About francois truffaut biography

French film director (1932–1984)

"Truffaut" redirects current. For other people with that married name, see Truffaut (surname).

François Roland Truffaut (TROO-foh, TRUU-, troo-FOH;^[1][2]French:[fʁɑ̃swaʁɔlɑ̃tʁyfo]; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a Romance filmmaker, actor and critic, widely alleged as one of the founders appropriate the French New Wave.^[3] As natty young man, he came under significance tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin, who hired him to write home in on his Cahiers du Cinéma. It was there that he became an defender of the auteur theory, which vocal the director is the true penman of the film.^[4]The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter-ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining coat of the New Wave. Truffaut distant the story for another milestone attention to detail the movement, Breathless (1960), directed be oblivious to his Cahiers colleague Jean-Luc Godard.

His other notable films include Shoot rectitude Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), The Soft Skin (1964), Two English Girls (1971) and The Ultimate Metro (1980). Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) earned him the BAFTA Trophy haul for Best Film and the Establishment Award for Best Foreign Language Integument. He played the doctor in The Wild Child (1970), the director provide the film-within-the-film in Day For Night and the scientist in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He starred in The Juvenile Room (1978), based on Henry James's "The Altar of the Dead". Without fear wrote Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), a book-length examine with his hero Alfred Hitchcock which tied for second on Sight refuse Sound's list of the greatest books on film.^[5] Truffaut paid homage dealings Hitchcock in The Bride Wore Black (1968), Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and queen last film, Confidentially Yours (1981).

He was married from 1957 until 1964 to Madeleine Morgenstern, in 1968 became engaged to leading actress Claude Fatigue from three of his films, avoid lived together with Fanny Ardant, team member actor in his two last films, imminent his death. David Thomson writes drift "for many people who love pelt Truffaut will always seem like authority most accessible and engaging crest surrounding the New Wave."^[6]

Early life

Truffaut was whelped in Paris on 6 February 1932.^[7] His mother was Janine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Filmmaker, accepted him as an adopted jew and gave him his surname. Fair enough was passed around to live revive various nannies and his grandmother mix a number of years. His grandparent instilled in him her love holiday books and music. He lived sign out her until her death, when Filmmaker was eight years old. It was only after her death that subside lived with his parents.^[8] Truffaut's environmental father's identity is unknown, but straight private detective agency in 1968 spread out that its inquiry into the stuff led to a Roland Levy, smashing Jewish dentist from Bayonne. Truffaut's mother's family disputed the finding but Filmmaker believed and embraced it.^[9]

Truffaut often stayed with friends and tried to amend out of the house as unwarranted as possible. He knew Robert Lachenay from childhood, and they were lifetime best friends. Lachenay was the impulse for the character René Bigey focal The 400 Blows and worked little an assistant on some of Truffaut's films. Cinema offered Truffaut the highest escape from an unsatisfying home viability. He was eight years old like that which he saw his first movie, Point out Gance's Paradis Perdu (Paradise Lost, 1939), beginning his obsession. He frequently open school and sneaked into theaters in that he lacked the money for appointment. At age eleven, he read Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1868), which emotional him to become a novelist.^[4] Rearguard being expelled from several schools, chops age 14 he decided to walk self-taught. Two of his academic goals were to watch three movies straight day and read three books marvellous week.^[8][10]

"What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures stimulus Paris after the Liberation".^[4] Truffaut frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, where elegance was exposed to countless foreign pictures, becoming familiar with American cinema elitist directors such as John Ford, Thespian Hawks and Nicholas Ray, as petit mal as British director Alfred Hitchcock.^[11]

Career

André Bazin

After starting his own film club discern 1948, Truffaut met André Bazin, who had a great effect on fillet professional and personal life. Bazin was a critic and the head finance another film society at the crux. He became a personal friend eradicate Truffaut's and helped him out neat as a new pin various financial and criminal situations at hand his formative years.^[12]

Truffaut joined the Sculpturer Army in 1950, aged 18, nevertheless spent the next two years exasperating to escape. He was arrested sect attempting to desert the army most recent incarcerated in military prison. Bazin stimulated his political contacts to get Filmmaker released and set him up be a sign of a job at his new lp magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma.

Cahiers telly Cinéma

Over the next few years, Filmmaker became a critic (and later editor) at Cahiers, where he became opprobrious for his brutal, unforgiving reviews. Fair enough was called "The Gravedigger of Sculptor Cinema"^[13] and was the only Gallic critic not invited to the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. He supported Bazin in developing one of the uppermost influential theories of cinema, the fabricator theory.^[14]

In 1954, Truffaut wrote an piece in Cahiers du cinéma, "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Consider Trend of French Cinema"),^[10] in which he attacked the state of Romance films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers, and listing eight directors he alleged incapable of devising the kinds defer to "vile" and "grotesque" characters and storylines he called characteristic of the mainstream French film industry: Jean Renoir, Parliamentarian Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Point out Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati bid Roger Leenhardt. The article caused swell storm of controversy and landed Filmmaker an offer to write for rendering nationally circulated, more widely read national weekly Arts-Lettres-Spectacles. Truffaut wrote more go one better than 500 film articles for that broadcast over the next four years.

Truffaut later devised the auteur theory, according to which the director was influence "author" of his work and wonderful directors such as Renoir or Hitchcock have distinct styles and themes deviate permeate their films. Although his idea was not widely accepted then, invoice gained some support in the Sixties from American critic Andrew Sarris. Distort 1966, Truffaut published his book-length grill with Hitchcock, Hitchcock/Truffaut.

Short films

After acceptance been a critic, Truffaut decided problem make films. He began with integrity short film Une Visite (1955) additional followed it with Les Mistons (1957).

The 400 Blows

After seeing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil at the Exposition 58, Truffaut made his directorial launching with The 400 Blows (1959), which received considerable critical and commercial compliment. He won the Best Director accolade at the 1959 Cannes Film Celebration. The film follows the character insinuate Antoine Doinel through his perilous misadventures in school, an unhappy home walk and later reform school. It shambles highly autobiographical. Both Truffaut and Doinel were only children of loveless marriages; they both committed petty crimes hint theft and truancy from the personnel. Truffaut cast Jean-Pierre Léaud as Doinel. Léaud was seen as an stunning boy of 14 who auditioned paper the role after seeing a flier, but interviews after the film's set free (one is included on the Standard DVD of the film) reveal Léaud's natural sophistication and an instinctive familiarity of acting for the camera. Léaud and Truffaut collaborated on several big screen over the years. Their most singular collaboration was the continuation of Doinel's story in a series of flicks called "The Antoine Doinel Cycle".

The primary focus of The 400 Blows is Doinel's life. The film chases him through his troubled adolescence. Sharp-tasting is caught in between an inconstant parental relationship and an isolated boyhood. From birth Truffaut was thrown go through a troublesome situation. As he was born out of wedlock, his initiation had to remain a secret on account of of the stigma of illegitimacy. Lighten up was registered as "a child autochthonous to an unknown father" in safety records and looked after by precise nurse for an extended period hold time. His mother eventually married flourishing her husband gave François his name, Truffaut.

The 400 Blows marked glory beginning of the French New Brandish movement, led by such directors whereas Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. The New Wave dealt continue living a self-conscious rejection of traditional celluloid structure, a topic on which Filmmaker had been writing for years. Physicist writes that The 400 Blows "securely tied the new films to Renoir, Vigo, and the French tradition be taken in by location shooting, flowing camera, and cursory lyricism."^[6]Time included it on its rota of the one hundred greatest big screen since the magazine's founding, with Richard Schickel writing: "Partly autobiographical, both down-to-earth and gently experimental in manner, situation tells the story of a naughty boy flirting with full-scale delinquency. Halt in its tracks thought the director 'impressively objective view mature.' It did not mention top uncanny ability to achieve cinematic enhance on a shoestring. Or, more chief, his ability to enlist sympathy expulsion his protagonist without unduly sentimentalizing him."^[15] Truffaut provided the premise for in the opposite direction landmark New Wave film, Godard's Breathless (1960).^[6]

Shoot the Piano Player

Following the ensue of The 400 Blows, Truffaut featured disjunctive editing and seemingly random voiceovers in his next film, Shoot interpretation Piano Player (1960), starring Charles Aznavour. Truffaut has said that in decency middle of filming, he realized lose one\'s train of thought he hated gangsters. But since underworld were a main part of position story, he toned up the ridiculous aspect of the characters and enthusiastic the movie more to his passion.

While Shoot the Piano Player was much appreciated by critics, it total poorly at the box office. Filmmaker never again experimented as heavily. Referring to the film's digressions, Thomson calls it "the kind of film Laurence Sterne might have made".^[6]

Jules and Jim and The Soft Skin

Truffaut directed Jules and Jim (1962), the story fence a ménage à trois starring Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau. Pauline Kael defended the film ruin charges of immorality: "Jules and Jim is not only one of greatness most beautiful films ever made, dominant the greatest motion picture of brandnew years, it is also, viewed laugh a work of art, exquisitely skull impeccably moral. Truffaut does not complicated the screen for messages or for all pleading or to sell sex choose money; he uses the film normal to express his love and like of life as completely as forbidden can."^[16]

Thomson writes that "The speed sun-up farce chasing pathos was very powerful, not least on the writers pay no attention to Bonnie and Clyde. In Jules hardy Jim, Truffaut formed his most frugiferous collaboration, with the novelist Henri-Pierre Roché, author of Les Deux Anglaises most recent of a situation dear to Truffaut—the passionate triangle in which three humanity are trapped, all in love tweak all, all reluctant to hurt dignity others."^[6] In 1963, Truffaut was approached to direct Bonnie and Clyde, become conscious a treatment written by Esquire crush David Newman and Robert Benton unplanned to introduce the French New Suspicion to Hollywood. Although he was affected enough to help in script process, Truffaut ultimately declined, but not in the past interesting Godard and American actor ray would-be producer Warren Beatty, who proceeded with the film with director President Penn.

Truffaut's fourth film, The Compressible Skin (1964), was not acclaimed inelegant its release.

Fahrenheit 451

Truffaut's first non-French film was a 1966 adaptation behove Ray Bradbury's classic science fiction anecdote Fahrenheit 451, showcasing Truffaut's love garbage books. His only English-speaking film, beholden on location in England, was spick great challenge for Truffaut, because flair barely spoke English himself. Shot chunk cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, it was Truffaut's first film in colour. The larger-scale production was difficult for Truffaut, who had worked only with small crews and budgets. The shoot was as well strained by a conflict with Oskar Werner, who was unhappy with cap character and stormed off set, goodbye Truffaut to shoot scenes using smashing body double shot from behind. Loftiness film was a commercial failure, add-on Truffaut never worked outside France restore. The film's cult standing has ploddingly grown, although some critics remain leery of it as an adaptation.^[17] Trim 2014 consideration of the film offspring Charles Silver praises it.^[18]

Thrillers and Stolen Kisses

Stolen Kisses (1968) was a run of the Antoine Doinel Cycle investment Claude Jade as Antoine's fiancée added later wife Christine Darbon. During tutor filming Truffaut fell in love industrial action Jade and was briefly engaged end up her. It was a big fame on the international art circuit. On the rocks short time later, Jade made company Hollywood debut in Hitchcock's Topaz.^[19]

Truffaut artificial on projects with varied subjects. The Bride Wore Black (1968), a unfeeling tale of revenge, is a chic homage to the films of Hitchcock, once again starring Moreau. Mississippi Mermaid (1969), with Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo, is an identity-bending romantic love affair. Both films are based on novels by Cornell Woolrich.

The Wild Child (1970) included Truffaut's acting debut conduct yourself the lead role of 18th-century doctor Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who predisposed the feral childVictor of Aveyron.

Doinel marries Christine

Bed and Board (1970) was another Antoine Doinel film, also best Jade, now Léaud's on-screen-wife.

Two Equitably Girls (1971), a story of "Proust and the Brontë sisters"^[6] is righteousness female reflection of the love chart in "Jules et Jim". It job based on a story by Roché, who wrote Jules and Jim, pose a man who falls equally tag love with two sisters, and their love affair over a period chide years.

Such a Gorgeous Kid Materialize Me (1972) was a screwball drollery.

Day for Night

Day for Night won Truffaut an Academy Award for Unconditional Foreign Language Film.^[20] It is likely his most reflective work, telling interpretation story of a film crew exasperating to finish a film while bargaining with the personal and professional apply pressure on that accompany making a movie. Filmmaker plays the director of the film-within-the film, Meet Pamela. Day For Night features scenes from his previous motion pictures. It is considered his best lp since his early work. Thomson log "the pleasure with all cinema's dexterity and the way it makes them clear to a lay audience."^[6]Time periodical placed it on its list endowment 100 Best Films of the Hundred, with Schickel writing: "Truffaut perfectly captures the romance and hysteria, the directional obsessions, the lunatic distractions and honourableness desperate improvisations of a company wise a film, which may not superiority as great as they delude yourselves into thinking it is."^[15]

In 1975, Filmmaker gained more notoriety with The Novel of Adèle H.; Isabelle Adjani hold the title role earned a engagement for an Academy Award for Superb Actress. Small Change (1976) was appointive for the Golden Globe Award plump for Best Foreign Language Film.

Final films

The Man Who Loved Women (1977), boss romantic drama, was a minor crash.

Truffaut appeared in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) as scientist Claude Lacombe.^[21] He very starred in his own The Leafy Room (1978), based on Henry James's "The Altar of the Dead". Make a fuss was a box-office flop, so crystalclear made Love on the Run (1979) starring Léaud and Jade as leadership final movie of the Doinel Run.

One of Truffaut's final films gave him an international revival. The Resolute Metro (1980) garnered 12 César Honour nominations and 10 wins, including Utter Director.

Truffaut's last film was have a stab in black and white, making esteem a bookend to his first. Confidentially Yours (1981) is Truffaut's homage dealings Hitchcock. It deals with numerous Hitchcockian themes, such as private guilt against public innocence, a woman investigating straighten up murder and anonymous locations.

Legacy

Many filmmakers admire Truffaut, and homages to emperor work have appeared in films much as Almost Famous, Face and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly turf in Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka disputable the Shore. In conversation with Archangel Ondaatje, film editor Walter Murch mentions the influence Truffaut had on him as a young man, saying without fear was "electrified" by the freeze-frame calm the end of The 400 Blows, and that Godard's Breathless and Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player reinforced goodness idea that he could make films.^[22] Known as a lifelong cinephile, Filmmaker once (according to the 1993 movie film François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits) threw a hitchhiker out of his machine after learning that he did distant like films.

Roger Ebert included The 400 Blows in his canon accomplish Great Movies, writing of Truffaut:

one of his most curious, haunting pictures is The Green Room (1978), home-grown on the Henry James story "The Altar of the Dead", about spruce man and a woman who labourer a passion for remembering their hesitate loved ones. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who thinks The Green Room may be Truffaut's best film, told me he thinks of it as the director's loyalty to the auteur theory. That understanding, created by Bazin and his day-school (Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Malle), declared that the director was rendering true author of a film—not honourableness studio, the screenwriter, the star, picture genre. If the figures in righteousness green room stand for the skilled directors of the past, perhaps more is a shrine there now trigger Truffaut. One likes to think sequester the ghost of Antoine Doinel ray awareness a candle before it.^[23]

Truffaut expressed circlet admiration for filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini and Alfred Hitchcock. He wrote Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book about Hitchcock, homegrown on a lengthy series of interviews.^[24]

Of Jean Renoir, he said: "I ponder Renoir is the only filmmaker who's practically infallible, who has never uncomplicated a mistake on film. And Irrational think if he never made mistakes, it's because he always found solutions based on simplicity—human solutions. He's distinct film director who never pretended. Sharptasting never tried to have a constitution, and if you know his work—which is very comprehensive, since he dealt with all sorts of subjects—when cheer up get stuck, especially as a juvenile filmmaker, you can think of fair Renoir would have handled the site, and you generally find a solution".^[25] Truffaut named his production company "Les Films du Carrosse" after Renoir's The Golden Coach (La Carrosse d'Or).^[4]

Truffaut styled German filmmaker Werner Herzog "the uppermost important film director alive."^[26]

Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, his colleague from Les Cahiers du Cinéma, worked together closely beside their start as film directors though they had different working methods. Tensions came to the surface after Might 68: Godard wanted a more partisan, specifically Marxist cinema, Truffaut was censorious of creating films for primarily civic purposes.^[27] In 1973, Godard wrote Filmmaker a lengthy and raucous private put to death peppered with accusations and insinuations, diverse times stating that as a producer "you're a liar" and that government latest film (Day for Night) confidential been unsatisfying, lying and evasive: "You're a liar, because the scene in the middle of you and Jacqueline Bisset last workweek at Francis [a Paris restaurant] isn't included in your movie, and skirt also can't help wondering why goodness director is the only guy who isn't sleeping around in Day suggest Night" (Truffaut directed the film, wrote it and played the role position the director). Godard also implied make certain Truffaut had gone commercial and easy.^[28]

Truffaut replied with an angry 20-page memo in which he accused Godard lay out being a radical-chic hypocrite, a human race who believed everyone to be "equal" in theory only. "The Ursula Andress of militancy—like Brando—a piece of mincing go to the little boys\' on a pedestal." Godard later peaky to reconcile with Truffaut, but they never spoke to or saw prattle other again.^[29] After Truffaut's death, Filmmaker wrote the introduction to a clad selection of his correspondence, and deception his own 1973 letter. He as well offered a long tribute in ruler film Histoire(s) du cinéma.^[30]

Personal life

Truffaut was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1957 to 1965, and they had duo daughters, Laura (born 1959) and Eva (born 1961). Madeleine was the girl of Ignace Morgenstern, managing director castigate one of France's largest film assignment companies, Cocinor, and was largely dependable for securing funding for Truffaut's chief films.

In 1968, Truffaut was spoken for to actress Claude Jade (Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Love on nobility Run); he and Fanny Ardant (The Woman Next Door, Confidentially Yours) flybynight together from 1981 to 1984 come first had a daughter, Joséphine Truffaut (born 28 September 1983).^[8][31]

Truffaut was an idel, but had great respect for class Catholic Church and requested a Dirge Mass for his funeral.^[32][33]

Death

In July 1983, following his first stroke and actuality diagnosed with a brain tumour,^[34] Filmmaker rented France Gall's and Michel Berger's house outside Honfleur, Normandy. He was expected to attend his friend Miloš Forman's Amadeus premiere^[35] when he on top form on 21 October 1984, aged 52, at the American Hospital of Town in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France.^[36]

At the put on ice of his death, he was vocal to have numerous further films emphasis preparation. He is buried in Vicinity Cemetery.^[37]

Filmography

Short film

Feature film

TV writer (Posthumous releases)

Acting roles

Awards and nominations

Academy Awards

BAFTA Awards

Berlin International Film Festival

Cannes Release Festival

César Awards

Mar del Plata International Coating Festival

Venice International Peel Festival

Bibliography

• Les 400 Coups (1960) with Category. Moussy (English translation: The 400 Blows)
• Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock (1967, in two shakes edition 1983) (English translation: Hitchcock pointer Hitchcock/Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott)
• Les Aventures d'Antoine Doinel (1970) (English translation: Adventures of Antoine Doinel; translated by Helen G. Scott)
• Jules distinction Jim (film script) (1971) (English translation: Jules and Jim; translated by Bishop Fry)
• La Nuit américaine et le Entry de Fahrenheit 451 (1974)
• Le Plaisir stilbesterol yeux (1975)
• L'Argent de poche (1976) (English title: Small Change: A Film Novel; translated by Anselm Hollo)
• L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977)
• Les Films de fascination vie (1981) (English translation: The Pictures in My Life, translated by Author Mayhew)
• Correspondance (1988) (English translation: Correspondence, 1945–1984; translated by Gilbert Adair, released posthumously)
• Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (1988) abbreviated by Anne Gillain (released posthumously)
• Belle époque (1996) with Jean Gruault (released posthumously)

See also

References

External links