filmmaker. Let’s put L’Enfance nue [Pialat’s film produced by Truffaut in 1968] on screen; it will be great because it’s the antithesis of Les 400 Coups.” So, fifteen years after the New Wave, I come along in 1975, and I stupidly think these two films are the same because of what I was reading at the time.

Q: So there was an amalgam between two generations with divergent aesthetic goals.

D: I was not able to understand that in terms of periods in art, such as you read about in Panofsky or Elie Faure (fauvism, for example), the New Wave is a completely different period from these later filmmakers, whom I guess we could call les ­nouveaux réalistes – Pialat, Doillon, etc. – though we have no set name for this ­movement. Anyway, as soon as Doillon arrived, trying to make a small film in the seventies, the former New Wave directors, even Chabrol, immediately said nice things about him. But in fact the generation following the New Wave – I mean Pialat and the rest of them – these people don’t know a thing about cinema. I mean: they play reality against cinema. In their interviews, they were always saying how the New Wave was uninteresting, not really deeply socially involved, etc. That’s what I read when I arrived in Paris, and so that’s what I thought too.

Q: Truffaut actually said that he had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Filmography
• Part I: La Planète Truffaut
• Part II: Style and Sensibility
• Part III: The Making of a Filmmaker
• Part IV: Truffaut and His Time
• Part V: Films
• Index