Francois Truffaut

Francois Roland Truffaut was born in Paris on February 6, 1932. His mother, Janine de Montferrand, was unmarried at the time of his birth, and the identity of his biological father remained uncertain to Truffaut for most of his life. Roland Truffaut, an architectural draftsman who married Janine in 1933, gave the boy his surname but never fully warmed to him. Francois spent his earliest years shuttled between a wet nurse and his maternal grandmother, only joining his mother and stepfather around the age of eight after his grandmother's death ^[1].

The household he entered was cold. His mother demanded silence and stillness, and the boy learned to make himself invisible, reading books and slipping out to movie theaters. He later estimated that he saw hundreds of films during the German occupation of Paris, often sneaking into cinemas without paying or skipping school to attend matinees ^[2]. School held little interest for him. He was an indifferent student, frequently truant, and he left formal education for good at fourteen.

At fifteen he founded a film club, the Cercle Cinemane, an enterprise that collapsed in debt and led to a stay in a center for juvenile delinquents after his stepfather turned him over to the police. The episode marked him deeply, and versions of it surfaced later in his most autobiographical work ^[1]. It was during this troubled adolescence that he met Andre Bazin, the film critic and theorist who ran a cultural film society. Bazin intervened to secure the boy's release, gave him work, and became the closest thing to a father Truffaut ever had ^[3].

After a short and unhappy stint in the French army, from which Bazin again helped extract him, Truffaut joined the staff of Cahiers du Cinema, the journal Bazin co-founded in 1951. There he became one of the most feared critics in France. His 1954 essay "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema" attacked the polished, script-driven films of the postwar French industry, a mode he dismissed as the "tradition of quality," and argued instead for directors who imposed a personal vision on their material ^[4].

That argument hardened into what became known as the politique des auteurs, the auteur theory, which held that the director is the true author of a film. Truffaut and his Cahiers colleagues, among them Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, championed Hollywood figures such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks alongside French directors like Jean Renoir ^[4]. His polemics were sharp enough that the Cannes Film Festival refused him accreditation as a critic in 1958.

The critics wanted to make films themselves. Truffaut directed a short, Les Mistons, in 1957, the same year he married Madeleine Morgenstern, whose father, the distributor Ignace Morgenstern, helped finance his first feature. That film, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups), followed a neglected Parisian boy named Antoine Doinel, played by the young Jean-Pierre Leaud, through truancy, petty theft, and reform school. Drawn openly from Truffaut's own childhood, it premiered at Cannes in 1959, one year after his ban, and won him the prize for best director ^[2]. Together with Godard's Breathless, which Truffaut helped write, it announced the arrival of the French New Wave ^[5].

The films that followed showed unusual range. Shoot the Piano Player (1960) mixed American pulp fiction with abrupt shifts in tone, and Jules and Jim (1962), adapted from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, traced a friendship between two men and their shared love for the mercurial Catherine, played by Jeanne Moreau. The film's freedom of camera movement and its refusal of moral judgment made it one of the defining works of the New Wave ^[2].

Truffaut kept returning to Antoine Doinel, following the character and the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud across two decades in Antoine and Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979), a sustained experiment in watching a fictional life age in real time ^[1]. In 1966 he made his only English-language film, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and that same year he published Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock based on roughly fifty hours of conversation recorded in 1962. The book became a standard text on filmmaking and did much to elevate Hitchcock's critical reputation ^[6].

His 1973 film Day for Night (La Nuit americaine), a comedy about the making of a movie in which Truffaut himself played the director, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film ^[7]. Later successes included The Story of Adele H. (1975), the period drama The Last Metro (1980), which swept the Cesar Awards including best film and best director, and The Woman Next Door (1981). Among the most memorable Francois Truffaut facts for many filmgoers is his acting turn for another director: Steven Spielberg cast him as the French scientist Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ^[5].

Truffaut's marriage to Madeleine Morgenstern produced two daughters, Laura and Eva, before the couple divorced in 1965. His romantic life was closely entangled with his work; he had significant relationships with several of his leading actresses, including Catherine Deneuve, with whom he was involved around the time of Mississippi Mermaid (1969), and Fanny Ardant, who starred in his final two features. He and Ardant had a daughter, Josephine, born in 1983 ^[1].

The question of his paternity haunted him. In the late 1960s he hired a private detective agency, an experience echoed in Stolen Kisses, and the investigation suggested that his biological father was Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Belfort. Truffaut chose not to make contact, but biographers Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana documented the episode in detail in their 1996 biography ^[1].

Away from the set he remained what he had been as a boy: a compulsive reader and moviegoer. Friends described a courteous, private man who answered correspondence diligently and organized his life around films and books. His long friendship and eventual public falling out with Jean-Luc Godard, who wrote him a scathing letter after seeing Day for Night in 1973, became one of the most discussed ruptures in film history ^[3].

Through his production company, Les Films du Carrosse, named in homage to Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach, Truffaut kept up a steady rhythm of roughly one film a year. The early 1980s brought two of his biggest commercial successes in France, The Last Metro and The Woman Next Door, followed by the noir-tinged Confidentially Yours (1983), again starring Fanny Ardant ^[5].

In the summer of 1983 he suffered a stroke-like episode, and doctors discovered a brain tumor. He underwent surgery and continued planning projects during his illness, including a long-considered film about his own youth, but his condition worsened. Francois Truffaut died at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris, on October 21, 1984, at the age of 52 ^[7]. He was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

He left behind 21 completed features made over 25 years, along with volumes of criticism, the Hitchcock interview book, and a celebrated collection of letters published after his death ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Francois Truffaut ends up describing two revolutions at once. As a critic he gave the auteur idea its polemical force, changing how films are studied, reviewed, and marketed; the notion that a director authors a film the way a novelist authors a book owes more to him than to any other single writer ^[4]. As a filmmaker he demonstrated that personal, low-budget cinema shot on real streets could reach a worldwide audience, an example that influenced generations of directors from the New Hollywood of the 1970s onward ^[5].

Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Wes Anderson are among the many filmmakers who have cited him, and The 400 Blows appears regularly in critics' polls of the greatest films ever made, including the Sight and Sound surveys conducted by the British Film Institute ^[2]. Kent Jones's 2015 documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut revisited the interview book and gathered directors such as David Fincher and Richard Linklater to testify to its continuing hold on the craft ^[6].

Any Francois Truffaut biography returns finally to the child in the dark of an occupied city, escaping into other people's stories. Among Francois Truffaut achievements, the most durable may be the tenderness of his films toward children, outsiders, and obsessives, figures he understood from the inside. The final freeze frame of The 400 Blows, a boy at the edge of the sea looking straight into the camera, remains one of the most quoted images in cinema ^[2].