François Truffaut au travail

Icon Icon Opinion : 

It is the working method of François Truffaut’s genius that is deciphered in this book – in great depth, this book returns above all to François Truffaut’s approach to cinema… A cinema marked by a passion, an interest in male-female relationships and a fascination for the age of childhood.

Author: Carole Le Berre

Publishing House: Cahiers du Cinéma

Publication Date: 9 Octobre 2014

Description : Among the abundant literature devoted to François Truffaut, a work on his working method from his archives was missing. Carole Le Berre’s patient investigation of the entirety of an unhoped-for working documentation allows her to access the universe and the creative process of a filmmaker as rarely as possible. Because Truffaut wrote a lot, covered his scripts with handwritten notes, and had a passion for keeping everything, the reader can witness, as if on the sly, the very movement of the elaboration of the work.

We find the still living traces of a mind in constant activity, as if we were catching a filmmaker at work, we discover his secrets of fabrication, we follow the emergence of an idea, the sketch sometimes of a mise en scène, the birth of a film. One has the impression of knowing everything about Truffaut, and yet, this book allows us to discover him from a new angle and to experience even more the obstinacy and coherence of his work.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the legend that Truffaut, the irascible critic, the gravedigger of French quality, had become a settled filmmaker. The subjects of his films, such as they are brought to light here, the violence that emanates from them, the profound savagery of the characters show, on the contrary, how much this received idea is a form of blindness. Truffaut’s cinema never ceases to play with the discrepancy between an anodyne appearance, the amiable mask of entertainment, and the ball of savagery that runs through it and emerges in bursts.

It is from this contradiction between the power of the fantasies he releases and the will to be accepted that he builds his cinema. And it is this need to be recognized and accepted, similar to the desire of his mirror character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, Antoine Doinel, to enter families, which is at the origin of the misunderstanding that would have us believe in his wisdom, in the unanimity of his cinema.

The organization of the book is chronological and each chapter approaches a film from an angle that highlights an aspect of Truffaut’s method. An abundant iconography enriches the author’s discourse and many unpublished documents are reproduced here, now accessible to fans of Truffaut’s films.