Francois Truffaut Research Articles

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood Mark Harris. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. The dust jacket shows Warren Beatty at the wheel, driving Faye Dunaway, all smiles in a slouch Fedora, to a reckless encounter, perhaps somewhere in Texas. Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution proves to be as much fun as the dust-jacket portrait promises; hence, maybe, in this case, you can judge a book by its cover, after all. This movie-rich narrative resembles an Armenian pastry, with intersecting layers of tasty filo, as Harris tells the stories, concurrently, of five movies that changed the world (or, with one Dolittle exception, at least Hollywood), at the Academy Awards of 1967, from the cussedly predictable 20th Century-Fox musical Doctor Dolittle, to the father-knows-best values of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, to the edgy race drama In the Heat of the Night, to the top trendsetters for the new Hollywood, The Graduate, and the impossibly upbeat noir gangster romp, Bonnie and Clyde, which seems to be the author's favorite. Now, that's a lot of entertainment on the plate, but Harris is able to keep his entrees separate, teasing readers with constant servings of tasty appetizers. At times the service slumps, as when Harris pauses too long toward the end of chapter four to ponder the limiting career choices available to Sidney Poitier in 1964. (Unsurprisingly, no one was offering him the lead role in King Lear back then, either.) But Harris has a knack for perking up his story, as when he writes at the top of chapter seven, Benton hadn't been thinking much Bonnie and Clyde on the morning that Warren Beatty showed up on his doorstep, asking if he could read the screenplay (85). Fortune knocks, with this unexpected Gentleman Caller! Harris's book starts in 1963 in New York, with Robert Benton, ending a romance with Gloria Steinern (is that name-dropping?) and going to see Jules and Jim at Dan Talbot's New Yorker Theater. Eventually, Benton would collaborate with fellow Esquire writer David Newman to write a screen treatment of the criminal careers of Clyde Borrow and Bonnie Parker, but the would be four years in the making. It was to be an American gangster about all of the things they don't show you in a gangster film (12). They had hoped that New Wave talent Francois Truffaut would direct, and they eventually even met with Truffaut for a story conference. So apparently Truffaut was interested, but when his interest began to lag, Benton and Newman then met with the great Jean-Luc Godard, without apparently knowing how to handle the volatile director's temperament. No, neither Godard nor Truffaut ultimately directed Bannie and Clyde (Godard wanted to shoot the in New Jersey!), but what a close (and interesting!) encounter this was with the French New Wave, whose directors were certainly infatuated with American gangsters. Director Arthur Perm would decline invitations to direct three times before the actually got made. Of course, not all of the films covered in this book are as interesting as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Heat of the Night, arguably the three best. The background for Doctor Dolittle, for example, is even sillier than one might have expected, and the stories involving its temperamental star, Rex Harrison, who overplayed the arrogance card and got fired, only to be rehired later, are more appalling than amusing, as when the drunken wife of the star decides to do handstands at a famous restaurant in Los Angeles, but had somehow neglected to wear undergarments that day. …

Auteur Film Directors as Contemporary Shamans

This essay illuminates and explicates the author’s theory that auteur film directors are contemporary embodiments of ancient, primitive shamans. They are figures of the same archetype but inhabit different eras, cultures, and costumes. Throughout history and cross-culturally, the mythical role of shaman and artist were inseparable. Shamans were, in fact, the most gifted of artists who recorded their visions in poetry, song, painting, and drama. They came to serve the functions of priest, doctor, psychotherapist, writer, actor, and, in the twentieth century, auteur film directors. From their invention during the 1890s, movies have served the mythic function of reestablishing for community members an ancient connection in the safety of a darkened, cave-like dwelling, which signifies both tomb and womb. Every person in the theater unconsciously agrees to come together as a collective and share this particular life experience. This essay also closely examines the notion of the auteur director as a “wounded healer” using the examples of Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Francois Truffaut, and Oliver Stone.

The Wild Child

L'Enfant sauvage de François Truffaut expose le privilège que la modernité du dix-neuvième siècle accordait à ta connexion entre la parole et l'audition par rapport à la tenue droite. En traçant l'incapacité de l'enfant sauvage d'Aveyron à répondre « au traitement de la parole », le film offre également divers arguments théoriques sur la subjectivité et la représentation. Bien que le film de Truffaut soit habituellement décrit comme docudrame basé sur une « histoire vraie », il remet en question le mythe référentiel et la pensée binaire sur lesquels il se fonde. Le film est autant un compte-rendu de la vie du réalisateur et de la philosophie de la Nouvelle Vague, qu'un récit « réaliste » sur le Dr. Itard et le cas de l'enfant sauvage. Itard est coincé dans le différend entre la science des Lumières et la substance du mythe.

Adaptation and the Art of Survival

Adaptation and the Art of Survival

The trouble with W*ttg*nst**n

«Neither with you nor without you»Francois Truffaut, La femme d’a cote No one can deny that there is a problem between Wittgenstein and analytic philosophers. To put it mildly, there are tensions between Wittgenstein’s and Wittgensteinian styled reflections and the views and practice of a lot of contemporary analytic philosophers, such that they often seem to be strange bedfellows, when they are bedfellows at all. Of course we know that Wittgenstein did not get along very well with Russell, t...

Nathalie...: An Alternative Enunciative Position in Popular French Cinema

Anne Fontaine’s latest film, Nathalie… (2003) draws comparison with Francois Truffaut’s 1981 film, La Femme d’a Cote ( The Woman Next Door ), in that it features a relationship between Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu. The couple could be seen to have evolved from a passionate relationship, as depicted by Truffaut, to one devoid of passion. Moreover, both films are narrated from a woman’s point of view. Similarities between the two films stop here, however, for Nathalie… ’s central interest rests on the relationship between two women of different age and background and focuses on their creation of a fantasmatic situation. The attention towards the creation of a feminine cinematic space raises the significant cinematographic question of the enunciator’s position as producer of the fiction. For contrary to classical cinema, where the source of enunciation controlling the discourse and the narrative logic is usually suppressed, in Fontaine’s film this is a position which is rendered visible within the narrative and is, moreover, occupied by a woman. Nathalie… centres around Catherine’s decision to hire a prostitute when she learns that her husband occasionally cheats on her. With her help, she creates a female character, Nathalie, and the filmic story – ‘herstory’ – both of which she directs. In this article, my aim is to consider the political impact of enunciation that the film raises. A close study of Fontaine’s film will reveal its attempt to challenge the masculine logic inherent in mainstream narrative cinema. My intention will be to show how Nathalie… manages to supplant hierarchical oppositions and divisions to enable alternative enunciative positions, defined in terms of fluidity and diversity, to be considered.

Francois Truffaut and friends: modernism, sexuality, and film adaptation

Francois Truffaut and friends: modernism, sexuality, and film adaptation

Playing Doctor: Francois Truffaut's L'Enfant sauvage and the Auteur/Autobiographer as Impersonator

Truffaut, impersonating/performing Dr. Itard, represents multiple layers of autobiographical content through allusions to film history, his life, cultural ideals, colonial upheavals, and critiques of the Enlightenment. Instead of the optimism critics have seen in this film, I suggest that it offers a criticism of colonialism and the Enlightenment through a convoluted autobiographicality that shifts its central subjectivity from Itard to Victor.

Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics

443 For critical suggestions and support at various stages of the writing process, I would like to thank Dudley Andrew, Kristin Boyce, Jim Chandler, Jim Conant, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Barbara Herman, Jim Lastra, Josh Malitsky, Mickey Morgan, Richard Neer, Joel Snyder, and Candace Vogler. An earlier draft of this essay was presented at the Contemporary Philosophy Workshop at the University of Chicago. 1. Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans.W.W. Halsey II andWilliamH. Simon, ed. Francois Truffaut (New York, 1973), p. 85; hereafter abbreviated JR. 2. A representative example of this position is Fred Ritchin, “Photojournalism in the Age of Computers,” in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle, 1990), pp. 28–37. Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics

Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Beginnings of Film Narrative: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation 2. The Art of Montage: Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin 3. Expressionism and Realism in Film Form: F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Charles Chaplin's The Adventurer 4. The Conversion to Sound and the Classical Hollywood Film: Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday 5. Expressive Realism: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane 6. Italian Neorealism: Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief 7. Auteur Theory and the French New Wave: Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows 8. Hollywood Auteur: Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious 9. The European Art Film: Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 10. Film and Postmodernism: Woody Allen's Annie Hall 11. Political Cinema: Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing 12. Feminism and Film Form: Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing 13. Epilogue: Digital Video and New Forms of Narrative in Mike Figgis's Timecode Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

"Sur le bord de la tombe": James and the Shadow of Musset

In La Chambre verte (1978), Francois Truffaut's tenebrous hommage to Henry James, the director-author of the film makes a forceful point about a presiding concern of the older writer. La Chambre verte is adapted, according to the credits, themes of Henry James. Most obviously the source for the film is Altar of the Dead (1895), but Truffaut also borrows freely from other late Jamesean stories that trace related obsessions-The Friends of the Friends, Maude-Evelyn, and, in the classic plot of experience denied, Beast in the Jungle. The badly damaged protagonist, Julien Davenne (played by Truffaut himself), is clearly based on the haunted figure of George Stransom, who conceives an altar for the ghosts from his shadowy past. Truffaut reveals more of his character's motives and past through the introduction of a confidente, Cecilia Mandel, who in her frustrated courtship of Davenne corresponds to James's infinitely patient May Bartram in Beast in the Jungle.1 In his narrative of obsession and deferral Truffaut reserves his formal dedication to James until late in the film, where he embeds it in the scene when Davenne finally admits C6cilia to the abandoned chapel that he has converted into a shrine for his personal dead. There, in a forest of candles, he leads her through a gallery of photographs of those commemorated in his project. (Before she enters, he hangs the death-bed photograph of Marcel Proust.) After pausing before images of several fictional departed friends, he turns to a familiar late portrait of HenryJames. Celui etait un am6ricain; il tellement aimait l'Europe qu'il a fini par adopter la nationalite

A history of the French new wave cinema

The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques. A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine, Cahiers du Cinema - especially Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard - who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave. In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.

Street with no name: a history of the classic American film noir

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title Flourishing in the United States during the 1940s and 50s, the bleak, violent genre of filmmaking known as film noir reflected the attitudes of writers and auteur directors influenced by the events of the turbulent mid-twentieth century. Films such as Force of Evil , Night and the City , Double Indemnity , Laura , The Big Heat , The Killers , Kiss Me Deadly and, more recently, Chinatown and The Grifters are indelibly American. Yet the sources of this genre were found in Germany and France and imported to Hollywood by emigre filmmakers, who developed them and allowed a vibrant genre to flourish. Andrew Dickos's Street with No Name traces the film noir genre back to its roots in German Expressionist cinema and the French cinema of the interwar years. Dickos describes the development of the film noir in America from 1941 through the 1970s and examines how this development expresses a modern cinema. Dickos examines notable directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, Anthony Mann and others. He also charts the genre's influence on such celebrated postwar French filmmakers as Jean-Pierre Melville, Francois Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard. Addressing the aesthetic, cultural, political, and social concerns depicted in the genre, Street with No Name demonstrates how the film noir generates a highly expressive, raw, and violent mood as it exposes the ambiguities of modern postwar society.

Henry James goes to the movies

work of Henry James has proved irresistible to film-makers (William Wyler, Francois Truffaut, James Ivory, Jane Campion). His themes still engage us: the function of power; the position of women; and the complexities of desire. These writings explore the impact of James on film and vice versa. Anthony Mazella traces the various adaptations of The Turn of the Screw, from novel to play to opera to film. Peggy McCormack examines the ways the personal lives of Peter Bogdanovich and then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd influenced critical reaction to Daisy Miller (1974). Leland Pearson points out the consequences of casting Christopher Reeve - then better known as Superman - in The Bostonians (1984) during the conservative political context of the first Reagan presidency.

Two Members of the Family: Henri-Pierre Roché and Jean Suquet

They are two “transparents,” as Octavio Paz would say; two “laughers,”I would say. One is Henri-Pierre Roche, of the same generation as his friend Marcel Duchamp, departed from the land of the living for forty years now, the author of Jules et Jim and Deux anglaises et le continent, on whom Francois Truffaut would confer a certain notoriety by adopting him (for fathers can also be adopted). The other is Jean Suquet, still very much alive and still laughing, a reporter-photographer as he defin...

Quixotic Desire and the Avoidance of Closure in Luis Bunuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

In homage to Luis Bunuel and his comic film noir, Ensayo de un crimen (released internationally as The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Mexico, 1955), Francois Truffaut writes that of the film's most remarkable characteristics may be discovered upon leaving the cinema: If you question the audience at the end [...] almost everybody will tell you that they've just seen the story of a likable guy who kills women. It is absolutely not true; Archibaldo has killed no one (267). Since literary critics usually treat film almost exclusively as a selfcontained text, the experience that takes place outside the darkened cinema is often regarded as an elusive, nebulous area beyond the realm of literary theory proper. Truffaut's observation, however, begs the question: How does a film achieve closure with its audience? According toJune Schlueter's work on the endings of theatrical plays, closure is not the same as an ending (in our case, a film's final frames) because viewers (whether real or implied) consent to closure based on how well the presentation of a story meets their expectations (24).1 Truffaut's comment offers a reading of the audience

La réception de Truffaut au Japon. La double influence de la culture japonaise et de la stratégie du cinéaste

How Francois Truffaut was understood in Japan : the double influence of the Japanese culture and of the film director's strategy The terms conformism and moderation have often been applied to François Truffaut's work by French critics. Yet, if we take into account the numerous reactions of foreign audiences to Truffaut's films, we realize how complex and original his cinema is. It is particularly true in the way he was understood in Japan. This text examines the origins of the cultural reconstruction of his work by Japanese critics. It proposes to show how Truffaut's work, while relying on cultural specificities (an interpretation in the light of the Nö Theatre, for instance) imposes its own referential myth as the films go by. The example of the theme of the love relation shows well how the Japanese critics raise Truffaut's own style to the status of a reference. Truffaut's cinema plays with the audiences'expectations in the end and it is both reassuring and disturbing.

The Liberal Prince on the Democratic Seesaw

The Liberal Prince on the Democratic Seesaw Jack N. Rakove (bio) Richard K. Mathews. If Men Were Angels: James Madison and the Heartless Empire of Reason. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. xviii 297 pp. Notes and index. $25.00. When I think about James Madison — as I often do, even while doing laps in the university pool — two visual images swim into view. One is the familiar portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1805, in which Madison appears so aloofly serious and dispassionate as to recall Francois Truffaut’s portrayal of the physician Itard in his film, L’enfant Sauvage. But the other portrait conveys a strikingly different impression. This is Asher Durand’s more intimate painting of 1833, which captures the deep, brooding power of Madison’s intellect at the late moment in life when he realized he had “outlived” not only his “contemporaries” but even “myself.” Stuart’s Madison looks somewhat abstractedly away from the painter, but Durand had Madison’s complete attention, making us the humbled objects whom his penetrating gaze challenges. Both portraits would have served Richard Mathews well in this middle volume of a projected trilogy that began with The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (1984) and will conclude (he now informs us) with Alexander Hamilton and the Creation of the Heroic State. The interpretive and normative themes which guide this project were clearly announced in the first volume and are both reprised and elaborated here. Jefferson was the true radical democrat who understood that our fulfillment as humans could only be attained through a politics of participation that included the recognition that each generation (however its span is measured) retains both the right and duty to frame its own constitution. Jefferson’s dream of an America grounded in sociability, community, participation, and continued political possibility was the road not adventured; instead we have been saddled with the “nightmare” (p. 279) first conjured by Madison and Hamilton, true liberals both. They were the real allies whose decisive collaboration in the late 1780s imposed on the American people the Constitution that permitted the triumph of market society and its attendant evils. In this story, the half-century political alliance between the two Virginians neither masks nor outweighs the profound [End Page 582] philosophical differences between them. Mathews thus rejects the conventional story of this great friendship, which usually emphasizes how a sober and discriminating Madison repeatedly tugged his impulsive friend back from the sudden enthusiasms and “round” expressions to which Jefferson was prone. How should historians evaluate this argument, which is avowedly anchored in the concerns of normative political theory, and which arguably draws greater inspiration from the writings of the late C. B. Macpherson, Sheldon Wolin, and even N. O. Brown, than from the usual lineup of those scholars who have fashioned the dominant interpretations of the origins of American political ideas and ideologies? Historians found much to fault with the first volume, and it is noteworthy that Mathews’s revisionist view of Jefferson garners only a single mention in the text of the not unrevisionist essays collected in Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (1993). I doubt whether a similar volume commissioned to commemorate the quarter-millennium of Madison’s birth in 2001 would pay any greater attention to If Men Were Angels. Yet it may be worth asking why Mathews can get certain facets of Madisonian thinking right, yet produce conclusions that fall somewhere between wrong-headed and silly. There are, I think, three main lines along which a respectful but critical assaying of this installment in the Mathews project can deploy: (1) its quest for the essential Madison; (2) its now more fully articulated reappraisal of his relationship with Jefferson; and (3) its mega/meta-historical argument about the relation between the Madisonian Constitution and the foreclosing of political participation in the less-than-truly Jeffersonian democracy we have inherited. As to the first of these broad headings, historians can find much to accept, or at least take seriously, in Mathews’s account of the historical Madison. For Mathews, Madison was the “constant liberal prince” in a quasi-Machiavellian sense of the term. That is, Madison framed in the 1780s a compelling...

Shoot the piano player: Francois Truffaut, director

Shoot the piano player: Francois Truffaut, director

The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut

The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut