A Truffaut Notebook

Sam Solecki

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780773546240
• eBook ISBN: 9780773597990
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

François Truffaut (1932-1984) ranks among the greatest film directors and has had a worldwide impact on filmmaking as a screenwriter, producer, film critic, and founding member of the French New Wave. His most celebrated films include The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Day for Night, and The Last Metro.

A Truffaut Notebook is a lively and eclectic introduction to the life and work of this major cinematic figure. In entries as brief as a page, as well as in full-length essays, it examines topics such as Truffaut's mentors, the autobiographical nature of his films, his place in the film tradition, his film criticism, his reputation, his relationships with other directors, and the formal and thematic coherence of his body of work. Sam Solecki also argues for Truffaut's continuing appeal and relevance by examining his influence on filmmakers like Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, Alexander Payne, Patrice Leconte, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and on writers such as Julian Barnes, Ann Beattie, and Salman Rushdie. Because the book returns regularly to the author's shifting responses to Truffaut's work over the last fifty years, it also offers an autobiographical meditation on his own lifelong fascination with film.

Consisting of over eighty short entries and essays, as well as provocative lists, dreams, and quizzes, A Truffaut Notebook is an original and exciting text and a model of passionate engagement with cinema.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Films of François Truffaut
• Chronology
• Why Truffaut?
• In His Own Words I
• Roland Lévy and Roland Truffaut
• Early Films: François and Sam
• The Godfather: André Bazin (1918–1958)
• 1 January 1954: “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema”
• The Mischief Makers (1957): Some Boys and a Girl on a Bicycle
• Films Truffaut Didn’t Make I
• Some Titles for The 400 Blows (1959)
• Making Films Together: A Letter to the Cast and Crew of The Last Metro (21 January 1980)
• The 400 Blows: A Life on Film
• Jean-Pierre Léaud with Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Bernardo Bertolucci
• Robert Lachenay (1930–2005): The Best Friend and the Ancillary Life
• Sacha Guitry (1885–1957): Le Roman d’un tricheur and The 400 Blows
• Shoot the Piano Player (1960): All You Need Is Love
• Shoot the Piano Player and a Debt to the Past
• Truffaut’s Breathless and Jean-Luc Godard’s
• A Posthumous Questionnaire (January 2015)
• Truffaut in His Letters
• Jules and Jim (1961): When We Speak of Freedom and Love and Death
• Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse (1967) and Jules and Jim
• Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over (1991) and Jules and Jim
• Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) and Jules and Jim
• Truffaut in and out of His Time
• Carlos Saura on The Soft Skin (1964), Obliquely
• The Auteur and the Empty Room
• Meeting Jeanne Moreau in Venice
• Truffaut Looks back to Godard: Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Alphaville (1965)
• Fahrenheit 451 and Truffaut’s English
• The Bride Wore Black (1967)
• Jacques Demy, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, and Truffaut
• Stolen Kisses (1968): A Debt to Marcel Proust or Anatole France
• David Thomson’s Mississippi Mermaid (1969)
• Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Week-end (1967), The Wild Child (1969): A Dialogue?
• Maurice Pialat’s Wild Child: L’Enfance nue (1968)
• Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Antoine Doinel
• Patrice Leconte’s The Girl on the Bridge (1999)
• “François, My Boy” and “Mr Hitchcock”
• Truffaut’s Typewriters
• The Ending of Two English Girls (1971)
• Two English Girls, Agora (2009), and Seeing Red on the Screen
• Truffaut, Godard, and Timbres
• Truffaut’s Afterlife: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
• Johnny Guitar (1954): Bad Faith in Truffaut and David Thomson
• A Title Quiz
• Creativity and Accidents
• Day for Night (1973): The Family Movie
• Day for Night, Wes Anderson, and American Express
• 8 1/2 (1963), Day for Night (1973), Stardust Memories (1980), Nine (2009)
• Pauline Kael, Wim Wenders, and Truffaut
• Truffaut, Adam Zagajewski, and the Fate of Spirit
• Truffaut in The Squid and the Whale (2005)
• Truffaut and Paul Léautaud (1872–1956)
• Montmartre and “Certification”
• The Story of Adèle H. (1975): Truffaut’s Feminism
• Truffaut and Deneuve in The Story of Adèle H.
• A Dream: The Story of Adèle H. and Elle
• Small Change (1976) and Renoir’s The River (1951)
• An Aged Man Is But a Paltry Thing
• Ingmar Bergman, Cavaleur
• Fame: Daphne Moon, Niles Crane, and a Truffaut Film
• The Man Who Loved Women (1977): Truffaut and Don Juan
• João César Monteiro’s A Comédia de Deus (1995): The Man Who Loved Girls
• Leslie Caron
• Suzanne Schiffman (1929–2001)
• Trufard and Godfaut: Resemblances
• Balthus (1908–2001)
• Film Names: Who Remembers Michel Poiccard and Patricia Franchini?
• The Green Room (1978): The Man Who Loved One Woman
• A Short History of “Dummies”: Luis Buñuel, Truffaut, and Oskar Kokoschka
• The Sentence that Sticks
• Pauline Kael’s Farewell to Truffaut and Godard
• Paul Schrader’s Tears
• The Last Metro (1980): François Truffaut-Lévy
• Subtitles and Voices
• Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977): The Italian Godfather
• The Woman Next Door (1981): “Neither with you nor without you”
• Fanny Marguerite Judith Ardant
• François and Sam: Some Favourite Films
• A Godard Dream (26 June 2011)
• Le Journal d’Alphonse: A Doinel Sequel
• In His Own Words II
• Truffaut’s Afterlife: Amélie (2001)
• Antoine de Baecque’s Two In the Wave (2010)
• Unfinished Business: Films Truffaut Didn’t Make II
• The Grave in Montmartre
• Last Words
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index