Francois Truffaut, by Anne Gillian – review

Almost 30 years after his death, François Truffaut remains a vital presence in the cinema. Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson are among maverick directors who have acknowledged their debt to him, while Noah Baumbach’s recent Frances Ha is in part an hommage à Truffaut in a way the French director would have appreciated: for example, the quick succession of scenes establishing the friendship of Frances and Sophie is borrowed from Jules et Jim (1962), Jean Constantin’s music from Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) appears on the soundtrack, and a poster for L’Argent de poche (1976) is glimpsed on a wall just in the way significant posters and pictures appear in the backgrounds of Truffaut’s own films.

In the world of film studies, however, Truffaut has been paid less attention than many of his contemporaries. As the editors put it in A Companion to François Truffaut:

Where Godard, while deliberately withholding satisfaction, challenges the viewer to understand him, even to deconstruct him, Truffaut’s films are specifically designed to be, in the first instance at least, undergone but not understood.

For Truffaut film was always an immersive experience. When he first went to the cinema he liked to sit as close to the screen as possible, and in the last year of his life he said: ‘I want my audience to be constantly captivated, bewitched, so that it leaves the theatre dazed, stunned to be back on the pavement.’ He may have started out as a critic, but he was always sceptical about film theory, writing in 1954:

There are no theories about [the director] Jacques Becker, no scientific analysis, no thesis. His work, like his personality, discourages it. Which is all to the good.

One therefore suspects that the acknowledgement of younger directors (just as in his own films he acknowledged Vigo, Renoir, Rossellini and Hitchcock) would mean a great deal more to Truffaut than scholarly books that analysed and interpreted his work.