(from http://www.1worldfilms.com/francois_truffaut.htm)
Francois Truffaut
Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Occupation: Director, screenwriter, critic Also: actor, producer
Born: February 6, 1932, Paris, France
Died: October 21, 1984, Neuilly, France
Influential film critic, leading New Wave director and heir to
the humanistic cinematic tradition of Jean Renoir, Francois Tru
ffaut made films that reflected his three professed passions: a
love of cinema, an interest in male-female relationships and a
fascination with children. After a troubled childhood, Truffaut
joined the French army, deserted and was sentenced to a prison
term. Critic Andre Bazin helped secure his release and encouraged
his interest in film. In Bazin's influential journal, Cahiers
du Cinema, Truffaut published "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema
Francais" ("A Certain Tendency in French Cinema") in 1954, proposing
what came to be known as the auteur theory. A reaction against the
bloated "Tradition of Quality" cinema in France, the article was a
plea for a more personal cinema and an informal manifesto for the
New Wave, which had not yet broken on the shores of French film.
As a filmmaker, Truffaut began by making shorts (UNE VISITE, 1954
, LES MISTONS, 1957) and working as an assistant to Roberto
Rossellini. In 1959 he completed his first feature-length film,
the semi-autobiographical childhood story THE FOUR HUNDRED BLOWS,
about a troubled adolescent, Antoine Doinel. Truffaut went on to
chronicle Doinel's youth and young adulthood in the "Antoine and
Colette" episode of LOVE AT TWENTY (1962), STOLEN KISSES (1968),
BED AND BOARD (1970) and LOVE ON THE RUN (1979), all films featuring
the same actor, Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Antoine. Two diverging strains
characterize most of Truffaut's work from the early 1960s on.
On the one hand, the director celebrated life in the humanistic
tradition of Jean Renoir. These films include that masterwork of
60s cinema, JULES AND JIM (1961), which defined the modern romantic
triangle for a generation-it is the bittersweet story, not of
Jules and Jim, the two men, but of Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the
woman who dominates their lives and is free, at least, to choose;
THE WILD CHILD (1969), an essay in signs and meaning in which
Truffaut himself starred as the historical Dr. Jean Itard, obsessed
with understanding how to establish human communication with a boy
raised outside of society; the ebullient SUCH A GORGEOUS KID LIKE ME
(1973); DAY FOR NIGHT (1973), an exuberant celebration of the joy
of filmmaking, the ultimate communal art; the joyous depiction of
childhood, SMALL CHANGE (1976); the celebration of women and love in
THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (1977); and the gentle thriller CONFIDENTIALLY
YOURS (1983). On the other hand, many of Truffaut's films are
fatalistic or even cynical, displaying a Hitchcockian fascination
with life's darker side. This group includes THE BRIDE WORE BLACK
(1968), his most explicit homage to Hitchcock, scored by the master's
regular composer, Bernard Herrmann; TWO ENGLISH GIRLS (1972), about
a writer (Leaud) and his affairs with two sisters; THE STORY OF
ADELE H (1975), one of the most harrowing examinations of unrequited
love ever filmed; THE GREEN ROOM (1978), about the love of death;
and THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR (1981). Yet another group of films reflect
an uneasy balance of these two divergent tendencies, as in his
anatomy of adultery, THE SOFT SKIN (1964); the romantic but brooding
MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (1969), which Truffaut described as being
about "degradation, by love"; and THE LAST METRO (1980). "I want a
film I watch to express either the joy of making cinema or the
anguish of making cinema," Truffaut once said. "I am not interested
in all the films that don't vibrate." In 1976, Truffaut accepted
the invitation of the wildly successful young American director Steven
Spielberg to star in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND as the
scientist in search of communication with extra-terrestrials.
His stoic portrait in that film is an emblem of Truffaut's pain,
the arduous difficulty a born outsider encounters in communicating.
This pain suffuses his lesser films, and cramps them, but it also
lurks never far from the heart of his great films. It's what makes
them "vibrate." Always concerned with the process as well as the
product of his profession, Truffaut maintained his role as critic
and commentator throughout his filmmaking career, as proud of his
books as he was of his films. Among his publications is a book-length
interview with Hitchcock, Hitchcock-Truffaut (1967), a perennial
critical classic which he revised in 1983, shortly before his death.
His critical essays were collected in Les Films de ma Vie (1975) and
his letters-posthumously-in Francois Truffaut Correspondance (1990),
with a foreword by Jean-Luc Godard. Truffaut died-dramatically,
arbitrarily-of a brain tumor in the American Hospital in Neuilly in
1984. He is the father of Laura Truffaut (b. 1959) and Eva Truffaut
(b. 1961), both of whom appeared in their father's film SMALL CHANGE
(1976)/L'ARGENT DE POCHE and whose mother is his former wife,
Madeleine Morgenstern; and of Josephine (b. 1983), whose mother is
Fanny Ardant
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