One can only speculate on how Francois Truffaut, the French filmmaker who died of a brain tumor in 1984 at age 52, would have used his art to reflect on mankind`s response to the many recent breathtaking changes in the world`s political and social order.
Truffaut`s legacy-a score of films written and directed over a quarter-century in his subtle, personal and uniquely sentimental cinematic style-stands as a body of work that is probably the most enduring of the nouvelle vague, or new wave, style of filmmaking ushered in by Truffaut and such colleagues as Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol in the 1950s.
It was a movement that took modern cinema a giant step further into the use of film as an expression of Everyman`s experience in a world of increasing confusion and terror.
The nouvelle vague style of filmmaking took a personalized and idiosyncratic approach to cinema, and emphasized the role of the director as auteur or author of the film.
Many of Truffaut`s films are available on videocassette and, this month, Chicago distributor Home Vision will begin releasing a new series of some of his finest on remastered tapes.
”400 Blows” (1959): Truffaut`s autobiographical study of a boy growing up on the streets of Paris marked his stunning debut as a director, after spending several years as a film critic on the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, pounding and ridiculing the French filmmaking
Establishment.
The film took the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award as best foreign picture. It was the first of five films (”Love at Twenty,” ”Stolen Kisses,” ”Bed and Board” and ”Love on the Run”) whose protagonist, Antoine Doinel, played by French actor Jean Pierre Leaud in all five films, is followed from his younger years over two decades through the Army, marriage, affairs, divorce and development into a small-time novelist.
Truffaut possessed a true gift for the portrayal of the horrible anguish of obsessive love, particularly in the depiction of beautiful women who fall prey to romantic compulsions.
”The Story of Adele H.” (1975) is a drama of a young woman-writer Victor Hugo`s daughter, Adele (Isabelle Adjani)-whose unrequited love for a soldier takes her on an odyssey of fantasy, desperation and, finally, madness. ”The Woman Next Door” (1975) places two star-crossed lovers (Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu) in adjoining houses several years after they thought they had ended a tumultuous love affair and gone on to happy marriages. The Ardant character initiates a reunion and the results are chaotic and tragic.
”Jules and Jim” (1961) is a bizarre love triangle (Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre) set during World War I.
”Two English Girls” (1972), based on the novel by Jean-Pierre Roche, who also wrote ”Jules and Jim,” is the reverse situation; two sisters are in love with the same man.
Truffaut was particularly influenced by the suspense films of Alfred Hitchcock and Hitchcock`s profound use of the expression of emotion onto film. He combined his love of Hitchcock`s outrageous methods with his own warmth and sense of humor to direct two films that are homages to the master of suspense. In ”The Bride Wore Black” (1968), a widow (Jeanne Moreau) tracks down and murders the men who were accidentally responsible for the death of her husband on their wedding day, and in ”Confidentially Yours” (1983), Truffaut`s last film, a French businessman (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is framed for several murders.
”The Last Metro” (1981) was criticized by film critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times as being ”a `film of quality` which Truffaut and his new wave colleagues ridiculed so mercilessly in their days as critics on Cahiers du Cinema.” One of Truffaut`s biggest commercial hits, it is a compelling drama set in Nazi-occupied Paris, where a theatrical group ”goes on with the show.”
”Day for Night” (1973) is Truffaut`s love song to the filmmaking art-and the business-that he adored. A film within a film, it is the story of a director making a film while coping with all of the personal dramas and unexpected gliches and gremlins that inevitably surface when one tries to squeeze art, manic personalities and mechanical wizardry into a rigid shooting schedule.
