Francois Truffaut Biography
François Trauffaut was born in Paris in 1932. During the German occupation, as a child, he took refuge in the cinemas of Montmartre, finding relief from childhood maladjustment in noir narratives or love stories. As a teenager, he was 'adopted' by the great critic André Bazin, who got him out of the Villejuif reformatory, finding him a job in the cinema section of "Travail et culture". After a period spent in prison for desertion, it was Bazin who got him hired at the Service cinématografique of the Ministry of Agriculture (1953) and who made him join the editorial staff of the magazines "Arts" and "Cahiers du cinéma" as a critic.
In 1954, one of his articles published in the "Cahiers du cinéma" and entitled Une certaine tendence du cinéma français caused a great stir and François Trauffaut stood out, at just twenty-two years of age, as one of the harshest and most intransigent critics, characterized by outbursts of total admiration for some directors. After having moved from militant criticism to direction with some short films, such as Une visite (1954), Les mistons (1957; The difficult age), which already anticipated some key themes of his cinema, and Histoire d'eau (1958) directed with Godard made his feature film debut with a work with a strong autobiographical, intense and painful flavour, Les 400 coups, dedicated to the memory of his 'saviour', Bazin, who died on the eve of the first take, but also to his own childhood memory.
Thanks to the unexpected success of the first film and thanks to his critical activity, François Trauffaut penetrated the poetic universe of the great masters he loved and appropriated it, using it as a precious laboratory of knowledge, craft and technique. From Rossellini he learned the taste for clarity and logic; from Lubitsch the art of indirect communication; from Renoir that the actor is more important than the character. Based on a radical interpretation of the theory of the politique des auteurs that he helped formulate in the 1960s, François Trauffaut conceived his films as challenges, the most important of which is to submit to codes, for example those of genres and, at within these constraints, find the greatest freedom of action.
The most important aspect of his work, however, was the concept of cinema taken 'to the extreme', that is, a need for cinema that pushed the director to take risks and launch challenges, for example, shooting in the years that he defined as ' of ideological terrorism' two extraordinary films for intellectual freedom and non-conformism such as Baisers volés and La sirène du Mississippi (1969; My drug is called Julie), but also avoiding clichés, current ideas, fashions and experimentalism.
A very young cinéphile, bitter polemicist, loving editor of books, tender director, award-winning author and unforgettable actor of some of his films, the stages of his existence are all here, linked to cinema, incomprehensible without cinema, this indirect art, as he himself he defined it, which hides while showing.
