Totally Truffaut
23 Films for Understanding the Man and the Filmmaker
ANNE GILLAIN
FOREWORD BY MARTIN
SCORSESE
FOREWORD TO THE FRENCH EDITION BY MICHEL MARIE
TRANSLATED BY ALISTAIR FOX
EDITED BY BARRY LYDGATE
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gillain, Anne, author. | Fox, Alistair translator Title: Totally Truffaut : 23 films for understanding the man and the filmmaker / Anne Gillain ; postface by Michel Marie ; translated by Alistair Fox.
Other titles: Tout Truffaut. English
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021015019 (print) | LCCN 2021015020 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197536308 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197536315 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197536339 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Truffaut, Franc¸ois—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.T78 G55513 2021 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.T78 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015019
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015020
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197536308.001.0001
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Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Sam
Foreword
François Truffaut’s passionate love affair with the cinema was lifelong, and you can feel the intensity of it in his criticism, in his acting, in his advocacy for his fellow filmmakers (Hitchcock and Renoir above all), and most of all in his films. It animates every movie he ever made, every scene, every shot, every cut. He spent a very long time in the editing room on each of his pictures, and the result is that every movement in every frame looks like it’s been lovingly scrutinized, so that every transition from one image to the next surprises you. That’s the source of the unique sense of exhilaration in Truffaut’s filmmaking.
More than any of his peers, Truffaut stood up for the continuity of film history. His book on Hitchcock is indispensable to anyone interested in movies, but it’s also very unusual. Here was one of the world’s most established and celebrated filmmakers devoting the same amount of time and energy it would have taken him to make a movie (or maybe two movies) to a very lengthy series of interviews with a much older director in the twilight of his career, and then crafting a book from it that has proven to be a bible for countless directors. It’s an extraordinary act of homage, almost unthinkable today.
Of course, Truffaut carried that sense of history into his moviemaking. Back in the early and mid-1960s, people were always talking about how this movie “quoted” from that older movie, but what almost no one talked about was why the quote was there, what it did or didn’t do for the movie, what it meant emotionally to the picture as a whole. In Truffaut, the historical awareness and a thorough grounding in the emotional reality of the picture went hand in hand. There are many echoes of Hitchcock in his movies, blatantly so in The Soft Skin (underrated at the time of its release and a favorite of mine) and The Bride Wore Black, not so blatantly in many other movies, and it’s almost impossible to quantify the importance of Jean Renoir to Truffaut (or, for that matter, of Henry James and Honoré de Balzac—Truffaut was also a great reader). If you study his pictures closely, you can feel echoes of each of them, but nothing ever feels extraneous to the film itself.
There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression on me and on my generation of filmmakers. For instance, the
Foreword
opening, breathlessly fast expository section of Jules and Jim, where time and space are abolished and the images and the narration and the music flow like a river, or the series of cuts in Fahrenheit 451, another underrated picture, where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger—I admit that I’ve duplicated this pattern quite a few times in my own films. And the character of the pianist played by Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player always on the verge of making a move but never quite doing it—opened my eyes to a kind of ambivalence that I hadn’t previously seen in movies.
And the dimension of time—the desire to slow it down, the ever-present reality of its swift passing . . . Truffaut had such a unique gift for giving form to this longing in us. It’s encapsulated in that moment at the end of Two English Girls another underrated picture, and a masterpiece—where Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Claude suddenly catches a glance at himself in the mirror and spontaneously murmurs the words: “My God, I look old.” And then, as quickly as it arrives, the moment is over.
That’s life. And that’s Truffaut.
Martin Scorsese
The Secret Rediscovered: Foreword to the French Edition
Anne Gillain is without a doubt one of the leading international experts on the work of François Truffaut. This is the third book that she has devoted to her favorite filmmaker. In 1988 she compiled an anthology of interviews with the director previously published in the national and international press, classifying and arranging each film in chronological order; then, two years later, she published a systematic analysis of his twenty-one feature films, grouped in pairs according to thematic associations that include, for example, “family secrets” (The 400 Blows and The Woman Next Door), deception (Shoot the Piano Player and The Soft Skin), and queenlike women (Jules and Jim and The Last Metro), ending with an analysis that explored Truffaut’s final film, Confidentially Yours, for its playfulness.
That second book, titled The Lost Secret referring to the expression Truffaut used to characterize the silent cinema of Chaplin and Lubitsch— drew mainly on the psychoanalytic concepts of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and D. W. Winnicott. Gillain demonstrated that each of Truffaut’s films constitutes in fact an unconscious response to a maternal figure who is “distant, ambiguous, and inaccessible.” The biography of the young Truffaut explains to a large extent the complexity of his relationship with his mother and the importance of the idea of secrecy in his childhood; his mother became for him a figure at once wonderful, fascinating, and inaccessible, and a secret that haunted him throughout his life, as his last films, in particular Love on the Run and The Last Metro, attest.
This third book complements the preceding one by analyzing chronologically Truffaut’s twenty-one fiction films in the order in which they were created, from The 400 Blows to Confidentially Yours, as well as two of the short films that he made at the beginning of his career, Les Mistons and Antoine and Colette. Gillain’s analyses incorporate new information brought forth in the voluminous biography by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana that was published in 1996, and that explores areas like the circumstances surrounding the films’ production and their relationship with the life of the auteur. Gillain also draws upon Carole Le Berre’s book Truffaut au travail
(2004), an in-depth study of the origins and genesis of each film based on a study of the screenplays and production notes preserved at the Films du Carrosse by the filmmaker himself, who was ever mindful of what he would bequeath to posterity.
Totally Truffaut thus provides the reader with a remarkably detailed and well-informed analysis of each of Truffaut’s films, demonstrating the power of the filmmaker’s creativity, the strength of his work, and the coherence of his oeuvre. In fact, owing to the extraordinary success of his first full-length fiction film in 1959, Truffaut was lucky enough to produce or coproduce all of his films with Les Films du Carrosse, the company he created at the very beginning of his career with the support of Ignace Morgenstern, his fatherin-law. From then on he always paid close attention to the financial state of the company, alternating his production projects’ costs between those with modest budgets and films with more ambitious budgets that allowed him to cast stars in the lead roles. The audience figures published in the appendix to this volume give the total numbers of admissions for his productions; they indicate that only one of the films he made during his career was a failure at the box office; namely, The Green Room, one of his most personal and daring films, which attracted only 153,525 admissions for the whole of France. The rather exceptional production conditions he enjoyed allowed him to select only those films that he wanted to make and to base them freely on original subjects or on adaptations of a wide range of literary works that he integrated into his personal universe. As a result, the entire oeuvre of the filmmaker consists of auteurist projects linked from one film to another by close relationships involving a system of repetitions, cross references, and citations. These intertextual correspondences are innumerable, and can be identified thanks to what Anne Gillain calls “memory shots”—shots that are repeated in the body of the film without playing a dominant narrative role. Thus, in her analysis of Confidentially Yours, she pinpoints twenty or so visual or verbal motifs that link this final film to the rest of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. All these cross references from one film to another show that the filmmaker was fully aware of creating a coherent body of work like those of Balzac and Marcel Proust, his professed literary models, with the character of Antoine Doinel being the most explicit manifestation of this unity from The 400 Blows to Love on the Run. Truffaut was in fact the first filmmaker of the New Wave to implement this notion of works created as a cycle, well before the series of Éric Rohmer (“Six Moral Tales,” “Comedies and Proverbs,” and “Tales of the Four Seasons”), and Jacques Rivette’s variations on theatrical
staging for the cinema that include Paris Belongs to Us, The Nun, Gang of Four, and Va savoir (Who Knows?).
Anne Gillain’s approach draws freely on the method of textual analysis established by Raymond Bellour at the beginning of the 1970s with his wellknown studies of two films by Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds (1963) and North by Northwest (1959). She applies this method to a short excerpt from each of Truffaut’s films, and relates the passage selected to the rest of the film and Truffaut’s oeuvre as a whole. The fragments chosen from one film to the next are very diverse in nature. They range from arresting narrative moments, like the encounter of the young Doinel with his mother and her lover in the Place de Clichy in The 400 Blows, to the murder-suicide of the passionate couple in The Woman Next Door. In Bed & Board, Two English Girls, A Gorgeous Girl Like Me, The Man Who Loved Women, and Confidentially Yours they mostly involve the final section of the film, and often concern key sequences like the encounter of Antoine Doinel with Monsieur Lucien at the end of Love on the Run and of Bernard Granger with Lucas Steiner in the cellar of The Last Metro.
A number of these fragments are very short, like the one from Fahrenheit 451 (five shots lasting two minutes, thirty-three seconds), when Montag begins to read his first book, syllable by syllable, or the excerpts from The Story of Adele H. (only two shots, the first lasting six seconds, the second, very mobile and long, of one minute, forty-eight seconds following Adele’s movements when she visits a bank) and from Confidentially Yours (four shots lasting one minute, forty-eight seconds in the police station, which present a story in flashback involving Barbara, the investigator). Other analyses concern longer passages consisting of up to fifty shots: one sequence of four minutes for the classic scene involving the declaration of love in Mississippi Mermaid, with its thirty-two close-ups in shot / reverse shot, with the faces of Louis and Marion in alternation; forty-one shots for the third occurrence of the child’s dream presented in black and white in Day for Night, consisting of twenty-nine close-ups of photos lasting twenty-three seconds at the end of the dream; and fifty very rapid shots during the “frugal meal” in Small Change that the young Patrick bolts down when Madame Riffle serves him the family’s pot-au-feu as he is devouring her with his eyes—one of the rare sequences in the filmmaker’s oeuvre that represents a character eating with greedy enthusiasm. Rare, because Truffaut was by no means a gastronomist. This typological variety of forms in the way each movie is cut and edited demonstrates the virtuosity of Truffaut’s film style, which is far removed
from the stereotypes of the classical model that is usually, and quite unjustly, attributed to him. All of the fragments selected accord primary importance to the choice of shot involved and also to the forms of editing. Thus, the detailed analysis of the sixteen shots in the fragment from The Bride Wore Black in which Julie Kohler poses as Diana the huntress, bow in hand, shows how the central shot of two minutes (Julie and Fergus on the couch) is framed by a succession of very brief shots, all of which last less than a second; with great speed, they frame Julie’s mouth in extreme close-up, her eyes, the arrow stuck in the wall, the gaze of Fergus the painter as he sizes up his model—all arranged in a brief montage reminiscent of Soviet cinema at the end of the 1920s, or of those avant-garde films whose montage can be so staccato and dizzying.
As a result of these analytic choices, Gillain offers the reader a lesson in the analysis of sequences of varying durations, parameters, and angles of approach; in this way, she elucidates the filmmaker’s mastery of a kind of filmic expression that results in a veritable “manipulation of the spectator,” aimed primarily at captivating viewers, enchanting them with the emotion that he means to provoke.
Gillain draws in addition, and more fundamentally, on the theory of spectatorship proposed by Raymond Bellour in Le Corps du cinéma, a theory that is based in part upon the work of the child psychiatrist Daniel Stern, whose ideas prove to be particularly enlightening when applied to the creative approach of François Truffaut. Gillain briefly summarizes these concepts in short theoretical sections at the beginning of the chapters on The Wild Child, Day for Night, and Small Change and in the course of the detailed analyses that accompany them. Bellour’s own theory of spectatorship is explained in the analyses of Mississippi Mermaid, The Story of Adele H., and The Woman Next Door.
Stern makes a distinction between two main stages of human development: that of the prelinguistic child, before its progressive acquisition of verbal language in the first year of life, and that of the adult in control of their words. The story of The Wild Child offers an almost perfect illustration of this theory given that it deals with a child who is abandoned alone in a forest and remains at the prelinguistic stage, and a well-meaning adult, Doctor Itard, who attempts day after day to educate the young boy by teaching him how to speak and master his first words, such as the word “milk” and the name “Victor” that Itard has given him. The film as a whole explores the mystery of language and the symbolic system it represents (designated by words written
on the blackboard and objects constructed out of pieces of wood) in confrontation with a prelinguistic perceptual system that privileges the senses other than sight and hearing—smell and touch, in particular. Truffaut understood how communication between the world of the film and that of the viewer could occur in a very different manner through bodies—through the bodies of characters, and hence through the bodies of the actors who played them.
Bellour’s insight is precisely to associate the emotion these physical movements produce in the viewer with a form of hypnotism, an absorbing captivation, a hypnosis that reactivates the infant’s prelinguistic mode of perceiving the world. The language of cinema allows the spectator to reconnect with the earliest impressions of an infant as it discovers the external world. But this hypnosis is not as dependent on narrative elements as it is on the physical world of the film—“the body of cinema that speaks directly to the body of the spectator”—that manifests itself through lighting, camera movements, colors, rhythm, and transitions between shots, which together constitute the material conditions of the film as organized through the mise en scène.
Thus, in The Story of Adele H., the viewer’s identification with the character of Adele, whom the camera almost never leaves, is generated by close-ups on the face of Isabelle Adjani, but even more by each element in the visual field that surrounds her. Accordingly, emotion derives from a concentration of signs that not only support the thrust of the narrative, but also surround it, reinforcing through peripheral vision a narrative already focused on the character. Or take Small Change, which, pitched at a child’s level but aimed at an adult audience as well, reflects Daniel Stern’s bilingualism, the language of the body and that of the word generating two possible levels of interpretation. The major sequences of the film are in fact silent; their power comes from the language of actions performed by children without words, sustained by the themes of Maurice Jaubert’s very beautiful musical score.
Suffice it to say that Anne Gillain’s aim in this book is to demonstrate that François Truffaut is truly one of the four or five great masters of French cinema, along with Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker, Robert Bresson, Maurice Pialat, and a certain number of his peers in the New Wave—from Éric Rohmer to Jean-Luc Godard (here individual tastes may vary). To read her analyses makes one immediately want to rewatch the films so as to discover riches that went unnoticed in previous viewings. This is most true of the films in which Truffaut’s genius is most obvious, such as Jules and Jim, The Wild Child, Two English Girls, The Story of Adele H., The Man Who Loved Women,
The Green Room, The Last Metro, and The Woman Next Door; but Gillain rightly rehabilitates a number of other films that were poorly received when they were first released—films such as Shoot the Piano Player, The Soft Skin, The Bride Wore Black, Bed & Board, Small Change, and Love on the Run. She is right, for instance, to emphasize the central place of Mississippi Mermaid at the beginning of the most creative phase of Truffaut’s career. She restores to Day for Night its status as a work of clarity and depth that marked a crossroads. She identifies multiple levels of complexity to be found in The Last Metro, a film of great density lying under a deceptively smooth appearance; the metaphor of a palimpsest allows her to suggest six superimposed levels of meaning in the film, levels that constantly intersect as the narrative unfolds. But it is The Woman Next Door that is her favorite film, the one she sees as Truffaut’s undeniable masterpiece:
Many critics rightly consider The Woman Next Door (1981) to be his most perfect film. In the last ten years of his career, with ever-increasing skill, Truffaut developed strategies of mise en scène designed to mobilize the viewer. They involve his handling of narrative organization and dialogue, but also a ceaselessly refined mastery of nonverbal language: the use of glances, hands, objects, spaces; framing choices and chromatic nuances (color or black and white); effective editing and filmic punctuation; impeccably orchestrated musical counterpoints to visual and verbal content; finally, and above all, silent scenes that distill into a few shots what is at stake in the narrative. Scenes like these belong so uniquely to Truffaut that they can rightly be read as his private signature.
There is no better way of putting it.
The satisfactions of reading Totally Truffaut, in all its richness and subtlety, are of a piece with the rewards of rewatching the filmmaker’s own films from first to last. New techniques of remastering and distribution of the films, digitally restored, greatly facilitate access to his oeuvre, so that we can consult it as we would a volume in our personal library. Montag the fireman can rest in peace. Truffaut and the men-books have triumphed in their fight against obscurantism and autos-da-fé. That is what Anne Gillain demonstrates with such mastery in the pages that follow.
Michel Marie
Preface
I get the feeling I don’t have much time left to do what I want to do. François Truffaut, “Radioscopie” with Jacques Chancel, April 15, 1975
Truffaut’s films have always attracted clichés the way evening gowns, brushing the floor, attract dust. This book hopes to sweep away a few and cast new light on one of the most lavish bodies of fiction in the history of French cinema. Truffaut’s oeuvre has enjoyed dazzling international success, but is often considered popular entertainment for a mass audience. Charming is an adjective associated time and again with Truffaut—a baffling usage, considering that the creation it characterizes plunges deep in the violence of passions and, even in the light comedies, designates death as its vanishing point. It is true that Truffaut translates his vision with an incomparable grace that may conceal what is at stake. As with Ernst Lubitsch, the term that seems most fitting to describe his work is elegance, a moral and aesthetic elegance certainly, but an elegance that is above all artisanal, an elegance of craftmanship. Like Lubitsch, Truffaut was a tireless worker who sought constantly to achieve perfection and skillfully masked the enormous labor it took to make films of such ethereal weightlessness. To evoke Truffaut is to conjure up images that are all perfectly orchestrated, all perfectly staged, and whether ironic or moving, totally unforgettable. Of them, Antoine Doinel at the edge of the sea remains the most iconic. Truffaut’s unerring mastery at cultivating metaphor forever places him in the lineage of Lubitsch, whom, along with Renoir and Hitchcock, he considered one of his masters.
Metaphoric thinking is the connecting thread of this book, which traces how the experiences of a life are transformed into the stuff of fiction. In 1991, I published a first book on Truffaut’s films: François Truffaut: Le Secret perdu. My approach was inspired by the theoretical writings of D. W. Winnicott on juvenile delinquency. I suggested then that an ambivalent relationship with a fantasized maternal figure provided a subterranean framework for Truffaut’s stories. My book contained few references to the facts of his life because at that time I was unaware of them. Instead, the films were linked
in pairs according to thematic and stylistic affinities. The organization of the present book, however, is resolutely chronological. Since 1990, two indispensable works have appeared: on one hand, the biography by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, and on the other, the book by Carole Le Berre, Truffaut au travail. Neither offers a textual analysis of Truffaut’s films, but each is a mine of information and of critical insights. Using this new data, I am proposing a second reading of Truffaut’s oeuvre that shows how much films became for him a sort of intimate and private journal, written in a coded language of great rigor and sophistication. Truffaut’s destiny was marked by three critical experiences whose seismic repercussions impacted his work, film after film: the 1943 discovery of his illegitimate birth; his discomfort over the simultaneity of increasing international fame and a bourgeois marriage in 1959; and, in 1969, the failure of a passionate love affair with Catherine Deneuve that led to a severe depression—“the black hole.” These events constitute the three harmonic lines that his films will compose into variations full of grace and imagination.
The most challenging aspect of working on Truffaut’s oeuvre is attaching a name to the specific territory his films explore. One way to simplify the task is to say that the terrain begins where language lays down its arms, a motif that Truffaut in fact built into his films, where language is often a full-fledged character, whether intriguing, as in The Wild Child, or threatening, as in The Story of Adele H. While words often empower the images, it is mostly the failure of language that the stories commemorate. Truffaut’s fascination with the written word and his love of literature are coterminous with his certainty that the film’s hold on the audience is not reducible to linguistics: “A film has nothing to say.” The word he favored—as did Hitchcock—to define his goal as a film director was emotion. In his seminal book Le Corps du cinéma, Raymond Bellour has brilliantly demonstrated that “emotion is hypnosis,” and has analyzed the hypnotic state as a powerful link between the perceptive modes of the prelinguistic child and those of the viewer of a fictional film.
Bellour’s analysis is inspired by a number of essential concepts found in the work of the great American child psychiatrist Daniel Stern. It is in fact Stern who formulates the question that in my opinion most accurately defines the territory Truffaut explores. Describing what he calls “implicit knowledge,” which belongs to the prelinguistic domain of inter-psychic relations, Stern asserts that the key question in defining this implicit knowledge is, “How do I know that you know that I know?” Implicit knowledge cannot be transposed into words. Resistant to language, its logic and its categories, it can
never be translated into “explicit knowledge.” In human development from childhood to maturity, explicit and implicit develop along parallel paths without ever intersecting. Implicit knowledge is in no way repressed knowledge, but simply knowledge that is non-verbalized and non-verbalizable. As Stern notes, it has been little studied, but those who understand it best are artists, for whom it is the key to their success with audiences.
In the course of his career, as will become clear, Truffaut accorded the viewer an increasingly prominent place—a central one, in fact—in his system of representation. Among his many formulations that sum up the imperatives of the work without codifying them as theory—for example, “The audience should be kept sitting with mouths agape,” and “A scene shouldn’t be introduced in order to slot in a single idea, but to slot in six of them”—one in particular seems to bear on the issue raised by Stern: “Direct information is to be avoided at all costs.” The statement is violent because this rejection is fundamental to Truffaut’s entire system. Direct information involves discursive language and logic, which immediately deny access to the territory that interests Truffaut the most. Making viewers take the perceptual detour described by Stern via an artistic medium requires mastery of a formidably complex system. As a child, the training Truffaut received in internalizing this system was faultless. Until the age of twelve, he was exposed to the unspoken thoughts of the adults around him. Although the secret of his birth certainly had a painful impact on his life, it also allowed him to develop an acute sense of the truths hiding behind words intended to mask them. Lying affords an early education in implicit knowledge. Faced with the invasion of cinéma-vérité, Truffaut would jokingly say he was in favor of cinémamensonge (a “cinema of lies”)—that is, works that require imagination. In this respect, his oeuvre has a lot in common with the work of the French novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Patrick Modiano, who was also subjected as a child to the crushing weight of adult lies. Like Modiano in his books, Truffaut in his films explores this territory that eludes the force field of language but where flourish the most profound and foundational passions in human experience. The problem is not reading the map, in this instance the map of subterranean drives, but understanding how films succeed in submerging us physically in this wild territory with its dangers, its enigmas, and its beauties. Metaphor is key to accomplishing this task. Serving as a bridge between unconscious autobiographical memory and conscious thought, it constitutes a primary form of cognition that precedes language and the formation of symbols. It is anchored in the experience of the body in space and speaks of
movements in terms of their momentum, their duration, their directionality. A comparison of metaphor to symbol can open a window onto its singular nature. Symbolic thought is conceptual and conscious; it uses the sentient world to give form to ideas. Metaphorical thought on the other hand is sensory and blind; those who engage in it remain unaware of the hidden links between their experience and its aesthetic encoding. Truffaut often said that he had not understood the relation between his life and certain of his films until long after their release. My work is focused on the inflections of this mode of thinking and on how they are communicated through the medium of film. To illustrate how Truffaut handles the details of mise en scène, I have selected for each film a short excerpt, from two to six minutes long, and analyzed it shot by shot. This allows me to foreground the formal strategies he favored, including, for example, these three:
First and foremost, movement. The way in which bodies move through space is a primary mode of expression in his films, and over the course of his career Truffaut pays increasing attention to this dimension of filmic language. There are films in which the mise en scène becomes a kind of choreography; Truffaut organizes it in function of the music he arranges to be played during the shooting of a scene, as he did with Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H. Working so intensively on movement allowed him to recapture the secret of silent cinema, which would always remain for him the cardinal reference.
The management of time and duration. In his films, some scenes filled with long, meandering shots seem to deliver precious little information that could be considered narratively logical. Truffaut is giving the viewer a role to play in the temporal dynamics of an inner event that is unfolding and that direct information would be powerless to convey. In Antoine and Colette, Antoine falls in love during a concert in a wordless scene that lasts for more than two minutes; in The Soft Skin, an ascent in an elevator expands time to register the crystallization of an amorous exchange. These subjective durations are indifferent to the norms of reality. Especially in his final films, Truffaut constantly jettisons logical connections and narratively rational explanations. The power of metaphorical thought is such that the viewer does not even notice these ellipses. No one has ever accused the films of lacking in clarity. Still, as one critic has remarked, the script of The Last Metro is full of non sequiturs that would have prompted any Hollywood producer to reject it. This technique reflects what Truffaut had learned from Lubitsch, whose films are so
full of narrative holes. “In Lubitsch’s Swiss cheese,” he wrote, “each hole is awesome.” The same goes for Truffaut.
Memory shots. This last element is without doubt the most important because it reveals the most about Truffaut’s private system. What I am calling “memory shots” are usually designated under the term “auto-citation.” Critics have sometimes seen such shots as signs of affectation or of obsessive tendencies. Martin Lefebvre has compiled an extensive catalog of them in his book. I have chosen the term “memory shot” because these shots work on the memory of the viewer. They are shots—or elements of shots: object, phrase, gesture—that are repeated within a film, or from one film to another. They are designed to deflect the attention of viewers away from their routine habits. Too numerous and too fleeting to support examination and rational analysis, they bombard the imagination and disrupt habitual ways of parsing what is happening on screen. Whether confusing or entertaining, they create, as do the other techniques, a hypnotic allurement that opens the way for a perceptual experience incommensurate with everyday perceptions. This is what the viewer is looking for in fictional films; this is the fons et origo of cinephilia.
The delight that accompanies this experience stems from its ability to activate at full capacity the entire psycho-corporeal system. Imagination in movement not only carries with it the networks of what is explicit and implicit; it whisks away the viewer’s body as well. Truffaut used to say he wanted to make his audience cry and to take possession of them to the point where they no longer knew where they were when they walked out of the theater. When cinema achieves its full potency, the body of the film enters into symbiosis with the body of the viewer, transporting it. Such is Raymond Bellour’s splendid thesis.
This book hopes to contribute to revising the critical view of Truffaut’s films. Despite the recognition his works enjoy, the nature and evolution of his oeuvre over a span of twenty-five years have not entirely been accounted for. Many clichés still abound, the most obvious being that only certain of his films from the 1960s are worthy of being termed masterly. I believe my analysis sweeps away the notion of a “bourgeois decline” toward a cinéma de qualité, of which The Last Metro is supposed to be the leading example. Chronological analysis of Truffaut’s work illustrates two things: a thematic evolution from the passionate toward the spiritual and, more importantly, a stylistic transformation toward a more concise, elliptical, dazzling filmic language. Both developments validate his final films as true masterpieces. Many critics rightly consider The Woman Next Door (1981) to be his most perfect
film. In the last ten years of his career, with ever-increasing skill, Truffaut developed strategies of mise en scène designed to mobilize the spectator. They involve his handling of narrative organization and dialogue, but also mark a ceaseless refinement of nonverbal language: the use of glances, hands, objects, spaces; framing choices and chromatic nuances (color or black and white); effective editing and filmic punctuation; impeccably orchestrated musical counterpoints to visual and verbal content; and finally, and above all, silent scenes that distill into a few shots what is at stake in the narrative. Scenes like these belong so uniquely to Truffaut that they can rightly be read as his private signature. His last films reach a quasi-mathematical precision that, secretly and with masterly skill, approaches the realm of the unutterable. Few filmmakers have staged with such compelling accuracy the equations of the heart.
