Word: truffauts
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Under Bazin's guidance, Truffaut quickly stabilized and began to write film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the recondite French movie journal that then housed such nouvelle vague cineasts as Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. Truffaut proved so corrosive a critic that in 1958 he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival and forced to snipe at targets he could not see. What he could see, however, was Madeleine Morgenstern, daughter of a film executive whose products had received Truffaut's hardest knocks. After they were married, Truffaut continued his criticism, this time...
Lifetime Diary. Instead, he made a name for himself with The 400 Blows, a title derived from a French slang expression "faire les 400 coups," meaning "to go on a spree." The movie told the mordant story of a disintegrating childhood that was half autobiography and half poetry. Truffaut later observed that "a director's total work is a diary, kept over a lifetime." This first entry revealed hints of the style that was to follow: despair that could add up to an affirmation of life, poignance that never stooped to self-pity, Mack Sennett farce that could dive...
...Truffaut solidified his reputation with two films that are still considered landmarks in modern cinema history. Shoot the Piano Player was both a sly, imitative tribute to the Warner Bros, shootem-ups of the '30s and the existential drama of a man (Charles Aznavour) who can no longer respond to life. Jules and Jim was a near-perfect evocation of Montparnassian fin de siecle life, informed with psychological observations of the '60s. A blend of saline tragedy and dulcet comedy, it reinforced the burgeoning reputation of Actress Jeanne Moreau...
...Truffaut's later films have seemed, for the most part, to go too far out or too close in. Partly to encourage backers who were dismayed at the commercial anemia of his critical successes, Truffaut in The Soft Skin abandoned the visual conceits of, narrow and widening screen and rocketing flashbacks that characterized his previous works. Skin was a mild film of convention that won few admirers. Fahrenheit 451, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, was his only true failure, an atypically emotionless sci-fi attempt to show the future as nightmare. The fact, of course, that...
Cinematic disappointments have not seemed to impede Truffaut's aplomb. If anything, he has grown more secure and relaxed. Though he is still a chain-smoker, he abandoned nail biting when one of his daughters took it up. In a field where jealousies unreel at every screening, he remains genial. His praise extends to every film maker but one-Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni. "That is the one director whose sensibilities I cannot get inside," he says, possibly because the aridity of Antonioni's films is diametrically opposite to Truffaut's abiding humanism. Perhaps his favorite cinematic...