Word: truffauts
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...movies took inception from the collapse of Hollywood in the early '50s and the revival of Europe as a center of film production. Since the European industry was small and loosely organized, such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard could pretty well shoot them as they saw them and let the censor take the hindmost. As a result, they made a number of fine far-out films (The Bicycle Thief, Wild Strawberries, 8½, L'Avventura, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, The 400 Blows, Breathless) that made a startling...
...Truffaut creates an aura of sterility around everything in the hero's life. His job (he's the book-burner) is to regulate his students' behavior (they're the future book-burners) in class and to follow a strict regimen himself on the truck. Oskar Werner demonstrates with tight-lipped professionalism that the first place to look for a book is the toaster. He stands out against the brash red of the fire engine--black uniform, arms akimbo--like a medieval executioner. His domestic life is equally grim. His wife is preoccupied with the puppets and parrots on their mammoth...
...Truffaut shows the hidden sensuality of these people, There is a boy in the public gardens standing with two arms clasping round his back. A policeman patrolling the garden comes by and knocks him with a stick. We expect to see a couple fall apart: instead the boy's own arms drop to his sides. There is a lady operator who suspects that the couple behind her have a relationship closer than street-hello acquaintance. The lady operator has no one. She strokes the white fur around her shoulders. There is a quick shot of the book burner's wife...
From here, Truffaut goes wrong. He surrenders to Bradbury's too-nifty plot: at the beginning all books were burned; now all will be rescued, in fact, memorized. That's some triumph; it negates the force of the whole movie. Werner had been tending toward humanity. Having turned from a mechanical life to an emotional-life-via-books, he could have turned even further--to real experience. After all, the girl was there. It was she who teased him into realizing he was unhappy and tempted him into reading. (Julie Christie plays both the wife and the tease...
...there are masses of people passing within speaking, within touching distance of each other--all muttering gibberish, eyes glazed, isolated. Truffaut cops out, He converts into a robot the hero he sets out to humanize. The music swells up and insists: be exhilarated! That's after 90-odd minutes of tedium...