TSPDT

Key Production Country: France
Key Genres: Drama, Comedy Drama, Romantic Drama, Period Film, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Post-Noir (Modern Noir), Melodrama, Coming-of-Age, Childhood Drama, Psychological Drama, Showbiz Drama
Key Collaborators: Marcel Berbert (Producer), Georges Delerue (Composer), Nestor Almendros (Cinematographer), Martine Barraqué (Editor), Suzanne Schiffman (Screenwriter), Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko (Production Designer), Jean-Pierre Leaud (Leading Actor), Jean Gruault (Screenwriter), Yann Dedet (Editor), Jean-Louis Richard (Screenwriter), Raoul Coutard (Cinematographer), Agnes Guillemot (Editor)

"Truffaut remained true to the Cahiers legacy by inserting into each film references to his favorite periods of film history and his admired directors (Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Renoir). Jules and Jim, set in the early days of cinema, provided an occasion to incorporate silent footage and to employ old -fashioned irises. Truffaut sought not to destroy traditional cinema but to renew it. In the Cahiers spirit he aimed to enrich commercial filmmaking by balancing personal expression with a concern for his audience: "I have to feel I am producing a piece of entertainment." - Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell (Film History: An Introduction, 2009)

"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)

"Truffaut’s influence on cinema was international in scope. He conveyed in his films and in his writing an apparently inexhaustible and infectious enthusiasm for the possibility of authentic personal expression in the cinema. Perhaps his most moving film after The 400 Blows, L’Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) stars Truffaut as a scientist who attempts to communicate with an Abandoned autistic child. Throughout his life, Truffaut believed that human communication could transcend language and culture. No doubt, his influence on young filmmakers derives from this faith." - Hilary Ann Radner (Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, 2007)

"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

"This distinguished French film-maker was an extraordinary man to pin down, in that he almost never made the same kind of film twice, and his films varied infuriatingly from very good to mediocre. There are autobiographical elements in many of them, which are veined with ideas of childhood, loneliness, women, mothers and obsessional objects;" - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)

"Truffaut made only a few films that are not flawed, several that have serious weaknesses in conception and realization, one or two content to treat the surface of a subject, but none without a youthful enthusiasm for movies. He treated material speculatively, in the way of an idealised Hollywood director in the days of constant production, priding himself on an ability to make any assignment beautiful and entertaining… Whether or how well his films will last remains to be seen. Whatever the answer to that question, for many people who love film, Truffaut will always seem like the most accessible and engaging crest to the New Wave." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)

"Truffaut's work moves, sometimes uncertainly, between the highly personal style of his best films (with their tendency towards episodic structure, diffident heroes, and suggestions of improvisation), and those which seem to reflect American influences." - Roger Manvell (The International Encyclopedia of Film, 1972)

"Truffaut was always a committed cineaste, who remained, up to his death from a brain tumour at 52, totally at ease with the revolutionary filmic language he had helped create. His critical reputation may have slipped slightly in some quarters, but the magnitude of his achievements as both theorist and auteur should not be underestimated." - Lloyd Hughes (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"One of France's most sympathetic film-makers, François Truffaut was closely associated with the nouvelle vague of the late Fifties… Truffaut's films are always marked by a distinctive gentleness, a graceful humour, and a truly personal cinematic sense.." - The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema, 1983

"Enthusiasm, lucidity, and freedom of expression characterise the films of François Truffaut, a leading force in the French new Wave. They are obviously made by someone who wants to retain a certain innocence." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)

"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