François Truffaut, Cinéaste
François Truffaut, December 1964. Image credit: Ensio Ilmonen / Lehtikuva, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In the wake of World War II, an innovative movement that came to be known as La Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave) materialized in French cinema. The dearth of resources and overall exhaustion from years of combat, occupation, and loss contributed to the industry’s reversion to the familiarity of traditional filmmaking, primarily of literary narratives. Inklings of discontent with the return to status quo were initially verbalized by French film director and critic Alexandre Astruc in 1948 in his essay in L’Écran française, “Du Stylo à la caméra et de la camera au stylo”. Astruc contended that cinema is not limited to providing images for an existing story but serves as an art form whereby the camera and director are akin to the pen of an author in creating a unique work.
Six years later, a young film critic with Cahiers du cinéma went on the offensive with “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français”, arguing that what he called ‘psychological realism’ of French cinema was formulaic, disrespectful of the sources of their plotlines, and condescending in their depictions of the speech and actions of the characters. This controversial critic, François Truffaut, then went beyond publishing his opinions to making films that epitomized the Nouvelle Vague.
Truffaut was not alone in his views of the possibilities that the world of film presented. Together with co-workers Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer, Truffaut began to write and direct his own films and quickly achieved critical and commercial success with Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) which earned him the Best Director Award at Cannes in 1959. Truffaut wrote the loosely autobiographical script with Marcel Moussy and cast Jean-Pierre Léaud as the protagonist Antoine Doinel, a troubled and trouble-making adolescent in Paris who is misunderstood by nearly all of the adults in his life.
The family life of the Doinel character was similar to Truffaut’s actual childhood. He did not know his biological father and was initially raised by his grandmother, who introduced young François to music and literature. Upon her passing, François lived with his mother and stepfather but preferred to spend time outside of the house with friends and going to the movie theater instead of attending school. His truancy resulted in expulsion from school during his teenage years, and Truffaut opted for directing his own education through reading books of his own choosing and attending film club meetings. Through the latter he encountered André Bazin, a noted film critic who took Truffaut under his wing. Bazin kindly intervened numerous times on Truffaut’s behalf when the younger man got involved in thorny situations and hired him for a writing position after co-founding Cahiers du cinema in 1951.
Jean-Pierre Léaud, French actor, in 2000. Image credit: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Both Bazin and Truffaut were instrumental in building on the views of Astruc to develop ‘la politique des auteurs’ as a reference to directors playing a more personal and comprehensive role in filmmaking than what they viewed as unoriginal adaptations of other works. They cited Jean Renoir as one of eight French directors who made films in this vein of ‘auteur theory’ as well as noting the artistry and vision of American filmmakers such as Morris Engel, John Ford, and Orson Welles. Although Truffaut made a few short films prior to Les quatre cents coups, his personal connection to the Doinel character undoubtedly was a key factor in the film’s heartfelt expression of the boy’s story.
The Nouvelle Vague broke new ground with film techniques that were atypical of traditional moviemaking, shooting scenes on location instead of on studio sets, casting amateur actors, improvising dialogue, and incorporating rapid scene changes. Some of these choices were intentional whereas others were driven by limited resources that required creative solutions. Truffaut and his colleagues from Cahiers du cinéma were not the only filmmakers to depart from past practices in cinema. A group now known as the Left Bank directors of the Nouvelle Vague included more experienced filmmakers such as Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jacques Demy. They also broke from French cinematic traditions and were strongly associated with the emerging nouveau roman movement that presented alternative ways of storytelling besides the standard plot-driven narrative.
Truffaut continued to develop the Doinel story over the course of four more films over two decades, keeping Léaud in the protagonist role, interspersed with a steady stream of movies based on his own experiences as well as novels and events that caught Truffaut’s eye. In 1974, his film La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) was honored with a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award for Best Film and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Six years later, Le Dernier Métro (The Last Metro), a film set in a theater in Nazi-occupied Paris and starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, garnered sizeable audiences in France and abroad as well as picking up ten César awards including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. Truffaut made several more films before being diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1983, and died the next year at the age of 52. His lifelong love for cinema and gift for depicting the emotions and experiences of life through it live on through his films, their viewers, and the inspiration that his work instilled in other filmmakers.
Jeu de français
François Truffaut, his Cahiers du cinéma colleagues, and the Left Bank directors all broadened the sphere of French and worldwide cinema. How many of the nine questions in the following Nouvelle Vague quiz can you answer correctly?
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