INITIAL RESEARCH

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/truffaut.html#senses

PASSION, LOVE AND OTHER PROBLEMS IN HIS FILMS:
LOVE TRIANGLES, CASUAL PARTNERS, ADULTERY + SELF PLEASURING

Truffaut seemed set to become reconciled with a maternal image, but more importantly still, confessed the passion that fed him and that adorned his cinema. From the prostitutes of his youth to the most glamorous film stars within his reach, his fascination for female love had no limit.
Plyne (Serge Davri) in TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE: "Woman is pure, delicate, fragile. Women are marvellous, women are supreme. For me women were always supreme".
JULES ET JIM (1962), an adaptation of a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché which he had read years earlier, is an ideal film to show us the no strings attached and unpredictable woman that he admired so much.

Another love triangle, but with a change of gender, is articulated in LES DEUX ANGLAISES ET LE CONTINENT, also based on a novel by Roche. The focus of attention is this time a man
The director tries to show us here the different phases that a romantic relationship endures as people mature: at the beginning the adolescent platonic love between Claude and Muriel, later the adult physical love between Claude and Anne. Between these two extremes Truffaut depicted the transitory nature of casual partners that serve to instruct, as well as adultery and self-pleasuring. Death will also play its hand to end this affective conflict.

Truffaut identified passionate love with insanity, with the incapacity to think with clarity when faced by the object of our affection. And what is more curious, he saw this passion as an excess that must be punished, generally by death, as we observe even in LES MISTONS. His idea of marriage is no more diaphanous, generally teaming it with boredom that justifies the extramarital adventures. There is marital tedium in LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS, in Tirez SUR LE PIANISTE, in LA PEAU DOUCE, in LA FEMME D'À CÔTÉ. Marriage as an institution leads to sorrow in LA MARIÉE ÉTAIT en noir and to degradation and deceit in LA SIRÈNE DU MISSISSIPPI.

In Truffaut's stories there is generally a strong and earthy woman set against a man with childlike traits

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/baisers_voles.html
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/la_nuit_americaine.html


FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT : A KEY INFLUENCE IN MODERN CINEMA, HIS PASSIONATE FILMMAKING STILL SEDUCES
MARTIN SCORSESE

Truffaut carried that sense of history into his moviemaking. Back in the early and mid-'60s, people were always talking about how this movie "quoted" from that older movie, but what almost no one talked about was why the quote was there, what it did or didn't do for the movie, what it meant emotionally to the picture as a whole.

In Truffaut, you could feel the awareness of film history behind the camera, but you could also see that every single choice he made was grounded in the emotional reality of the picture. There are many echoes of Hitchcock in his movies, blatantly so in The Soft Skin (underrated at the time of its release, and a favorite of mine) and The Bride Wore Black, not so blatantly in many other movies, and it's almost impossible to quantify the importance of Jean Renoir to Truffaut (or, for that matter, of Henry James, of Honoré de Balzac—Truffaut was also a great reader). But if you look at those movies carefully, you will see that there's nothing extraneous or superficial.

There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression: the opening expository section of Jules and Jim, where time and space is abolished and the images flow like music across the screen; the series of shots from Fahrenheit 451 (another underrated picture) where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger, which I admit I've duplicated many times in my own films. And the character played by Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, who keeps almost acting but never does until it's too late, had a profound effect on me, and on many other filmmakers.

Time—the desire to slow it down coupled with the harsh reality of its swift passing ... Truffaut had a great gift for giving form to this sensation. In a way, it's all encapsulated in a moment near the end of Two English Girls—yet another underrated picture, this time a masterpiece—where Jean-Pierre Léaud's character suddenly glances at himself in the mirror and murmurs the words: "My God, I look old." And then that moment is over. That's life. And that's Truffaut.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/truffaut.html