François Truffaut |
François Truffaut |
|
François Truffaut |
|
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT François Truffaut, His early career in the 1950s as a film critic and theorist with the journal Cahiers du Cinéma led him to construct his own movies out of a dissatisfaction with the heavy-handed style of traditional French movies. He preferred the sharper, quicker, more muscular realism of many American films. Along with other writer/directors like Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, and Godard he stood at the center of the New Wave, which transformed French and World filmmaking. |
Maybe François Truffaut first showed up in high school. I sure wasn't looking for him. But it was a Friday night, maybe, and there was nothing to do. And my sister says, "Come to the movie at St. Francis with me and Mary Kay." Or something like that. So we went to see "Tirez sur le Pianiste" - and we laughed our heads off. Or maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe the film that night was a grim and incomprehensible French version of Crime and Punishment. I remember thinking, "Oh God, I've got to read this movie." Because my French was very poor, nonexistent. I came home with a headache. If it had been Truffaut that night, I would not have had a headache, despite the subtitles. Truffaut does not produce - never has, never will produce - headaches. It's more likely that I didn't see Shoot the Piano Player until many years later in Houston on one of countless nights at The River Oaks Theater, an extraordinary film repertory house that was the best film classroom in those pre-VCR days. But this would not account for my feeling that Truffaut had been with me for a long, long time. At any rate, Shoot the Piano Player was a revelation. Truffaut produces joy, or whatever you want to call that Brightness you get in the presence of some beautiful person or thing. Eventually I gobbled up The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, The Wild Child, Day for Night, The Story of Adele H. You get the picture - a truckload of great stories. I still haven't seen all of his work, but even his arguably less succesful movies, like Fahrenheit 451 and Small Change, delivered something worth seeing. I always got the feeling that his camera respected the person, the actor, the character enough to keep its distance - to show us as much as we had a right to see, like in that famous final scene from The 400 Blows up above. I'm told that it's the first time a freeze-frame was used to end a film. It seems the perfect, most necessary thing to do right then. Antoine had nowhere else to go. I probably discovered his book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock while loafing in the stacks of the Joliet Public Library, avoiding work. Could this have been our first meeting - not on the screen but on the page? I don't know. But that book helped me to see Hitchcock - and movies in general - with wider eyes and a bigger mind. Truffaut died too soon on October 21, 1984. |
(linked to IMDb) |
|
François Truffaut (in French) |