Happy birthday, Truffaut!
Steven Spielberg on working with François Truffaut
“Saturn devoured us. And we tore each other apart, little by little, so as not to be eaten first. The cinema had taught us how to live, and it took its revenge.”
-Godard
via: Tobias Grey
‘For me, the arresting concluding scenes of The 400 Blows are some of the most hauntingly personal scenes in all of French cinema. From the moment Antoine escapes from the reform school at a soccer game where he throws in the ball to play and then turns around and takes flight from the soccer ground, to one of the most famous freeze-frames in cinema’s history where Antoine is located in the sea and turns around towards us, we are witnessing cinema as if for the first time.’
I still ask myself the question that has tormented me since I was thirty years old: Is cinema more important than life?
Apologies to Bob Marley, Ronald Reagan, Eva Braun, and all the other dead luminaries who celebrated their birthdays on February 6. Today, it transpires, is not their time. Instead, the world’s biggest internet search engine has opted to honour the 80th anniversary of the late François Truffaut via the medium of the Google doodle. When Sibelius made his crack about no one ever erecting a statue to a critic, he clearly reckoned without the rise of the Google doodle.
Arguably the foremost of the New Wave film-makers, Truffaut was also the first to go: killed by a brain tumour at the age of 52 after a life spent in perpetual motion. In his teens he had been the juvenile tearaway and in his 20s a crusading film critic, railing against the impoverished state of post-war French cinema and refining the auteur theory to allow the inclusion of Hollywood titans like Hitchcock and Ford.
Yet Truffaut went on to prove himself one of the most fresh and vibrant directors of his generation…
Softer than Godard, warmer than Chabrol, and more meaty than Rohmer, Truffaut was the man who brought the nouvelle-vague to the mainstream; who took cerebral film theory and made it sing. Happy birthday, François Truffaut. And wherever you may be, we hope there is cake and candles and that Eva Braun hasn’t drunk all the Blue Nun.
via: Xan Brooks
“There are no Ray films that do not have a scene at the close of day; he is the poet of nightfall, and of course everything is permitted in Hollywood except poetry.”
-François Truffaut
Book Review of Charles Drazin’s “French Cinema”
French cinema lies somewhere in between iconicity and iconoclasm.
Source: hydramag.com
Catherine Deneuve and François Truffaut on the set of Mississippi Mermaid
An excerpt from the Janus theatrical pressbook for The 400 Blows
Making his way through the fields, he runs on and on until at last, he finds himself on a beach. The boy stops and stares filled with awe as, for the first time in his young life, he sets eyes on the sea.
Will Antoine, in time, look back upon his adolescence as a painful transition between childhood and youth? WIll he eventually come to terms with life? As the youngster turns around to look straight into the camera, the final freeze shot suggests that it is up to each viewer to provide the answer to these questions and the denouement to the story.
Source: peggymoffitt
I rather tend to reject life and take refuge in the cinema, so when the cinema is attacked, I must defend it
(via arianduzi)
Source: archive.sensesofcinema.com
The idea that men are equal is theoretical for you, it is not felt; that’s why you can’t love anyone, nor help anyone, other than throwing some cash on the table.
This is, in my humble estimation, explains why I feel Tuffaut > Godard. I love a lot of Godard’s films and can appreciate what he’s trying to do but, even I can’t help but think ‘fuck this’ while watching him try to hammer his politics across (hello there,Weekend). Besides, I’m at a loss as to what Godard has ever done that was comparably beautiful and moving as the final shot in The 400 Blows. Send any hate mail to my ask box…
François Truffaut, in a rupture letter to Godard…
I think this quote hones in on something that is probably true of a lot of people. Maybe it’s one of the reasons why a lot of “liberal” movements aren’t truly as progressive as they claim to be.
(via lepoinconneurdeslilas)
Source: lepoinconneurdeslilas
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Domicile conjugal- François Truffaut
