Filmmakers

François Truffaut

François Truffaut was an illegitimate child who never knew his father.  He was raised by his grandmother before going to live, as a young adolescent, with his mother and stepfather.  He got along well with the latter, but his mother couldn’t stand his presence.  He was not an easy child.  He did poorly at school and was involved in minor delinquent activities which eventually landed him in a reformatory.  Having decided abruptly to join the army, he overextended a leave and found himself in a military prison.  If he escaped an existence on the margins of society, it was thanks to a film critic, André Bazin, who took him into his home and became a father and a mentor for him.

Truffaut had been a passionate cinephile since his childhood.  Under Bazin’s patronage he became a film critic himself, first at the Cahiers du cinéma (of which Bazin was Editor-in-chief), then at the magazine Arts.  He rapidly became known (and detested) as an implacable enemy of conventional French cinema, the films of the big studios and the most prominent directors of the 1950s.  Toward the end of the decade he began to make films himself, short subjects first, before becoming famous with his first feature film, The 400 Blows (1959), which obtained the prize for Best Director at Cannes.

Like other films by Truffaut (but not all), The 400 Blows is markedly autobiographical.  The story of the young protagonist, Antoine Doinel, resembles closely Truffaut’s own experience, to such an extent that his mother and stepfather never pardoned him for the (“unjust”) manner in which they are depicted in the film.  Whatever the case, Truffaut made a whole series of films with the actor who represents him in The 400 Blows, Jean-Pierre Léaud, as the young adolescent grows up into adulthood (over a period of twenty years).

Truffaut made other films as well, more than twenty in all.  Several of them were highly successful, like the famous Jules et Jim (1962) and Day for Night (1973, Oscar for the Best Foreign Film), L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), Small Change (1976), The Last Subway Train (1980), and The Woman Next Door (1981).  Truffaut was also an actor in several of his own films, playing the main role in The Wild Child (1970), Day for Night, and The Green Room (1978).  His career was cut short, tragically, by a brain tumor.  He passed away in 1983 at the age of 52.

Filmography

1958  The Brats (short subject)
1959  The 400 Blows  
1960  Shoot The Piano Player
1962  Jules et Jim; Antoine et Colette (second episode of the Doinel cycle, short subject in the collective film, Love At Twenty)
1964  Soft Skin  
1966  Fahrenheit 451
1967  The Bride Wore Black  
1968  Stolen Kisses (third episode of the Doinel cycle)
1969  La Sirène du Mississippi
1970  Domicile conjugal (fourth episode of the Doinel cycle); The Wild Child  
1971  The Two Englishwomen and the Continent  
1972  A Beautiful Girl Like Me  
1973  Day For Night (Oscar for the best foreign film)
1975  Histoire d’Adèle H.
1976  Small Change  
1977  The Man Who Loved Women  
1978  The Green Room  
1979  Love In Flight (fifth and final episode of the Antoine Doinel cycle)
1980  The Last Subway Train  
1981  The Woman Next Door
1982  Vivement Dimanche