Truffaut

Truffaut Festival Penthouse Cinema Preview

Francois Truffaut rose to prominence in 1959 with The 400 Blows, which together with Godard's Breathless, Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Chabrol's Les Cousins, announced the arrival of the 'New Wave' in film-making.

These directors were in revolt against the literary-based pedantry of the French film-establishment, and with the exception of Resnais, had been active for some time as outspoken critics in the journal Cahiers du Cinema. Their prophet was Andre Bazin, a man fervently committed to both the intrinsic value of a pure art form, and to the strength of realism as a means for discovering the world and helping to change it. The Cahiers group looked back to the 1930s, to Renoir, Jean Vigo and Rene Clair, calling for a resurgence of the vitality and spontaneity of the films of that time.

Truffaut's work is full of humour. He is always aware of the irony accompanying the grimmer moments, always quick to exploit a visual pun. Freedom, usually under threat for the protagonist who stands outside the accepted conventions, the possibilities for and of love, and the redeeming qualities of human-beings, are central concerns. Cinematically, he employs techniques from an array of sources as diverse as gangster Hollywood and theatrical melodrama, engaging in continual dialogue over the nature of the art. Elliptical time jumps irrelevant and irreverent interruptions, improvisation, cinema-verite, freeze frames, slow motion. . . his revelry in the creative process underscores a serious commitment; at his best he surprises and delights to lead one far into the themes he is exploring.

The Bride Wore Black (La Mairee Etait en Noir, 1968), which opens the festival is one of his weaker films. Owing much to Hitchcock in structure and pace but lacking ingenuity, it stars Jeanne Moreau. Music is by the late Bernard Herrmann, composer of the scores of Taxi Driver and Obsession.

Stolen Kisses (Baisers Voles, 1969), tells the story of a young man who runs through a succession of semi-preposterous jobs, and his girlfriend who must suffer his perpetual incompetence. Described as being 'pretty precisely about sheer happiness, and as 'a thoroughly charming love story' it reveals Truffaut relaxed in his medium (a forerunner in tone perhaps of his latest film Small Change, an endearing and much-praised look at children.) Stolen Kisses stars Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor with whom Truffaut has developed a close working relationship through a series of analogically autobiographical films. This is the third.

Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirene du Mississippi, 1969) 'provides an almost ideal synthesis of every feature of his style and is full of echoes, many of them deliberate, of his earlier films. The aim is, as always, a dislocation of one's expectancies from the genres (in this case as in so many others of the New Wave, the thriller and the love story.) Murder seems out of place in the steady rhythm and visual beauty; the emphasis is on personal interaction, on contrasting the potential for private happiness and the harsh outside world. Notable moments are created by the camerawork, while weaknesses appear when Truffaut falls back on proven techniques without close enough regard for his present requirements. A frivilous vein enjoys some favour, as when the lead woman comments that the hideaway she and her husband have arrived at would be a good place to end a gangster movie — Shoot the Piano Player used the same place. Jean Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve star.

Day for Night (1974), is Truffaut's third most recent film, and generally considered his best since 1961. The subject is filmmaking. Truffaut himself plays a director attempting to mould all the disparate elements around him into a satisfactory representation of his own vision. The film he is making does not appear to be a particularly good one, which must be self-comment in itself. The frustrations of working with an alcoholic, fast declining star who has her lines pasted onto the set out of view of the camera, and still plays the scene wrong; the troubles with time, with money; problems with crew members who fall in love and leave at a critical period; and the joys of seeing something working, the sheer excitement of making a film: all contribute to make this the most personal of Truffaut's films. Through its explicit introversion it is even more than Mississippi Mermaid, a watershed of his traits and ideas, a summary of what has gone before and an investigation of what is to come. Control of what must have been a bewilderingly complex situation is excellent, the result is quite simply marvellous. Also starring Jean-Pierre Leaud, Jean-Pierre Aumont and Jacqueline Bisset.

May 13-22.

—Simon Wilson.