François Truffaut

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domino harvey
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#51 Post by domino harvey » Sat Feb 06, 2016 9:07 am

Well, of course. In addition to all the Young Turks from Cahiers, there's also Paul Schrader and Peter Bogdanovich off the top of my head

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Trees
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#52 Post by Trees » Sat Feb 06, 2016 9:09 am

Seems like Schrader has directed a lot of turkeys, though.

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Re: Francois Truffaut

#53 Post by Numero Trois » Sun Feb 07, 2016 6:46 am

Trees wrote: Generally speaking, do accomplished film critics make good film directors?
Possibly. I think the odds are better than with a "fanboy."

That Panther Panchali incident you mention sounds like an aberration. Unless you can point out multiple instances of Truffaut abruptly dismissing movies out of hand then it doesn't mean much. I'd rather judge someone based on repeated patterns.

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MichaelB
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#54 Post by MichaelB » Mon Feb 08, 2016 2:32 am

You also need to consider the context: it was a late-night screening at a time when Indian films had no artistic reputation and nobody had ever heard of Ray.

Film festivals are not the best environments in which to reach considered judgements, as the late Philip French acknowledged when he reviewed Jan Švankmajer's brilliant but conceptually challenging Faust. At Cannes, punch-drunk from seeing dozens of other films that week, he found it "baffling and boring". On a second viewing in more congenial conditions, he found it "astonishing". And I absolutely sympathise.

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Gregory
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#55 Post by Gregory » Mon Feb 08, 2016 3:10 am

The way that everyone went after Truffaut for that comment is a classic example of the kind of "gotcha" media culture and political correctness run amok that took over in the mid-1950s and is now spreading to our college campuses. Overly sensitive people didn't like his opinion about watching utensil-less peasants, so of course there had to be a social media pile-on about it.

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knives
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#56 Post by knives » Mon Feb 08, 2016 6:48 am

domino harvey wrote:Well, of course. In addition to all the Young Turks from Cahiers, there's also Paul Schrader and Peter Bogdanovich off the top of my head
A few Italian filmmakers from that generation too. I think Argento was working at a journal when he did Once Upon a Time in the West.

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zedz
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#57 Post by zedz » Tue Feb 09, 2016 4:46 pm

Trees wrote:I don't want to open up a huge can of worms here and totally derail this thread, but there is one thing I am wondering about. What are the opinions of people here on this forum about this question: Generally speaking, do accomplished film critics make good film directors?
Being an accomplished film critic gives you additional tools that can be useful as a film director, and - hopefully - some historical background, but it's hardly necessary. Assayas is a great modern director who's an ex- Cahiers critic and very engaged in film history / international film culture.

I'd actually argue that Truffaut was a mediocre critic. He was way too inclined to make sweeping, unexamined judgements and his brand of auteurism was ludicrously simplistic and unnuanced (praising even the worst films by designated auteurs over great films by those designated 'unworthy' of auteur status, simply on principle). Party lines regularly trumped close readings.

If that Ray anecdote is correct, then I'd say it's prima facie evidence of bad critical form at the very least, since no responsible critic should dismiss a film they haven't seen in its entirety.

But then, I also think he's a middling director at best, so it doesn't really prove or disprove the thesis!

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Professor Wagstaff
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#58 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Tue Feb 09, 2016 5:00 pm

zedz wrote:I'd actually argue that Truffaut was a mediocre critic. He was way too inclined to make sweeping, unexamined judgements and his brand of auteurism was ludicrously simplistic and unnuanced (praising even the worst films by designated auteurs over great films by those designated 'unworthy' of auteur status, simply on principle). Party lines regularly trumped close readings.
I'd agree with this. I love Truffaut but find a lot of his reviews, as you said, simplistic. Maybe translation is to blame, but I struggled with and never finished his collection of essays because the writing was so clunky.

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knives
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#59 Post by knives » Tue Feb 09, 2016 5:10 pm

I doubt it's translation since none of the other Cahiers crew are as bad in terms of reading (though they can be in terms of politicking). Truffaut strikes me as really taking all of the worst lessons from Bazin who seemed to share Truffaut's POV, but with a more intelligent sense of discourse. I think it's no coincidence that all of Truffaut's best films have children or child like protagonists.

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RossyG
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#60 Post by RossyG » Tue Feb 09, 2016 6:04 pm

zedz wrote:I'd actually argue that Truffaut was a mediocre critic. He was way too inclined to make sweeping, unexamined judgements...
He also made a silly statement about there being a disparity with the words British and cinema. Once again, he retracted that, but in his younger days at least he seemed to like being King of the edge lords and making these sorts of statements for effect.

Good film maker, but at times a bit of a knob, really.

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domino harvey
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#61 Post by domino harvey » Tue Feb 09, 2016 6:08 pm

Well, most of the Cahiers crew hated British cinema (apart from Hitchcock) outright, so it was a widely held (predominately ideological post-war) belief with his colleagues

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RossyG
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Re: Francois Truffaut

#62 Post by RossyG » Wed Feb 10, 2016 2:29 am

Typical frogs!

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Re: Francois Truffaut

#63 Post by Jonathan S » Wed Feb 10, 2016 5:42 am

domino harvey wrote:Well, most of the Cahiers crew hated British cinema (apart from Hitchcock) outright, so it was a widely held (predominately ideological post-war) belief with his colleagues
To be fair, most of their British equivalents also hated British cinema - and some of their antipathy even predates Cahiers. The film journal Sequence was co-founded in 1947 by Lindsay Anderson (later contributors included Karel Reisz), who decades later recalled:
Lindsay Anderson wrote: By the end of the War, British films were respectable and overpraised... We had seen My Darling Clementine several times and, and found it greatly superior... to the British films of Lean, Reed and Powell then being hailed and lauded by the press .... It was much more useful, surely, to draw attention to the vision and vitality of American cinema – then much despised... Sequence though was quite untouched by French influence and the aesthetics of “Cahiers du Cinema”. We certainly had no time for the auteur theory.
In 1962 the UK magazine Movie was founded, and this certainly shared many viewpoints with Cahiers, not least its almost total derision of British cinema, including the "New Wave" films made by some of the earlier Sequence critics! In an opening 1962 broadside written "on behalf the editorial board":
V.F. Perkins wrote:Five years ago the ineptitude of British films was generally acknowledged... All we can see is a change of attitude, which disguises the fact that the British cinema is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive.
Seventeen years later, when he was one of my film tutors, he hadn't changed his mind, as I recall the only British film for which he expressed any real admiration was John Krish's ten-minute documentary The Elephant Will Never Forget. Even Hitchcock's British films were not exempted and another Movie contributor Robin Wood also curtly dismissed them in his book Hitchcock's Films ("little more than 'prentice work... who wants the leaf-buds when the rose has opened?")

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domino harvey
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Re: François Truffaut

#64 Post by domino harvey » Sun Nov 13, 2016 1:36 am

Well, I knocked out the rest of my remaining unseen Truffauts, and all four were of the same overall quality I associate with the director on the whole: decisively mediocre, without much good or bad in either direction.

Tire-au-flanc ’62 (with Claude de Givray 1960) Broad army farce produced and co-written by Truffaut in addition to the shared directing duties. Heavily weighed with physical comedy, there are a few bits here and there that work, and the film has an effectively madcap pacing and roughness to it. It all adds up to exactly nothing, but I wasn’t bored, though I doubt I would ever want or need to see it again.

L’enfant sauvage (1970) More self-consciously stylized than most later Truffaut films, this one first flirts with Robert Flaherty-esque pastorals before turning into an interior procedural. The biggest complaint is that Penn’s the Miracle Worker already told a similar story with a thousand times more urgency and verve and style and craft than Truffaut does here, and the polite, formal structure of this film is too dry for such a fascinating topic. A surface-level look at the complexities of human development.

L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) A ladies man reflects on his history of womanizing and the film at-times threatens to be a survey of first paragraphs to Penthouse Forum letters. Truffaut has no idea what to do with the central idea and so we get a third act self-reflexive twist on everything that acts like a narrative train wreck, only to be quickly undone by Truffaut dropping an atomic bomb on the tracks with the tritest, most Leslie Caron-aided explanation for Our Lech’s behavior imaginable. Of the four films, this one had the most imagination and energy, but it also took the worst wrong turns as well.

La chambre verte (1978) Truffaut casts himself in the lead as a forlorn widower who wastes his life away pining for the dead. I’m unfamiliar with the Henry James source text, but this is a strange and wholly unsatisfying detour in Truffaut’s filmography (this was the decade of indulgent James adaptations, apparently), self-reverential to the point of being inert in the overall dramatics or resolution. Briefly hints at some intriguing ideas, but Truffaut’s approach is indistinguishable from any competent TV director’s touch.

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Rayon Vert
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Re: François Truffaut

#65 Post by Rayon Vert » Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:33 am

domino harvey wrote:L’enfant sauvage (1970) More self-consciously stylized than most later Truffaut films, this one first flirts with Robert Flaherty-esque pastorals before turning into an interior procedural. The biggest complaint is that Penn’s the Miracle Worker already told a similar story with a thousand times more urgency and verve and style and craft than Truffaut does here, and the polite, formal structure of this film is too dry for such a fascinating topic. A surface-level look at the complexities of human development.

L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) A ladies man reflects on his history of womanizing and the film at-times threatens to be a survey of first paragraphs to Penthouse Forum letters. Truffaut has no idea what to do with the central idea and so we get a third act self-reflexive twist on everything that acts like a narrative train wreck, only to be quickly undone by Truffaut dropping an atomic bomb on the tracks with the tritest, most Leslie Caron-aided explanation for Our Lech’s behavior imaginable. Of the four films, this one had the most imagination and energy, but it also took the worst wrong turns as well.

La chambre verte (1978) Truffaut casts himself in the lead as a forlorn widower who wastes his life away pining for the dead. I’m unfamiliar with the Henry James source text, but this is a strange and wholly unsatisfying detour in Truffaut’s filmography (this was the decade of indulgent James adaptations, apparently), self-reverential to the point of being inert in the overall dramatics or resolution. Briefly hints at some intriguing ideas, but Truffaut’s approach is indistinguishable from any competent TV director’s touch.
I agree with your assessment of La Chambre verte, but from your remarks I gather I'm a greater Truffaut admirer than you are, and I do have some love for L'Homme qui aimait les femmes, despite its flaws - to my mind the strongest of his late work along with La Femme d'à côté (I think Le Dernier Métro is overrated). Here are my notes on the film after the first time I saw it:

Truffaut seems to be putting together elements of all his previous films here, including references (like the cat licking the milk bowl on the tray put outside the door that had occurred in two previous films) that serve as frames distancing us from the narrative. The theme is again, and more forcefully than ever, obsessional love, in this case a man’s obsession with possessing or collecting experiences with lovely “inconnues” for one night stands. It’s made clear as the film progresses that Charles Denner’s middle-aged character’s obsession is the result of his psychological scars, of being raised by a unloving mother who ignored him (an autobiographical element first referenced in The 400 Blows) and desperately though unconsciously seeking repair. He is unable to truly love and needs to return to his own bed at night after each adventure, while in the daytime he works as a quasi-child’s job checking toys in a reference to one of Antoine Doinel’s jobs in Domicile conjugal.
SpoilerShow
His writing a novel of his story put hims on a certain path of recovery until his untimely end.
The content is serious but the treatment light, with all of the different episodes featuring those “unique” women creating comical vignettes. And Truffaut’s love of books is once again on full display, in this character who, once again in a clear autobiographical reference, learned to love books as a stand-in for what he was deprived of, and the book that he writes becoming the ending centerpiece of the film.

It’s not a completely successful film. The comedy isn’t that strong, nor is the drama. It feels as if some of the void in Denner’s soul colors to some degree this picture that, like Denner's book that gets discussed by the publishing house, is made both of significant and less significant moments. It feels like we’ve seen this terrain before, done with more energy, and it’s starting to feel a little tired. That said, there’s still plenty of originality, charm and thought-provoking material to deal with and it’s a must for lovers of Truffaut’s oeuvre and themes.

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hearthesilence
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Re: François Truffaut

#66 Post by hearthesilence » Mon Jan 21, 2019 1:16 pm

La Chambre verte seems to get screened a lot around NYC, but I haven't been able to catch one until now. (It's playing at Quad Cinema, part of a program on Henry James adaptations.) A shame no HD version is available for home viewing, because Almendros's work is quite beautiful and fortunately the 35mm print was in excellent shape.

As for the film itself, it's surprisingly rich and complex, certainly a lot to mull over. There seemed to be two ways of approaching the film, and the ideas stirred up by both seem to co-exist at the same time. On the one hand, the fixation on death does play like an obsessive neurosis for the lead character. His inability to let go of a deceased wife (and his condemnation of others who can) is at best a naively romantic notion. But the film took a profound turn for me when I started identifying the photographs in his altar - many of them are artists. Some Truffaut actually knew, but there are definitely some he did not. His relationship to them isn't dissimilar to the relationship we'd have with a lot of deceased artists - people we don't know on a personal level and yet their work could very well have had a profound impact on our lives. It then brings up questions about their work being lost to time. No popular artist remains popular, but their gradual fade into obscurity has less to do with the diminishing vitality of their work than a culture that perpetually moves on to the newest fashions. I'd argue that the film works best as a meditation on an artist's work and its presence in anyone's life (or culture) as well as how that may change or fade with time.

FWIW, I recently saw a production of The Waverly Gallery with Elaine May. She's absolutely wonderful but it struck a chord because a few of my parents' friends, people I've known since early childhood, have passed away. A whole generation of people that had a large presence in my life and many others' is now beginning to fade - that idea is certainly explored in La Chambre verte, but what the film had to say was more cerebral than emotional, which is interesting coming from Truffaut.

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zedz
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Re: François Truffaut

#67 Post by zedz » Thu Apr 30, 2020 10:59 pm

A GORGEOUS GIRL LIKE ME

I keep plugging gaps in my Truffaut experience hoping that one of these days I might see something that will justify his reputation. That hope remains unfulfilled with this tedious farrago. Like Domino, I'd always found Bernadette Lafont an appealing screen presence, but her charm swiftly turns rancid amidst all this movie’s forced zaniness. She’s playing opposite the chronically fake Andre Dussolier, who's barely registering, and surrounded by various broad caricatures. Technically, this is a black comedy, but it’s so stylistically bland and bereft of laughs it barely qualifies as such.


THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR

After a quirkily self-reflexive opening that’s immediately abandoned (and might have added some life to a very tired film if it had been sustained) we plunge into yet another of Truffaut’s misogynist fantasies about a hot unstable chick. Fanny Ardant here is a lot better than Isabelle Adjani in Adele H. (who isn't?), but her character remains a slap in the face, especially when, at the basic level of plot and behaviour, it’s Depardieu’s character that’s begging to be pathologized.

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Re: François Truffaut

#68 Post by Calvin » Sat Sep 05, 2020 5:02 pm

It sadly looks like there won't be English subtitles, but Arte are releasing a new Truffaut box set in France this November that will contain The Bride Wore Black, The Wild Child, Mississippi Mermaid, A Beautiful Girl Like Me, The Story of Adele H, Small Change, The Man Who Loved Women, and The Green Room - a few of which are Blu-Ray firsts.

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Re: François Truffaut

#69 Post by Rayon Vert » Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:31 am

Thanks for the news. This is very welcome not only because of the BR firsts, but others notoriously have had burned-in subtitles.

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Re: François Truffaut

#70 Post by kekid » Tue Sep 08, 2020 11:02 pm

Who has rights to the English friendly Blu Ray of "The Green Room" ?

Stefan Andersson
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Re: François Truffaut

#71 Post by Stefan Andersson » Fri Oct 09, 2020 2:18 pm

The Arte Bluray Truffaut box set has 25 pfs masters - reported in an Oct. 9, 2020 post here:
https://www.dvdclassik.com/forum/viewto ... 9#p2847507
Subsequent posts discuss 1080i and possibility of TV masters being used.

Box contents:
https://boutique.arte.tv/detail/coffret ... s-truffaut

Carlotta is releasing nine MK2 Truffaut titless, six on Blu and DVD, three on DVD only. The Blu discs have French HOH subs and some extras. The DVDs have English subs and a wider array of extras.
https://laboutique.carlottafilms.com/co ... s-truffaut

Are these the same masters as the Artificial Eyes? With the same subtitles? Would much appreciate such info!

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tenia
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Re: François Truffaut

#72 Post by tenia » Fri Oct 09, 2020 2:32 pm

To be exact, the Arte Truffaut set has specs with duration calculated at 25 fps. There's no certainty yet it's because it'll really be 1080i50.
The specs however mention HD, 2k and 4k, and I'd suppose everything stating HD will be older pre existing masters.

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Re: François Truffaut

#73 Post by Stefan Andersson » Fri Oct 09, 2020 2:57 pm

Hi Tenia, thanks for your reply. Seems I should wait for reviews (if any) of these discs, with final technical specs.

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Re: François Truffaut

#74 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Jan 02, 2021 1:59 am

Truffaut would probably be at or near the bottom of a ranked list of nouvelle vague filmmakers if I chose to make one, but Two English Girls is a quiet masterpiece even more powerful on a second watch as it was when I first caught it five years ago. His diplomatic style is fitting for this novelistic merge of subjective-immersed-in-primarily-objective accounts that form a great tragedy of elusive love. Truffaut implements a delicate handling of a deceptively casual affair, and over the course of two hours, covertly implicates that the strongest feelings are felt in isolation for what is absent, as opposed to in harmony with another for what is present. Love, defined this way, is both authentically-externalized and deeply egocentric, self-pity is the inevitable pain and glory at once, and we must swallow the bitter pill in understanding that love’s elusiveness isn’t happening to us, but propagated by the flawed cortex of intolerance embedded in human condition.

Better films have been made that touch on our failure to appreciate what we have and our preoccupation with only yearning for what we don't, but rarely is this irony expressed in a manner where all the characters are perpetually confused by these fleeting yet dominating emotions, kept at a distance from one another and themselves. I get why people don't care for this- these characters aren't well-known and those 'better' films charitably let us into their characters' subjectivity as surrogates, but Truffaut's magnum opus is admirable precisely because our distance matches the characters' aloofness from their own existential cores. When we are allotted subjective intensity, it's always coming from a character who is feeling isolated, and desperately longing for another person, not 'as they are' but through fantastical idolatry. We can relate to this, as can some of us to the numbed state of detaching for apparently no reason at all, or at least none that we can comprehend. This film doesn't gouge the viewer with brutal submersion into this nebulous territory, but it also doesn't suggest a solution for catharsis. The film comes to an ethereal finish, yet there's a seething discomfort as we realize the barriers to intimacy are so enigmatic that there's no transparent diagnosis we can extract to take mental notes for our own self-actualization, as one of those more digestible films may have provided for us in the past.

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barbarella satyricon
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Re: François Truffaut

#75 Post by barbarella satyricon » Sat Jan 02, 2021 9:48 am

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sat Jan 02, 2021 1:59 am
Two English Girls is a quiet masterpiece
Thanks for the write-up and for bringing this one back into view. I feel that revisiting this would be something of a time-machine trip, as it came so early in my years of adolescent film-watching, when I was caught up in the first flush of discovery and driven by dual auteurist/completist impulses. Its memory is a hazy, gauzy one in my mind (maybe from the look of the film itself) and associated with a mouldering library copy of a Pauline Kael book that contained a review of it (not very favorable, if I recall correctly). Of all the late-period Truffaut I’ve seen, I suspect this is the one that would reveal the most layers, things that eluded or just glided past me way back when. Thanks for the reminder. I hadn’t thought of it in ages.

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