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Totally Truffaut
Totally Truffaut
23 Films for Understanding the
Man and the Filmmaker
ANNE GILLAIN
F O R EWO R D B Y M A RT I N S C O R SE SE
F O R EWO R D T O T H E F R E N C H E D I T IO N B Y
M IC H E L M A R I E
T R A N SL AT E D B Y A L I STA I R F OX
E D I T E D B Y BA R RY LY D G AT E
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197536308.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Sam
Contents
Appendix 289
Bibliography 291
Index 293
Foreword
François Truffaut’s passionate love affair with the cinema was lifelong, and
you can feel the intensity of it in his criticism, in his acting, in his advo-
cacy for his fellow filmmakers (Hitchcock and Renoir above all), and most
of all in his films. It animates every movie he ever made, every scene, every
shot, every cut. He spent a very long time in the editing room on each of
his pictures, and the result is that every movement in every frame looks like
it’s been lovingly scrutinized, so that every transition from one image to the
next surprises you. That’s the source of the unique sense of exhilaration in
Truffaut’s filmmaking.
More than any of his peers, Truffaut stood up for the continuity of film his-
tory. His book on Hitchcock is indispensable to anyone interested in movies,
but it’s also very unusual. Here was one of the world’s most established and
celebrated filmmakers devoting the same amount of time and energy it would
have taken him to make a movie (or maybe two movies) to a very lengthy se-
ries of interviews with a much older director in the twilight of his career, and
then crafting a book from it that has proven to be a bible for countless dir-
ectors. It’s an extraordinary act of homage, almost unthinkable today.
Of course, Truffaut carried that sense of history into his moviemaking.
Back in the early and mid-1960s, people were always talking about how this
movie “quoted” from that older movie, but what almost no one talked about
was why the quote was there, what it did or didn’t do for the movie, what it
meant emotionally to the picture as a whole. In Truffaut, the historical aware-
ness and a thorough grounding in the emotional reality of the picture went
hand in hand. There are many echoes of Hitchcock in his movies, blatantly so
in The Soft Skin (underrated at the time of its release and a favorite of mine)
and The Bride Wore Black, not so blatantly in many other movies, and it’s al-
most impossible to quantify the importance of Jean Renoir to Truffaut (or,
for that matter, of Henry James and Honoré de Balzac—Truffaut was also a
great reader). If you study his pictures closely, you can feel echoes of each of
them, but nothing ever feels extraneous to the film itself.
There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting
impression on me and on my generation of filmmakers. For instance, the
x Foreword
opening, breathlessly fast expository section of Jules and Jim, where time and
space are abolished and the images and the narration and the music flow like
a river, or the series of cuts in Fahrenheit 451, another underrated picture,
where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent
danger—I admit that I’ve duplicated this pattern quite a few times in my own
films. And the character of the pianist played by Charles Aznavour in Shoot
the Piano Player—always on the verge of making a move but never quite
doing it—opened my eyes to a kind of ambivalence that I hadn’t previously
seen in movies.
And the dimension of time—the desire to slow it down, the ever-present
reality of its swift passing . . . Truffaut had such a unique gift for giving form to
this longing in us. It’s encapsulated in that moment at the end of Two English
Girls—another underrated picture, and a masterpiece—where Jean-Pierre
Léaud’s Claude suddenly catches a glance at himself in the mirror and spon-
taneously murmurs the words: “My God, I look old.” And then, as quickly as
it arrives, the moment is over.
That’s life. And that’s Truffaut.
Martin Scorsese
The Secret Rediscovered: Foreword to
the French Edition
(2004), an in-depth study of the origins and genesis of each film based on
a study of the screenplays and production notes preserved at the Films du
Carrosse by the filmmaker himself, who was ever mindful of what he would
bequeath to posterity.
Totally Truffaut thus provides the reader with a remarkably detailed and
well-informed analysis of each of Truffaut’s films, demonstrating the power
of the filmmaker’s creativity, the strength of his work, and the coherence of
his oeuvre. In fact, owing to the extraordinary success of his first full-length
fiction film in 1959, Truffaut was lucky enough to produce or coproduce all
of his films with Les Films du Carrosse, the company he created at the very
beginning of his career with the support of Ignace Morgenstern, his father-
in-law. From then on he always paid close attention to the financial state of
the company, alternating his production projects’ costs between those with
modest budgets and films with more ambitious budgets that allowed him to
cast stars in the lead roles. The audience figures published in the appendix to
this volume give the total numbers of admissions for his productions; they
indicate that only one of the films he made during his career was a failure at
the box office; namely, The Green Room, one of his most personal and daring
films, which attracted only 153,525 admissions for the whole of France. The
rather exceptional production conditions he enjoyed allowed him to select
only those films that he wanted to make and to base them freely on orig-
inal subjects or on adaptations of a wide range of literary works that he in-
tegrated into his personal universe. As a result, the entire oeuvre of the
filmmaker consists of auteurist projects linked from one film to another by
close relationships involving a system of repetitions, cross references, and
citations. These intertextual correspondences are innumerable, and can be
identified thanks to what Anne Gillain calls “memory shots”—shots that are
repeated in the body of the film without playing a dominant narrative role.
Thus, in her analysis of Confidentially Yours, she pinpoints twenty or so visual
or verbal motifs that link this final film to the rest of the filmmaker’s oeuvre.
All these cross references from one film to another show that the film-
maker was fully aware of creating a coherent body of work like those of
Balzac and Marcel Proust, his professed literary models, with the character of
Antoine Doinel being the most explicit manifestation of this unity from The
400 Blows to Love on the Run. Truffaut was in fact the first filmmaker of the
New Wave to implement this notion of works created as a cycle, well before
the series of Éric Rohmer (“Six Moral Tales,” “Comedies and Proverbs,” and
“Tales of the Four Seasons”), and Jacques Rivette’s variations on theatrical
Foreword to the French edition xiii
staging for the cinema that include Paris Belongs to Us, The Nun, Gang of
Four, and Va savoir (Who Knows?).
Anne Gillain’s approach draws freely on the method of textual analysis es-
tablished by Raymond Bellour at the beginning of the 1970s with his well-
known studies of two films by Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds (1963) and North
by Northwest (1959). She applies this method to a short excerpt from each
of Truffaut’s films, and relates the passage selected to the rest of the film and
Truffaut’s oeuvre as a whole. The fragments chosen from one film to the next
are very diverse in nature. They range from arresting narrative moments, like
the encounter of the young Doinel with his mother and her lover in the Place
de Clichy in The 400 Blows, to the murder-suicide of the passionate couple in
The Woman Next Door. In Bed & Board, Two English Girls, A Gorgeous Girl
Like Me, The Man Who Loved Women, and Confidentially Yours they mostly
involve the final section of the film, and often concern key sequences like
the encounter of Antoine Doinel with Monsieur Lucien at the end of Love
on the Run and of Bernard Granger with Lucas Steiner in the cellar of The
Last Metro.
A number of these fragments are very short, like the one from Fahrenheit
451 (five shots lasting two minutes, thirty-three seconds), when Montag
begins to read his first book, syllable by syllable, or the excerpts from The
Story of Adele H. (only two shots, the first lasting six seconds, the second,
very mobile and long, of one minute, forty-eight seconds following Adele’s
movements when she visits a bank) and from Confidentially Yours (four shots
lasting one minute, forty-eight seconds in the police station, which present a
story in flashback involving Barbara, the investigator). Other analyses con-
cern longer passages consisting of up to fifty shots: one sequence of four
minutes for the classic scene involving the declaration of love in Mississippi
Mermaid, with its thirty-two close-ups in shot /reverse shot, with the faces
of Louis and Marion in alternation; forty-one shots for the third occurrence
of the child’s dream presented in black and white in Day for Night, consisting
of twenty-nine close-ups of photos lasting twenty-three seconds at the end
of the dream; and fifty very rapid shots during the “frugal meal” in Small
Change that the young Patrick bolts down when Madame Riffle serves him
the family’s pot-au-feu as he is devouring her with his eyes—one of the rare
sequences in the filmmaker’s oeuvre that represents a character eating with
greedy enthusiasm. Rare, because Truffaut was by no means a gastronomist.
This typological variety of forms in the way each movie is cut and edited
demonstrates the virtuosity of Truffaut’s film style, which is far removed
xiv Foreword to the French edition
from the stereotypes of the classical model that is usually, and quite unjustly,
attributed to him. All of the fragments selected accord primary importance
to the choice of shot involved and also to the forms of editing. Thus, the de-
tailed analysis of the sixteen shots in the fragment from The Bride Wore Black
in which Julie Kohler poses as Diana the huntress, bow in hand, shows how
the central shot of two minutes (Julie and Fergus on the couch) is framed
by a succession of very brief shots, all of which last less than a second; with
great speed, they frame Julie’s mouth in extreme close-up, her eyes, the arrow
stuck in the wall, the gaze of Fergus the painter as he sizes up his model—all
arranged in a brief montage reminiscent of Soviet cinema at the end of the
1920s, or of those avant-garde films whose montage can be so staccato and
dizzying.
As a result of these analytic choices, Gillain offers the reader a lesson in
the analysis of sequences of varying durations, parameters, and angles of ap-
proach; in this way, she elucidates the filmmaker’s mastery of a kind of filmic
expression that results in a veritable “manipulation of the spectator,” aimed
primarily at captivating viewers, enchanting them with the emotion that he
means to provoke.
Gillain draws in addition, and more fundamentally, on the theory of spec-
tatorship proposed by Raymond Bellour in Le Corps du cinéma, a theory that
is based in part upon the work of the child psychiatrist Daniel Stern, whose
ideas prove to be particularly enlightening when applied to the creative ap-
proach of François Truffaut. Gillain briefly summarizes these concepts in
short theoretical sections at the beginning of the chapters on The Wild Child,
Day for Night, and Small Change and in the course of the detailed analyses
that accompany them. Bellour’s own theory of spectatorship is explained in
the analyses of Mississippi Mermaid, The Story of Adele H., and The Woman
Next Door.
Stern makes a distinction between two main stages of human develop-
ment: that of the prelinguistic child, before its progressive acquisition of
verbal language in the first year of life, and that of the adult in control of their
words. The story of The Wild Child offers an almost perfect illustration of this
theory given that it deals with a child who is abandoned alone in a forest and
remains at the prelinguistic stage, and a well-meaning adult, Doctor Itard,
who attempts day after day to educate the young boy by teaching him how
to speak and master his first words, such as the word “milk” and the name
“Victor” that Itard has given him. The film as a whole explores the mystery of
language and the symbolic system it represents (designated by words written
Foreword to the French edition xv
The Green Room, The Last Metro, and The Woman Next Door; but Gillain
rightly rehabilitates a number of other films that were poorly received when
they were first released—films such as Shoot the Piano Player, The Soft Skin,
The Bride Wore Black, Bed & Board, Small Change, and Love on the Run. She
is right, for instance, to emphasize the central place of Mississippi Mermaid
at the beginning of the most creative phase of Truffaut’s career. She restores
to Day for Night its status as a work of clarity and depth that marked a cross-
roads. She identifies multiple levels of complexity to be found in The Last
Metro, a film of great density lying under a deceptively smooth appearance;
the metaphor of a palimpsest allows her to suggest six superimposed levels of
meaning in the film, levels that constantly intersect as the narrative unfolds.
But it is The Woman Next Door that is her favorite film, the one she sees as
Truffaut’s undeniable masterpiece:
Many critics rightly consider The Woman Next Door (1981) to be his most
perfect film. In the last ten years of his career, with ever-increasing skill,
Truffaut developed strategies of mise en scène designed to mobilize the
viewer. They involve his handling of narrative organization and dialogue,
but also a ceaselessly refined mastery of nonverbal language: the use of
glances, hands, objects, spaces; framing choices and chromatic nuances
(color or black and white); effective editing and filmic punctuation; impec-
cably orchestrated musical counterpoints to visual and verbal content; fi-
nally, and above all, silent scenes that distill into a few shots what is at stake
in the narrative. Scenes like these belong so uniquely to Truffaut that they
can rightly be read as his private signature.
Michel Marie
Preface
I get the feeling I don’t have much time left to do what I want to do.
—François Truffaut, “Radioscopie”
with Jacques Chancel, April 15, 1975
Truffaut’s films have always attracted clichés the way evening gowns, brushing
the floor, attract dust. This book hopes to sweep away a few and cast new light
on one of the most lavish bodies of fiction in the history of French cinema.
Truffaut’s oeuvre has enjoyed dazzling international success, but is often con-
sidered popular entertainment for a mass audience. Charming is an adjective
associated time and again with Truffaut—a baffling usage, considering that
the creation it characterizes plunges deep in the violence of passions and,
even in the light comedies, designates death as its vanishing point. It is true
that Truffaut translates his vision with an incomparable grace that may con-
ceal what is at stake. As with Ernst Lubitsch, the term that seems most fit-
ting to describe his work is elegance, a moral and aesthetic elegance certainly,
but an elegance that is above all artisanal, an elegance of craftmanship. Like
Lubitsch, Truffaut was a tireless worker who sought constantly to achieve
perfection and skillfully masked the enormous labor it took to make films
of such ethereal weightlessness. To evoke Truffaut is to conjure up images
that are all perfectly orchestrated, all perfectly staged, and whether ironic or
moving, totally unforgettable. Of them, Antoine Doinel at the edge of the sea
remains the most iconic. Truffaut’s unerring mastery at cultivating metaphor
forever places him in the lineage of Lubitsch, whom, along with Renoir and
Hitchcock, he considered one of his masters.
Metaphoric thinking is the connecting thread of this book, which traces
how the experiences of a life are transformed into the stuff of fiction. In 1991,
I published a first book on Truffaut’s films: François Truffaut: Le Secret perdu.
My approach was inspired by the theoretical writings of D. W. Winnicott
on juvenile delinquency. I suggested then that an ambivalent relationship
with a fantasized maternal figure provided a subterranean framework for
Truffaut’s stories. My book contained few references to the facts of his life
because at that time I was unaware of them. Instead, the films were linked
xviii Preface
Across the gilded bamboo leaves the children's voices stole to mingle
incongruously with the shouts of the returning fishermen, to the drawling
melody of——
"A Friend Who never changeth, Whose love will never die.
Our earthly friends may fail us,
And change with changing years ..."
Cyprian slipped out of the hammock and raised Ferlie to her feet.
* * * * * *
There were only thin wooden walls to the little forest bungalow.
Ferlie and he had been sleeping indoors since his illness so that she
might have all medicines and the paraphernalia for nursing within easy
reach.
Ferlie was lying face downwards: her forehead on her arms, which
gleamed lily-coloured in the pure light.
"John is mine by duty and Thu Daw is yours by desire, but I want—and,
at the moment, I'd sell my soul to eternal death to make it come true—your
son in my arms ... through love...."
He had said to her, "I see the truth of the Resurrection," and she had
replied that all else followed; but she had not then meant to signify the
strength for this sacrifice. And he saw, blindingly, that there might be no
half-measures. The ghost of an unborn child barred the way of compromise.
Shaken with pain, mental and physical, Cyprian of the once all-
satisfying ethical agnosticism called with the impotent despair which is akin
to anger upon that Lover who stood between them as lovers, and who was
becoming in conception unwaveringly the same as the God who brooded
over the disciplined Churches.
"Why should Ferlie let them torture her?" he had asked fiercely again
and again of himself in the past, and now that the power lay with him to
stay the hated pressure he found himself weakly refraining instead with the
question, "why should I let them torture me?"
Even if separation had spelt material death for them both, Ferlie's
Church would concentrate only upon the spiritual death their life together
must effect.
Had not the time really come to dismiss as out-worn sentimentality this
talk of a soul's death?
His own, such as it was, and if he might barter, and gladly, for the
fathomable happiness of To-day, despite that secret glimpse of wisdom
imparted during his unconscious hours. But what of Ferlie's soul, such as
That was, and now in his keeping—a stainless loyal Existent?
He had fought to make it see with material vision and the mastering
Force had fought on his side.
Yes, she had indeed fallen, spent, in the fearful starlessness and it was
his at last exultingly to lead.
Above the dim blue mists still shrouding the patient jungle the sun
floated, a scarlet ball, heralding the resurrection of another day.
Others, like the legendary Er, had proved that the pulsing of the soul
does not cease with the pulsing of the heart; nevertheless it was well-nigh
impossible to rest one's faith in this matter upon the experiences of others.
Just in this matter. One was prepared to believe the incredible statements of
scientists and astronomers without wrestling individually with their proofs.
Why not, therefore, the vision of those who had eyes to see and ears to hear
beyond the grave? His own past contact with that death-state was failing to
inspire now that his body felt, once more, gloriously alive. One had to
remember not to forget.
To that slender link with the future he must trust. Many had not so much
and yet walked untroubled.
Was there not some special revelation for those who, not having seen,
were yet ready outside Gethsemane's gates with the bitter admission, "Thou
has conquered, O pale Galilean"? The wraith of the dying Emperor, forced
to accept such defeat, seemed to smile mockingly at him from the distorted
patches of light and shade outside.
He lifted tired eyes to the on-stealing light and his lips moved. They
framed the one word which Ferlie, waking, might have recognized as
representing the clarion call of her utter triumph.
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