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François Truffaut 

 

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The 19th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)
 
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
 
See Also
Jacques Becker
Claude Chabrol
René Clair
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Pierre Melville
Max Ophüls
Jean Renoir
Eric Rohmer
Jean Rouch
Bertrand Tavernier
Jean Vigo
View video clips relating to this director at YouTube.com
Director / Screenwriter / Producer / Actor
1932 - 1984 
Born February 6, Paris, France
Key Production Country: France
Key Genres: Drama, Romantic Drama, Comedy Drama, Period Film, Romance, Psychological Drama, Childhood Drama, Coming-of-Age, Melodrama, Post-Noir (Modern Noir)
Key Collaborators: Marcel Berbert (Producer), Georges Delerue (Composer), Nestor Almendros (Cinematographer), Jean-Pierre Leaud (Leading Player), Suzanne Schiffman (Screenwriter), Martine Barraque (Editor), Jean Gruault (Screenwriter), Jean-Pierre Kohut (Production Designer), Jean-Louis Richard (Screenwriter), Raoul Coutard (Cinematographer)
Highly Recommended: The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules et Jim (1961), The Soft Skin (1964), Stolen Kisses (1968), Day for Night (1973)
Recommended: The Bride Wore Black (1967), The Wild Child (1969), Bed & Board (1970), Two English Girls (1972), The Woman Next Door (1981), Confidentially Yours (1983)
Links: [ IMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide[ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [ Film Reference ] [ Strictly Film School ] [ Baseline Biography ] [ Wikipedia ] [ 1970 Interview ] [ WSWS Article (1999) ] [ Films de France Biography ] [ Francois Truffaut.com ] [ Salon Article (1999) ] [ kamera Article ] [ Art and Culture Profile ]
Books: [ The Films in My Life ] [ François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945-1984 ] [ The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut ] [ François Truffaut: The Complete Films ] [ François Truffaut ] [ François Truffaut (French Film Directors) ] [ Francois Truffaut at Work ]  [ Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation ]
DVD's: [ Amazon ] 
1,000 Greatest Films: The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules et Jim (1961), The Wild Child (1969), Two English Girls (1972), Day for Night (1973), The Woman Next Door (1981)
 
The 400 Blows (1959)Shoot the Piano Player (1960)Stolen Kisses (1968)Day for Night (1973)
 
     
  "François Truffaut was one of five young French film critics, writing for André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinema in the early 1950s, who became the leading French filmmakers of their generation...Unlike his friend and contemporary, Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut remained consistently committed to his highly formal themes of art and life, film and fiction, youth and education, art and education, rather than venturing into radical political critiques of film forms and film imagery." - Gerald Mast (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991)  
     
  "A passionately romantic humanist like Renoir, Truffaut was also a devout admirer of the skills of Hitchcock, which he attempted to emulate in several of his own thrillers. He published a book of a series of interviews he conducted with Hitchcock, whom he repeatedly identified as his idol, but temperamentally and emotionally his affinity with Renoir seemed to be the stronger side of his split artistic personality" - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)  
     
  "In his lesser films, he tended to rely too flagrantly on sentimental charm, melodramatic contrivance and romantic whimsy, and an insistent fascination with the mystery of women...His finest work, however, is precariously but deftly balanced between sympathetic involvement with his characters' doubts, frustration and confusion, and gently ironic detachment; accordingly, he favoured the medium close-up and medium-shot, linear but subtly elliptical narratives and, occasionally, voiceover narration, literary in tone." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)  
     
  "A seminal director in the French New Wave, Truffaut is a master at illustrating the small joys and sorrows of human existence, with a particular talent for understanding children." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
  "The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure." - François Truffaut  
     
 

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"A film is a petrified fountain of thought." - Jean Cocteau   "If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed." - Stanley Kubrick