The Paradox of "Familiarity" Truffaut, Heir of Renoir Ludovic Cortade (original) (raw)

François Truffaut: love for cinema, the cinema of love - Part 1: A general introduction

Truffaut's cinema is made of love, in all its possible meanings, and precisely for this reason it requires, in order to be appreciated, that the spectator approaches it with an attitude that is able first of all to grasp the emotional range of the images: as if it were necessary to treat the film with the same love with which it was conceived. But love is, at the same time, the main theme, the central focus, the most intimate and authentic inspiration of Truffaut's films. It is a feeling that involves all dimensions, from family to social, from romantic to sexual. This Dossier takes a close look at the director’s filmography, investigating its three main dimensions: after a General introduction (Part 1), we deal with the ways Truffaut has filmed childhood and adolescence (Part 2), the Antoine Doinel “cycle” (the mythical character from his first feature film, The 400 blows)(Part 3), and finally the sentimental “triangles” and the love obsessions, with such masterpieces as Jules and Jim and The woman next door (Part 4). The four parts are all available at Academia.edu and at www.cinemafocus.eu

François Truffaut: love for cinema, the cinema of love - Part 3: The Antoine Doinel "cycle"

Truffaut's cinema is made of love, in all its possible meanings, and precisely for this reason it requires, in order to be appreciated, that the spectator approaches it with an attitude that is able first of all to grasp the emotional range of the images: as if it were necessary to treat the film with the same love with which it was conceived. But love is, at the same time, the main theme, the central focus, the most intimate and authentic inspiration of Truffaut's films. It is a feeling that involves all dimensions, from family to social, from romantic to sexual. This Dossier takes a close look at the director’s filmography, investigating its three main dimensions: after a General introduction (Part 1), we deal with the ways Truffaut has filmed childhood and adolescence (Part 2), the Antoine Doinel “cycle” (the mythical character from his first feature film, The 400 blows)(Part 3), and finally the sentimental “triangles” and the love obsessions, with such masterpieces as Jules and Jim and The woman next door (Part 4). The four parts are all available at Academia.edu and at www.cinemafocus.eu

A Deleuzian Imaginary: The Films of Jean Renoir

Deleuze Studies, 2011

This article contrasts the notion of a Deleuzian imaginary with that articulated by various film theorists during the 1970s and 1980s. Deleuze offers us, I argue, a way to conceive of the imaginary in the cinema in a positive way; that is, as something which opens up new expressions of the real. By contrast, for film theorists of the 1970s and 1980s, the imaginary was primarily conceived as a negative concept, as something which offered merely escapes or fraudulent distortions of the real. A Deleuzian imaginary for the cinema can be articulated, I argue, by way of the films of Jean Renoir.

Re-interpretation of François Truffaut’s La Politique des auteurs Discourse.pdf

Re-interpretation of François Truffaut’s La Politique des auteurs Discourse Roh, Chul-Hwan In January 1954, an article in Cahiers du Cinéma provoked a controversial issue in the French film industry: “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema” written by François Truffaut. A young critic criticized bitterly contemporary French major films, called ‘Tradition of quality’. One of the main concepts used in this article, La Politique des auteurs (Authors' politics) became the core of Auteur theory (Author theory) discourse later on. After this discourse, Truffaut's opinion had become a turning point of cinema studies. For example, the classification like American movies as commercial movies VS. European films as art films was gone. Nowadays, almost everyone admits globally this concept, ‘film director as authors’. The existence of film d’auteur(author's film) is surely certain. “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema” has been still cited as the root of Auteur theory. However, many studies have misinterpreted Truffaut's article. What he had said in his article was partially obscured behind the name of Auteurism or Auteur theory. Also, there are some uncritically accepted errors which were made by the Anglo-American critics. This study looks into La Politique des auteurs once again to find out Truffaut's real intention. It wants to make a diagnosis of the analytic errors or some misinterpretations.

François Truffaut: love for cinema, the cinema of love - Part 4: Sentimental triangles, love obsessions

Truffaut's cinema is made of love, in all its possible meanings, and precisely for this reason it requires, in order to be appreciated, that the spectator approaches it with an attitude that is able first of all to grasp the emotional range of the images: as if it were necessary to treat the film with the same love with which it was conceived. But love is, at the same time, the main theme, the central focus, the most intimate and authentic inspiration of Truffaut's films. It is a feeling that involves all dimensions, from family to social, from romantic to sexual. This Dossier takes a close look at the director’s filmography, investigating its three main dimensions: after a General introduction (Part 1), we deal with the ways Truffaut has filmed childhood and adolescence (Part 2), the Antoine Doinel “cycle” (the mythical character from his first feature film, The 400 blows)(Part 3), and finally the sentimental “triangles” and the love obsessions, with such masterpieces as Jules and Jim and The woman next door (Part 4). The four parts are all available at Academia.edu and at www.cinemafocus.eu

In search of le secret perdu: How French film director, François Truffaut, was influenced by silent cinema

University of Birmingham UBIRA ETheses, 2019

The focus of my research is the “secret perdu” or “lost secret” of François Truffaut’s cinema, to wit, the means by which Truffaut engaged with silent cinema and how it greatly influenced his oeuvre. This study is important since no other in existence focuses solely on this area of research and it provides an addition to the relatively small canon of academic literature on Truffaut in English. My research methods included: sourcing affirmative writing on Truffaut and silent cinema; isolating key words related to silent cinema, and further investigating their meaning to Truffaut and his work; and finally, watching a diverse range of visual material concerning Truffaut and silent cinema. My findings indicate that the success of Truffaut in his personal quest for “le secret perdu” was predicated on the help of a range of people who shared his passion for the silent era. Finally, it remains to be said that no single definition of le secret perdu exists, or, rather, if it ever did, it has gone to the grave with Truffaut. This leads me to suggest that we should be talking about secret(s) perdu(s) (plural), and that, ultimately, this subject remains open for further exploration.

ch30 Nagib on Truffaut - Film as Literature.pdf

The Man Who Loved Women, the film that should have been its protagonist’s book, is often considered one of Truffaut’s weakest films. In this chapter, I will look at this ‘weakness’ as a sign, stronger here than anywhere else in his work, of what I call ‘the Truffaldian malaise’, located at the intersection of film and literature. This will allow me to posit the intermedial relation between film and literature in Truffaut’s oeuvre, not as a solution, but as a problem, an insufficiency that permeates form as much as content in The Man Who Loved Women, producing an immature or incomplete subjectivity, with a reduced view of the objective world whose fragments are turned into fetish – as beautifully illustrated by the protagonist’s fixation on female legs. Literature, in this context, will be viewed as the fault line in Truffaut’s auteurist project, as well as the unmistakable signature of his impure cinema.