The Films in My Life

François Truffaut

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781626813960
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttheorie & -kritik

From a cinematic grand master, "one of the most readable books of movie criticism, and one of the most instructive" ( American Film Institute).
 
An icon. A rebel. A legend. The films of François Truffaut defined an exhilarating new form of cinema for moviegoers the world over. But before Truffaut became a great director, he was a critic who stood at the vanguard, pioneering an innovative way to view movies and to write about the cinematic arts. Now, for the first time in eBook, the legendary director shares his own words, as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time examines the art of movie-making through engaging and deeply personal reviews about the movies he loves. Truffaut writes extensively about his heroes, from Hitchcock to Welles, Chaplin to Renoir, Buñuel to Bergman, Clouzot to Cocteau, Capra to Hawks, Guitry to Fellini, sharing analysis and insight as to what made them film legends, and how their work led Truffaut and his fellow directors into classics like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and the French New Wave movement.
 
Articulate and candid, The Films in My Life is for everyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and dreamed.
 
"Truffaut brings the same intelligence and grace to the printed page that he projects onto the screen. The Films in My Life provides a rare knowledgeable look at movies and moviemaking." — Newsday

III

The Generation of the Talkies: The French

Claude Autant-Lara

La Trave​rsée de Paris

A director’s highest duty is to reveal the actors to themselves; and to do that, he must know himself very well. Cinematographic failure generally occurs because there is too wide a disparity between a filmmaker’s temperament and his ambitions.

From Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh in the United States) to Marguerite de la Nuit, and in between—in L’Auberge Rouge, Le Blé en Herbe, and Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black)—I have consistently attacked Claude Autant-Lara and I have always deplored his tendency to simplify everything, make it bland. I disliked the coarseness with which he “condensed” Stendhal, Radiguet, Colette. It seemed to me he deformed and watered down the spirit of any work he adapted. Autant-Lara seemed to me like a butcher who insists on trying to make lace.

But I admire, without any real reservations, La Traversée de Paris. I think it’s a complete success because Autant-Lara has finally found the subject he’s been waiting for—a plot that is made in his own image, a story that his truculence, tendency toward exaggeration, roughness, vulgarity, and outrage, far from serving badly, elevates to an epic.

During the Occupation, two Frenchmen spend the night walking around a studio-set Paris in a wartime blackout, carrying a pig clandestinely to the black market. The film simply reproduces their journey and their conversation, a dialogue both banal and theatrical, and the best that’s been heard in a long time in a French film. French movies have been circling around La Traversée de Paris for ten years without finding it.

It’s more like a filmed play, artfully given some space by the happy idea of the long walk before a mobile backdrop. In film terms, it is a series of transparencies. La Traversée de Paris is adapted from a short story by Marcel Aymé. The audacious (for cinema) language wouldn’t be at all so on the stage, in a play like Waiting for Godot, but films rarely give us an opportunity to listen to the “average” Frenchman, a character who is ordinarily flattered in movies, since he’s the one who pays to see them.

The character of Bourvil, a little man crushed by life, a tiny fall guy, innocent and guilty at the same time, represents an absolute truth. As Jean Gabin plays him, he is a synthesis of the painter Gen Paul (in the spirit of Marcel Aymé), Jacques Prévert, and of the anarchical ambitions of Jean Aurenche and Claude Autant-Lara. The character remains somewhat literary and contrived, but nevertheless possesses great power.

The authors could have further deepened their portrait of wickedness, and probably wanted to, but we only think about that afterward, when our astonishment has worn off. A verve much like Céline’s and an insistent ferocity dominate the movie, but it is saved from meanness by a few emotional notes that overwhelm us, particularly those in the final scenes. If the whole gives the impression of more subtlety and more power than the combination of a film by Claude Autant-Lara, a play by Marcel Aymé, and dialogue by Aurenche and Bost would suggest, it is because these four personalities fuse in a particularly fortunate way in the service of a subject that becomes a common denominator. The situation the film describes tempers Autant-Lara’s leftist anarchism, Aymé’s rightism, and lets Aurenche and Bost set the tone. Thanks to them La Traversée de Paris is not trivialized by having political, social, or ideological labels attached to it.

Don’t laugh too loudly when you see La Traversée de Paris, first of all so your neighbors can hear the dialogue—but even more because Martin and Grandgil could be you and me.

—1956

En Cas de Malheur

En Cas de Malheur (In Case of Accident), one of Simenon’s best novels, is also one of Claude Autant-Lara’s best films. It’s not a new theme; it’s the same one as in Nana and La Chienne: a mature man’s love for a girl too young and frivolous for him who represents the eternal feminine. I’m reminded of La Chienne because of Renoir’s wonderful introduction to the film where he has marionettes sing: “It’s the eternal story: she, he, and the other. She is Lulu, a fine girl; she’s always sincere; she lies all the time.” It fits perfectly the character of Yvette as played by Brigitte Bardot.

Yvette has committed a holdup with the help of a friend. Before she is arrested, she gets the idea of asking a famous Paris trial lawyer (Jean Gabin) to take on her defense. The first time she visits his office she tries to seduce him, hiking up her dress to show him she’s not wearing anything underneath. He rebuffs her but agrees to defend her and, by his slick defense, gets her off. Then, having become her lover, he installs her in his apartment with the tacit agreement of his wife, who is responsible for his social success. Yvette has nothing to do so she sleeps around and in short order falls in love with a strange and passionate boy, “a worker by day, a student by night.” He tries to teach her the few absolute principles of morality before he kills her, which is what the attorney, Gobillot, would probably have done in the same situation thirty years earlier. I want to stress the daring of the plot. Yvette has recently discovered that she’s pregnant by the lawyer and she’s happy about it, even though she is carrying on a lesbian relationship at the same time with a young maid who is responsible for looking after her—in Gobillot’s presence, even with his cooperation.

Ordinarily, Aurenche and Bost adapt novels by turning them into theater pieces rather than screenplays, using standard dramatic procedures: cuts and summaries, ellipses, three acts, ingenious flashbacks, commentaries, etc. Compared to the quality of the original work, the director’s ambition and the producer’s desires can produce the worst kind of matinee theater (Le Blé en Herbe, Le Diable au Corps, Le Rouge et le Noir), or, on the other hand, left-bank avant-garde theater (La Traversié de Paris), or as in this case, something in between, a kind of Champs-Elysées comedy.

En Cas de Malheur has been turned into the sort of play that Jean Anouilh might have written. We come out of it with a mixture of disgust and admiration, a sense of satisfaction that is real enough but incomplete. It is 100 percent French, with all the virtues and vices that implies: an analysis that is at once subtle and narrow, a skill that is mixed with spitefulness, a spirit of unflinching observation directed at the sordid, and talented sleight-of-hand that delivers a liberal message in the end.

A number of years ago, when I was twenty and innocent, I would have condemned it angrily. I feel a bit bitter today when I find myself, somewhat to my own surprise, admiring, even moderately, a film that’s more intelligent than beautiful, more adroit than noble, more artful than sensitive. But if I have put some water in my wine, so have Aurenche and Bost and Autant-Lara added wine to their water and made it quite a bit stronger. If their names endure in the history of cinema, it will not be so much because they’ve done anything to move cinema forward as that they have moved the public forward. A filmmaker like Ingmar Bergman has for fifteen years been making films that are as daring and frank as En Cas de Malheur—films that make no concessions and do not sink to vulgarity. But it is because of films like En Cas de Malheur that the general public may come to understand Bergman.

Like Anouilh, Aurenche and Bost are clever at managing ingenious ellipses so that the director can shoot fifteen scenes of equal importance and interest without dead moments or laborious transitions and tedious connections. Their dialogue is like Anouilh’s, always facile and seductive, but at the same time familiar and very effective. In terms of simple spectacle, they have achieved a certain perfection.

In Autant-Lara they have found the ideal partner. Without a moment’s hesitation and without touching a single comma, he produces each of their brainstorms; he is as conscientious, hard-working, and upright as Pierre Bost, and as sharp, narrow, and vengeful as Jean Aurenche. He skirts nothing when he deals with his characters, emphasizing all their weaknesses and failings. A goodness that I believe I see in Simenon’s work, a compassion that softens the worst indecency, is nowhere to be found in the film; it is full of vengeance. If I like it anyhow and go to the trouble of defending it, it’s because I think it comes down on the right side of the battle against complacency.

Let me give you another example—another film of Bardot’s, Une Parisienne. It is precisely against the state of mind that inspired Une Parisienne, and against its fans, that Aurenche, Bost and Autant-Lara struggle. Let me see if I can make that more concrete. The film opens with a television commentary about a visit by the Queen of England. Taking advantage of the fact that the entire Paris police force is preoccupied with the royal visit, Bardot robs a jewelry shop. All the while we hear a bombastic TV commentary: the Queen goes here, does this and that…In the evening, Gobillot and Edwige Feuillère, his wife, are at a dinner in honor of the Queen at the Elysée Palace. Gobillot’s secretary, modeled closely on the one of Ornifle—which was also played by Madeleine Barbulée—stuffs an enormous sandwich in her mouth as she watches the Queen pass by on a sightseeing boat.

The idea is simple but strong: a crowned head moves around Paris under spotlights seeming to symbolize grace, beauty, woman, fortune, happiness, and at the same time a beautiful penniless girl knocks over an old man for a few watches. It’s the girl who interests us and preoccupies us, not an anachronistic queen. It is precisely because Bardot is a girl who represents her time absolutely faithfully that she is more famous than any queen or princess. That’s why it’s too bad she played Une Parisienne or Les Bijoutiers. And it’s why En Cas des Malheur is her best film since Et Dieu créa la Femme—an anti-Sabrina, anti-Roman Holiday, anti-Anastasia movie that is truly republican.

We could list a lot of things about the film that are bold, even though each foray is balanced by small concessions. But the essential thing is that in this film you hear talk about miscarriages, tiny holes in hotel bedroom doors, a complacent wife, “games” that are, if not four-sided, at least triangular, voyeurism—everything, in fact, that smacks of original sin (which I suppose Aurenche believes in, but not Lara).

The crucial things are said clearly, avoiding the confusions, sentimentality, and the sheer physical seduction that make nine out of ten films unbearable. What of its compromises? We notice them when we compare the movie with the novel. The character of the wife, for example, is too sentimental in the film; she was much earthier in the book. But the compromises are usually visual rather than verbal, Autant-Lara’s rather than the scenarists’. For example, it is scandalous that they did not dare to film Bardot and Cabin kissing each other on the mouth; both the situation and dialogue demand it. Did they try it out and then hesitate because they were afraid it would be shocking? If the answer is yes, that would be enough to condemn the film. And if not, why did they back off, what was the reason for a self-censorship which contradicts the film’s spirit?

Autant-Lara is making progress technically: his camera spins as he follows his constantly moving characters. His technique is less cluttered as he has become less theatrical. Accelerating on Bardot and Cabin, slowing down on Edwige Feuillère, it’s perfect. With La Traversée de Paris and this film, Autant-Lara has outclassed Henri-Georges Clouzot and René Clément. But like them he closes himself off to poetry and therefore to great cinema.

—1958

Jacques Becker

Casqu​e d’Or ^*

In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, a group of German officers pull at each other’s mustaches for several minutes in order to unmask the imposter in their midst. It would be pointless to subject the characters in Casque d’Or to such a test; each hair of Serge’s Reggiani’s mustache is guaranteed real in this celebration of authenticity.

Casque d’Or is the only film that Jacques Becker—who is ordinarily very finicky, absorbed by detail, obsessive, restless, and at times uncertain—ever made in one stroke, very quickly, straight through from beginning to end. He wrote the colloquial and absolutely natural-seeming dialogue so economically that we have the impression that Reggiani doesn’t say more than sixty words.

Those of us who love Casque d’Or are clear in our minds that Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani had their best roles ever in it, even if the French public (but not the English, decidedly more subtle) was cool to this paradoxical coupling, so beautiful precisely because of its contrasts—a little man and a large woman, the little alley cat who is made of nothing but nerves, and the gorgeous carnivorous plant who doesn’t turn her nose up at any morsel.

If you’re at all interested in how stories are constructed, you cannot fail to admire the ingenuity of the plot, particularly the strong, oblique, unexpected way it gets abruptly to Manda’s execution in a scene that is as beautiful as it is mysterious, as the Casque d’Or arrives in the middle of the night at a disreputable hotel. When I or any of my fellow scenarists are in tro...

Table of contents

• The Films in My Life
• Copyright
• Contents
• François Truffaut (1932-1984)
• What Do Critics Dream About?
• The Big Secret
• The Generation of the Talkies: The Americans
• The Generation of the Talkies: The French
• Hurrah for the Japanese Cinema
• Some Outsiders
• My Friends in the New Wave
• Films by François Truffaut
• Connect with Diversion Books