Let's Talk Truffaut

First of all I want to apologize for postponing my month tribute to the great Francois Truffaut for the past two months. This month I will attempt to discuss this man's films and what he means to me starting now:

I first heard (or saw) the name Francois Truffaut in the credits for Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Truffaut played the French scientist Claude Lacombe. I was fairly young and just getting into movies as an art form and other than Spielberg and other household names like Hitchcock or Capra, I knew very little of any other directors, I was still not sure as to what a director did other than point the camera. It wasn't until I read a Spielberg interview a couple years later where he talks about working with Truffaut on the film that I got a vague idea of who he was, it was also the first time I heard the term French New Wave. Two questions came to mind, what is the French New Wave and what did Truffaut have to do with it?

I got my first taste of both Truffaut and the birth of French New Wave when I rented "The 400 Blows", Truffaut's first film about a young boy who rebels against his parents and his teachers at school by running away from home, skipping school, and turning to a life of crime. It was probably the first foreign language film I ever saw. Since then I've gone back to "The 400 Blows" many times, I heard that it was considered to be a semi-autobiographical film from Truffaut, which I came to understand was always an important theme that ran through his films.

I pretty much learned the history of The French New Wave through Truffaut's films, soon after I saw "Jules and Jim", then "Shoot the Piano Player", then I learned of other directors involved in this important movement like Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Louis Malle. I admit I haven't seen as many of their films as I have with Truffaut (mostly because they're difficult to track down). I have seen only a small handful of Godard's such as "Breathless" (Which Truffaut wrote the screenplay for). I found these films to be very different from the classic Hollywood ones I had become accustomed to, they had ta feel that most independent movies have now, they were small and personal. It was because of these films I started to view movies differently, they helped me grow, I was looking at films on a personal level and started to notice recurring themes in other director's work. This didn't all happen over night, but I believe Truffaut and other directors like him helped me make the first steps into discovering this.

I'm not sure if it was in fact Truffaut who came up with the so-called "Auteur Theory" which stated that the director is like the author of the film, but I associated that term primarily with him when I first heard of it.

One thing I've come to understand mostly about Truffaut's films is how he is fascinated with the idea of films making anything possible. Of his films I've seen, I can always sense a very childlike curiosity towards the magic they can possess. In his "Day for Night" for which he won an Oscar, Truffaut casts himself as the director of a film who has dreams of when he was a child. As the child we see him going to a movie theatre to swipe photos of the film "Citizen Kane". Whether or not this actually happened in real life I'm not so sure, but I could very much picture Truffaut doing something like that.

Truffaut's films are often described as delightful, I can't make an argument against that, particularly with his Antoine Doniel films, but by simply saying that's all his films are misrepresents this man. His films usually dealt with characters and relationships in a very intimate way, but he was always tactful in making his small stories cinematic. To see a film by Truffaut is like a stimulant, it awakens the senses, and makes the movie come alive for us.