The critic nicknamed the Gravedigger of French Cinema went on to rebuild it
François Truffaut was a truant who sneaked into cinemas without paying, a deserter jailed by the army, and a reviewer so savage that Cannes refused to invite him in 1958. A year later his debut, The 400 Blows, won him Best Director at that same festival and helped launch the French New Wave.
Born in Paris in 1932 to a mother who was not married, Truffaut was registered as the child of an unknown father and spent his early years with nannies and a grandmother who taught him to love books and music. A detective agency hired in 1968 traced his likely father to Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne; his mother's family rejected the finding, but Truffaut accepted it. Films became his refuge: he saw his first at eight, quit formal schooling at 14, and set himself a target of three movies a day and three books a week.
The critic André Bazin became a mentor and rescuer. When Truffaut tried to desert after joining the army in 1950 and landed in military prison, Bazin pulled strings to free him and gave him work at Cahiers du Cinéma. There Truffaut wrote the 1954 polemic A Certain Trend of French Cinema, attacking the industry's screenwriters and producers, and championed the auteur theory: the idea that a director, not the script, is the real author of a film. The American critic Andrew Sarris took up the idea in the 1960s.
The 400 Blows (1959) drew heavily on his own childhood. Its hero, Antoine Doinel, played by a 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud who answered a flyer, is an only child of a loveless home who drifts into petty theft. Léaud kept playing Doinel across later films such as Stolen Kisses (1968). Truffaut also supplied the premise for Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), and was offered Bonnie and Clyde before passing it along, helping steer it toward Warren Beatty.
His range surprised people. Shoot the Piano Player (1960) delighted critics yet flopped, and he never experimented that heavily again; Jules and Jim (1962) was hailed by Pauline Kael as deeply moral. Day for Night (1973) won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, he acted as a scientist in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and his long interview book Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) honoured his hero. He died in 1984.
Source: François Truffaut
