Sincerely Truffaut
GEWEN, BARRY
SPRING BOOKS SINCERELY TRUFFAUT BY BARRY GEWEN ANYONE Who enjoys or admires the films of François Truffaut will derive enormous pleasure from his Correspondence 1945-1984 (Noonday/Farrar...
...Between his early short, The Mischief Makers (1951), andhis first feature, The 400 Blows (1959), both dealing with children, he could state, with reason: " I think I really know the universe of 12 -year-old kids that I want to film...
...Friends must have been delighted whenever a letter of his arrived in the mail...
...Yet Truffaut's letters demonstrate that the kind of freedom he strove for and represented was a different sort—not one of irresponsibility but of attentiveness, not one of lazinessbutofbreadth.The distinction between him and his epigones is clear, and perhaps the best way of expressing it is to say that while François Truffaut could be childlike, he was never—in contrast to many who claim to be following in his footsteps—childish...
...We have become, in this era of "postmodernism," accustomed to a freedom in the arts that pulls together materials from anywhere, oblivious of all rules and restrictions...
...The newfound nits went on and on...
...He never seemed able to tell a joke, but heexuded good humor, warmth, openness, and simple humanity...
...After viewing Truffaut's Day for Night, Godard wrote (the letter is included in the collection) to call his former friend a liar—and to ask for money to produce a film...
...Like a person on thevergeofadivorce remembering a lifetime of accumulated grudges, he drew up a long list of particulars...
...Truffaut was the best kind of correspondent—a person one is happy to spend time with...
...It was a good time to be alive," says Godard in the brief Foreword that he wrote for this collection...
...When speaking of the directors he admired—Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Alfred Hitchcock—he could sound like a starstruck adolescent...
...Truffaut, in his reply, was fierce and slashing...
...It was not only friends who received Truffaut's critiques...
...These were accompanied by accusations...
...I'm going through a Hitchcockian period," he wrote in 1961, though the year could just as easily have been 1951,1971 or 1981...
...In broaching the idea of a joint venture with the wily old master of suspense, Truffaut began his letter: "First of all, allow me to remind you who I am...
...The receptive, eclectic sensibility that resulted was something genuinely new under the sun...
...The picture was never made...
...He goes on to say that he has sold all of Lachenay's books without his permission, in order to pay the rent...
...Many of the letters in the collection deal with the preparations for and publication of his classic book of interviews with Hitchcock, a volume that has been criticized for what was seen as Truffaut's excessive, and possibly disingenuous, deference...
...Friends sent him manuscripts and screenplays, knowing they would get careful, reasoned readings of their work...
...In a line of work that left people jaded before turning 30, he apparently never became cynical or oversophisticated...
...In 1951, at age 19 and years before ever venturing onto a movie set, the brash young man who would become arguably the greatest director of women in film history was writing gnomically to another distinguished director-to-be, Eric Rohmer: "If you make a film, don't forget that 'cinema is the art of the little detail that does not call attention to itself and that 'cinema consists of having beautiful things done to beautiful women,' the rest is estheticism...
...Simultaneously, he bubbles with enthusiasm over the films he is seeing...
...Even when he was being outrageous, he managed to projectcharm...
...The correspondence from those years reminds us that before he became a filmmaker, Truffaut was a voracious reader...
...As a teenager, he cried at the movies of his favorite actresses— and as an adult as well...
...Worse, they argue that what they are doing is "art," or are championed by professors who make the argument for them.The loosening of the definitions of culture and art, most commonly associated with the spirit of the '60s, has unleashed a frightful intellectual lassitude...
...he's been touched by a kind of grace...
...When Hitchcock sent him a proposed script for comment, Truffaut responded with a scene-by-scene breakdo wn, the points carefully numbered one through 23, and concluded: "Naturally, if you are not too upset by these criticisms, I should be delighted to read the next version...
...For the creator of The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player is immediately recognizable in his letters, especially in his comments on the opposite sex...
...To a Belgian writer, he remarked: "The first part of your novel arrived safely and I took the liberty of noting in pencil the words or expressions that I found jarring as I read through it...
...I have a nasty piece of newstogjveyou," ayouthful and impoverished Truffaut announces to Robert Lachenay, his best friend, who is away in the Army...
...Strangers, not realizing that they were provoking an irresistible impulse, often got the same treatment...
...I was not ashamed to shed tears while watching you...
...Everything—fiction and cinema, Hollywood and Paris, high art and pop culture—came together in his hyperactive mind...
...He could, in one breath, provide an annotated list of available biographies of Balzac and, in the next, describe a run-of-the-mill movie like The High and the Mighty as "a sublime film, no more, no less...
...He churns with excitement as he describes for Lachenay the authors he has devoured: Sartre, Melville, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Genet, Proust, Dostoyevsky...
...Wait a little before writing, Truffaut adds, "as G d prefer a calm letter to a furious one...
...It led not only to exciting and original films but, for those in the other arts who shared Truffaut's sensibility, to worthwhile work in music, dance, painting, and sculpture...
...In his own field, he must take a measure of the blame for the legion of filmmakers who now believe a diet of popular movies constitutes an adequate esthetic education, and who are pursuing (often highly profitable) careers reproducing the kinds of pictures that mesmerized them when they were youngsters...
...SPRING BOOKS SINCERELY TRUFFAUT BY BARRY GEWEN ANYONE Who enjoys or admires the films of François Truffaut will derive enormous pleasure from his Correspondence 1945-1984 (Noonday/Farrar Straus Giroux, 590 pp., $50 cloth, $19.95 paper), edited by Güles Jacob and Claude de Givray...
...A woman who asked him to sign a petition was told: "Since you charmingly insist that I add my signature to the list of those who have signed the Manifesto for Survival, I find myself obliged, other than by silent abstention, to inform you of my disagreement with its text, which is, in my opinion, completely woolly, vague and insipid and bristling with too many capital letters...
...there's no doubt at all, he's the greatest, the most complete, the most illuminating, the most beautiful, the most powerful, the most experimental, and the luckiest...
...Godard was malicious, he was deceitful, he was narcissistic, he was arrogant, he was a poseur and, finally, the rapier-thrust: "You're nothing butapieceof shit on a pedestal...
...There was, unfortunately, a price to be paid...
...To live normally, he once declared, was to offer love unguardedly...
...Truffaut's charm was due, at least in part, to achildlike directness, a king-has-no-clothes guilelessness...
...Though he ceased writing articles and reviews after he began making films (to avoid having to attack professional colleagues), in fact he continued to display his talents as a critic, only now in the privacy of his letters...
...This from the man who was already world-famous as the director of The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim...
...Numerous cultural crimes havebeen committed as a consequence, from scrap metal displayed as sculpture to college courses in comic books...
...Despite his persistent earnestness, one imagines him always with a twinkle in his eye, a wry and understanding smile on his lips...
...Precise" was one of his favorite words...
...Truffaut's comments were invariably lucid and detailed...
...Even idols were not immune...
...Youare superb in Claude Miller's film...
...Every week, I go and see again two or three of those films of his that have been reissued...
...Lachenay must have waited, because his reply was relatively mild, surprising Truffaut into responding with sweet and cajoling irony: "Agreed, my letters were ridiculous...
...He enjoyed children, and they obviously reciprocated, for his success with them on the screen was only slightly less than his success with women...
...Butit wasn'tapose...
...Dear great lady of the present time," he wrote to the French actress Miou-Miou in 1977...
...FOR MANY, the fireworks of thisexchange will bethehigh point of the book...
...They are certainly fun...
...He had a child's capacity for idolization and wore his enthusiasms on his sleeve...
...Truffaut entered the world of cinema as a formidable critic, and because of his complete honesty, his critical impulses never waned...
...but you know as well as I do that, in a situation of this kind, one has to give the impression of being humble and even thick-witted, it disarms the enemy...
...A day later, a second letter arrived, with Truffaut declaring: " I reread your script this morning, looking for nits to pick, and of course I found some...
...Bernard Dubois, a French director, received a long discussion of a script intended for Jean-Pierre Léaud, the actor most closely identified with Truffaut, with observations on dialogue, plot, characterization, motive, casting, costumes, camera angles, sound, even how to save money during shooting...
...Truffaut's critical arsenal was most dazzlingly displayed during his quarrel with his one-time New Wave ally, Jean-Luc Godard...
...It is also a good time to relive through Truffaut's letters...
...But for me, the most thrilling pages are the ones that cover the period before The 400 Blows, when Truffaut was developing intellectually and helping to foment the revolution of auteur criticism in the columns of Cahiers du cinéma...
...With his celebrations of many formula Hollywood films, Truffaut was one of those who helped open the door to these abuses...
...Iapologizeforplayingtheprofessor...
Vol. 73 • May 1990 • No. 8
