Product Description

Here is the definitive story of one of the most celebrated filmmakers of our time, an intensely private individual who cultivated the public image of a man consumed by his craft. But as this absorbing biography shows, Truffaut's personal story-from which he drew extensively to create the characters and plots of his films-is itself an extraordinary human drama.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295462 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 476 pages

Amazon.com Review
The mass movie audience knows him best as the sweet French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but François Truffaut (1932-1984) made his first thunderous impact on world cinema as "that young thug of journalism." In the 1950s, as this culturally savvy biography by two French film journalists reminds us, Truffaut and a group of like-minded friends at the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma blasted traditional French film as too literary and polished. They proclaimed the birth of rougher, more personal moviemaking by "auteurs" (directors who wrote their own scripts) who were as intoxicated by the medium's possibilities as by the classic Hollywood movies these Young Turks adored. Truffaut practiced what he preached in early films like The Four Hundred Blows and Jules and Jim, which electrified a new generation of American directors who came of age in the 1960s. His private life was just as unconventional: though divorced from his first wife in 1965, they remained business associates through his many affairs with actresses (to whom he was also chronically unfaithful), and he even moved back in with her for a while when the brain tumor that ultimately killed him made it impossible to function alone. His biographers convey all this turbulent material with Gallic lucidity and toughness, seeing no need to make their subject conventionally lovable by softening his sharp edges. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
When Steven Spielberg directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1976, he cast Franois Truffaut, the celebrated 44-year-old innovator of French new wave cinema, as a scientist specializing in UFOs. I needed, Spielberg recalled, a man who would have the soul of a child. In this extensively researched biography, film historians de Baecque and Toubiana dont fully capture the Truffaut whom Spielberg seemed to grasp so intuitively. An autodidact and teenage movie fanatic, Truffaut did a stint at a juvenile prison before being taken under the wing of film critic Andr Bazin, who helped launch his career. An illegitimate child, having never learned to bond, he seems to have also sought compensation in compulsive philandering. Truffaut was notorious for bedding beautiful women, usually actresses in his films, but every relationship (with the exception of that with his divorced wife, Madeleine, who was as loyal as he was faithless) was brief. De Baecque and Toubiana identify this drive, this thirst, this voracious need to seduce only in terms of his imposing his own style. Yet their most poignant pages show Truffaut, having found his real father through a private detective, spying on the old man as he takes his nightly walk. Truffauts courage failed him; rather than introduce himself, he fled to the darkness of a nearby cinema and watched an old Chaplin film. When Truffaut died at 52 in 1984, he was celebrated for what the authors call his hallmark style, defined here as often carefully orchestrated improvisation. Today his reputation is based upon a few significant successesamong them The 400 Blows (1959), Jules and Jim (1962) and The Last Mtro (1980)and many forgettable failures. Some fans may pick up Truffauts biography solely for its survey of his work, but the life that shaped it, though only partially realized here, is moving in its pathos. 68 b&w illustrations.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Who doesn't love Truffaut's films? The director of classics like Jules and Jim was clear-eyed in his probing of human folly but always had a light touch. So do the authors of this biography, an entertaining look at the man and his art that also offers a capsule history of French cinema in the last half of this century. (LJ 5/15/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A book that delves deeply into the life of Truffaut
The book starts from before day one, describing Truffaut's conception into the world as accidental and unwanted. We see parents who were much harsher and less loving in the bio than we do in The 400 Blows. We are presented with a boy genius turned truant, turned self-hating autodidact who by the grace of some magical force is redeemed. That magical force, of course, is the beauty and wonder of film. Amid this telling, we are given a lesson in French film history. Great names like Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, Goddard, and Cocteau. We see this young boy rise from a state of debilitating poverty to the ranks of polemical, ingenious film criticism. We are excited when this precocious film journalist rails against a heavily commercialized, stagnant film establishment, and we hold our breaths when this same critic turns director, and releases his first full length feature, The 400 Blows and wins the Cannes' Grand Jury Prize.

In this biography, the wonderful and important films that made Truffaut famous take a back seat. Instead, we see how his formative years inform his adult years in his search for love from actress, to actress, to actress. We see Truffaut's friendships and fall outs with brilliant filmmakers, and we see what goes on behind the scenes on the sets of his films. We realize, quite easily, that Truffaut the man is very special.

At the end of the book, we come away with at least a glimpse of the true essence of Truffaut--a singular genius, searching for love in life and through films; a humble creator who makes films to please no one but himself; a charming friend who prefers humor over sentimentality; and most of all, an intensely private individual who used film to articulate his deepest yearnings. Yes, Truffaut was a great film maker, but as this biography so convincingly shows, he was an even greater person.

Not definitive, but the best biography we have so far...
While I share the other reviewer's enthusiasm for this excellent biography, there were some problems with the book that suggest to me that there is more to be said about Mr. Truffaut. The jumps in time throughout the book were ominous, as if the authors either didn't have enough information or didn't want to write about a particular moment in Truffaut's life. The organization of the book into short chapters with titles like "Friends First" and "The Diminished Life" some only 3 or 4 paragraphs long interrupted the flow of the narrative for me and made it hard to keep names and events clearly in my mind's eye. The biography was strongest on the early and late periods in the director's life. The long middle section felt repetitive and I found myself wandering a bit. As other reviewers have pointed out: you wont' find any exhaustive information on the making of various films in this book. I am looking forward to reading the Insdorf book for film coverage. There is an exhaustive listing of Truffaut's written works at the end of the book, but a curiously short list of books an articles on Truffaut (24 listings primarily in French). I suspect that the publishers trimmed this list considerably, so you will have to look elsewhere for a comprehensive bibliography. Despite my criticisms I enjoyed this book a great deal and it has led me back to the films which are now enhanced from reading this biography.

Comprehensive and frequently touching biography
There was considerable autobiographical content to the movies of Truffaut, but they expose only a public side, frequently with a focus on male/female relations. Truffaut's childhood is exposed as sadder, but possibly less harsh than his image (and The 400 Blows) suggest. The rest of his life was lived to its fullest with many life-long friends, close working relationships and a touching continuity to his relations with the women in his life, even after the time of passion had passed. There are many references to French intellectuals and film-makers that will not be familiar to American readers and occassionally slow the book down. The description of the genesis of many of the famous movies and the time and troubles to be overcome to bring a movie to the viewer is as the best I have read. All-in-all, this is an entertaining and extremely well-written biography. The translation is seamless.