Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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President François Mitterrand last week made the first visit to Britain by a French head of state in eight years. Like two of his postwar predecessors, Charles de Gaulle and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the Socialist leader was accorded the rare honor of addressing members of both houses of Parliament. He used the occasion to issue a ringing appeal for European unity. Said Mitterrand: "The moment has come to make Europe become a genuine political reality, capable of asserting itself on the international scene...
...visit was marred by an astonishing occurrence. A French bomb-disposal technician planted a small quantity of explosives, without detonator to be sure, on the grounds of the residence of the French Ambassador, where Mitterrand was to hold a reception. The technician, acting without authorization, apparently wanted to test British antibomb squads. The explosives were quickly discovered by dogs trained to detect them. Understandably edgy in the wake of the Irish Republican Army bombing in Brighton two weeks ago aimed at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British authorities questioned the French technician at length and gave him what was described...
...tribute for Alfred Hitchcock. On cue the lights went down and scenes from Hitchcock films flared onscreen. Stopping himself in, midsentence, Truffaut exclaimed, "Oh! La projection!" and turned, eyes bright, to a peephole that gave access to the magic images. The old lure was irresistible for this French movie master who was, first and forever, a child of the American cinema...
America, in all its promise and excess, has long intoxicated the French. Truffaut's achievement was to reconcile, with a uniquely canny buoyancy, the polar tugs of these two cultures. Six of the 21 features he directed were based on works by American writers, from Cornell Woolrich (The Bride Wore Black) to Henry James (The Green Room), yet they were unmistakably French in atmosphere and obsessions. In Truffaut's pantheon of directors, Hitchcock rubbed shoulders with Jean Renoir, and his own films sizzled with the tension between Hitchcock's manipulative elegance and Renoir's sharp-eyed...
...work indicates that Truffaut remained in part a perpetual enfant adorable. That life began in rebelliousness. The son of a Paris architect, young François spent time in reform school (an ordeal he memorialized in his first feature, The 400 Blows) and was kicked out of the French army (an incident that begins Stolen Kisses). Luckily for Truffaut, the great film critic André Bazin saw in the layabout a ferocious intelligence begging to be channeled. By his early 20s, Truffaut the critic was trumpeting the cause of auteurs, directors whose point of view and command of visual style...