Truffaut's Prophecy: The Film of Tomorrow

Francois Truffaut has become my new obsession, and it's not just because I chose him as my director of the month, but I ma now just starting to understand just what he was all about. I'm not just watching Truffaut's films but I'm also reading some of his old essays and criticisms on films and I find them fascinating. For those of you who don't know, before Truffaut was a filmmaker, he was an established film critic for the french magazine "Cahier de Cinema".

This is an excerpt from an essay written by Truffaut that got me thinking. It was first published in 1957. "The film of tomorrow seems to me therefore more personal even than a novel, individual and autobiographical, like a confession or like a personal diary. Young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will tell us what happened to them: it might be the story of their first love or of their most recent one, their finding a political consciousness, a travel journal, an illness, their military service, their marriage, their most recent vacation, and it will necessarily be likeable because it will be true and new."

"The film of tomorrow will not be made by functionaries behind a camera but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a formidable and exalting andventure. the film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportionate to the number of friends the filmmaker has."

"The film of tomorrow will be an act of love."

Well it's been over 50 years since Truffaut made those statements and I am now wondering if he was correct but first to be clear, let me mention that Truffaut was talking about the state of french cinema and comparing it to Hollywood which he noticed a change into a more personal way of filmmaking. In many ways I agree, yet I'm not convinced that film has made that leap into the Utopia that Truffaut describes. Yes there are films that are made today that are deeply personal and keep to the intimate side, I particularily was impressed just last year with the amount of smaller more thought provoking projects. For me the closest Truffaut's vision was realized was in the seventies where Hollywood started taking risks and created some of the most persoanl and deeply felt films ever. However I also would believe that Hollywood has taken a step back.

We are currently living in a time where films have become less about art and more about big business, more about serving mass audiences with short attention spans and less about serving people who want to breath it all in. As films like "The Dark Knight" are coming out and breaking records across the world, I don't see this ending anytime soon. I'm not saying there isn't room for those bigger films particularily one as well crafted as "The Dark Knight", but the danger is in losing an artistic and personal perspective in our films, soon all we may be left with are films with cool shots, swift pacing, and "the latest in digital technology." How can we expect to have a new and interesting brand of filmmakers if this is all they are exposed to.

So tell me what you think. Do you think we are living in the film world Truffaut had envisioned over 50 years ago, or have we taken a step back? What would Truffaut himself think of the state Hollywood films were in if he were alive today?