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Showing posts with label François Truffaut. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

François Truffaut - La Sirène du Mississipi AKA Mississippi Mermaid (1969)

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Mississippi Mermaid is a rich and tropical amalgam of the post-war French fascination with the great American tradition of gritty urban thrillers and Francois Truffaut’s growing yearnings for settings more and more dystopian and exotic. Viewed today, the film remains a fascinating exploration of the major themes essayed by movie melodramas of betrayal – a sort of distillation of the amoral nucleus of Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) and the wilder settings of Key Largo (John Huston, 1948). Then there’s the added star presence of those great faces of the New Wave: Jean-Paul Belmondo, still carrying the cinematic baggage of his Bogey-obsessed and murderous madcap in À bout de souffle/Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), and Catherine Deneuve who would soon become the model for Marianne – the face that represents France for each new generation. It’s a heady, steamy brew! --Jonathan Dawson

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

François Truffaut - Letters (1989)

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This collects nearly all of Truffaut's extant correspondence, many were lost or simply never kept, a few have been withheld for personal reasons but what does remain still amounts to a very hefty and remarkable body of letters.

Perhaps this is a more enjoyable book to leaf through and let something catch your eye than to read in a strict chronological fashion. That said the early sections that capture the eventful years of Truffaut's late adolescence do possess quite a narrative thrust of their own: selling your friends most treasured possessions behind his back, a suicide attempt, desertion from the army, military incarceration...

It is a letter from 1973 though that has become infamous. It is one addressed to Godard and it is such a devastating and methodical dismantling of his narcissism that one can only suspect it had been percolating in Truffaut's mind for many years. Revenge is a dish best served cold...

Quote:

To Helen Scott from Paris, 9 January 1961

11 o'clock

Dear Helene,

Thank you for your latest letters.
In effect, Jeanne Moreau will be in New York around the 20th of this month, with which boyfriend I couldn't say. I spoke to her about you and she would like nothing better than to see you; perhaps you'll be disappointed in her, since I've noticed you continue to labour under quite a few illusions about performers, actors and stars. Can you imagine the kind of mentality that's needed to do a job like that? It means endlessly boosting yourself above other people, which basically comes down to belittling them; it starts off as a vocation, a quite sincere form of ambition, to be just as good as the next man, then better than the next man, then doing in the next man; stars are sad creatures, but there's something sickening about their sadness. Stars suffer because they're constantly being harassed; when they're no longer harassed, it's even worse. They work eight hours a day cutting themselves off from humanity and then claim to be able to express all human feeling. I tell you, there's not one of them any better than the others...

http://rapidshare.com/files/401901246/Letters.pdf

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Monday, June 21, 2010

Serge Leroy / Claude de Givrey / Bernard Revon / Guy Seligman - Les salades de l'amour - François Truffaut (1961 - 1986)

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Through five films (and two decades), Antoine Doinel captivated audiences around the world with his exploits. Collected here are materials that illustrate how Doinel came to be, from early theme-defining work to insights into the creative processes of the filmmakers.

Rip includes:

# Les mistons (The Mischief Makers)
1957 - 18 min - B&W - Dual audio
This 1957 short depicts a group of pubescent boys whose admiration of a young girl takes on an edge of cruelty, with unforeseen results. Truffaut's budding affinity for showing life through the eyes of children, along with his predilection for impossible loves, would later come to fruition in the Doinel series.
Secondary audio track contains the commentary for Les mistons by assistant director and future co-writer Claude de Givray

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# Audio/visual “primer” for Les mistons by film historian Serge Toubiana
1957 - 1.45 min – B&W

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# Working with François Truffaut: Claude de Givray and Bernard Revon, co-writers
2003 - 44 min – Color
This rare interview with co-writers Claude De Givray and Bernard Revon, conducted in April 1986 in Paris, was originally intended for Rainer Gansera's documentary Arbeiten mit François Truffaut, produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne. Only a few minutes were actually used, with the raw footage kept on very poor master tapes. The Criterion Collection gained access to these materials, and prepared a re-edited version exclusive to this box-set.

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# Excerpt from the rare documentary François Truffaut
1961 -24 min – B&W
Features Truffaut discussing his influences and beginnings, along with Les mistons and The 400 Blows

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# Interview from the 1981 French TV show Champ contre champ
1981 – 7 min – Color
Truffaut discusses Jean-Pierre Léaud and the challenges of creating films that are intensely personal, yet popular in appeal.

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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

François Truffaut - L'Histoire d'Adele H. AKA The Story of Adele H. (1975)

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Quote:

Francois Truffaut's dramatization of the true story of Adele Hugo, the daughter of French author-in-exile Victor Hugo, and her romantic obsession with a young French officer is a cinematically beautiful and emotionally wrenching portrait of a headstrong but unstable young woman. Adele (Isabelle Adjani, whose pale face gives her the quality of a cameo portrait) travels under a false name and spins a half-dozen false stories about herself and her relationship to Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson), the Hussar she follows to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pinson no longer loves her, but she refuses to accept his rejection. Sinking farther and farther into her own internal world, she passes herself off as his wife and pours out her stormy emotions into a personal journal filled with delusional descriptions of her fantasy life. Beautifully shot by Nestor Almendros in vivid color, Truffaut's re-creation of the 1860s is accomplished not merely in impressive sets and locations but in the very style of the film: narration and voiceovers, written journal entries and letters, journeys and locations established with map reproductions, and a judicious use of stills mix old-fashioned cinematic technique with poetic flourishes. The result is one of Truffaut's most haunting portraits, all the more powerful because it's true.

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François Truffaut - L'Amour en fuite AKA Love on the Run (1979)

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Francois Truffaut took a few steps toward modernism with this very self-conscious experiment in narrative form (1979). It's not so much another episode in the Antoine Doinel cycle as a reflection on it, using extensive clips from the previous features to examine the ways in which art devours life--a theme that has always been present in Truffaut's autobiographical cinema, but never so directly stated. Still, the results are more interesting than satisfying; it is a film more thought than felt. With Jean-Pierre Leaud, Marie-France Pisier, and Claude Jade.

François Truffaut - L'Enfant Sauvage aka The Wild Child (1970)

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Quote:

A movie like this can be viewed in two main ways: a human example of a scientific study (with on screen replications of the study, and a moral conclusion); or a lesson in learning for the participants (the wild child will learn how to spell his adopted name; his teacher -- and we the audience -- will learn how to feel!). Truffaut kind of merges both into something of unique value. It feels a little removed, and it becomes clear that that's to prevent sentimentality. It's unsentimental, but Truffaut is a quiet master; as is the case with David Lynch's "The Elephant Man," his auteur sensibilities shine through the story so that it fits in neatly with his catalogue -- here we have another film with a naked boy's bum, and young children being goofy and walking in packs. What the film is is an intense magnification of the troubles of child-rearing, emphasized twofold by Truffaut's role in the film: he is the "mother" giving birth to the film; and he is the father raising this "wild child" within the film; good-natured, but without the inherent understanding of the boy that his housekeeper has (and without the inherent understanding Truffaut the director has of cinema).

Is it possible to feel bad watching a Truffaut film? And even better than making you feel good, he's not being sneaky about it -- instead of crass manipulation (and what kind of film could be more easily made manipulative than a one about boy left to survive in a forest and how he learns to be "human"?), he imbues each frame with soft, gentle love; so instead of jerking our emotions around via contrivance of the characters, he trusts us enough -- and his own talent enough -- to allow us to latch on to feeling his respect and love for cinema itself. (And he wisely keeps the film in mostly medium shots.) Nothing is really highlighted, but occasionally a particular image will be so fine that it's hard not to notice it, like the one where the camera is raised above Victor as he slouches back to his room after being told he can't accompany Truffaut to the doctor. (Or the sly visual gag where Truffaut is teaching Victor letters with the boy's fingers, and he manages to basically flip the audience the bird -- then has Truffaut swat his fingers with a cane.)

Truffaut isn't interested in the kind of acting displays that normally accompany this kind of film; the acting is subdued and realistic (but then again, how would we ever know how a wild child would act?). The boy is limited to acting without words, and it's a very good performance: whether he's grinning wildly in a bath or swaying back and forth or opening his mouth as wide as it can go in an act of effrontery, it's a performance that refuses to indicate how we should feel. There are some scenes that portray confusion so well but don't rub our noses in it, like the one where he's trying his hardest to follow instructions and eat his soup properly, but can't help himself and sticks his face in the bowl. After Victor makes a craft and impresses Truffaut with it, Truffaut writes in his ongoing journal how joyful he is but to forgive his enthusiasm over such a small triumph -- that's the best way to describe how the film feels: a series of small triumphs of gentle subtlety.

François Truffaut - L'Argent de poche AKA Small Change (1976)

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In the town of Thiers, summer of 1976, teachers and parents give their children skills, love, and attention. A teacher has his first child, a single mother hopes to meet Mr. Right, another mom reaches out to Patrick, a motherless lad who is just discovering the opposite sex. Patrick befriends Julien, a new student who lives in poverty with his mother and has a terrible secret. Bruno shows his friends how to chat up girls. Sylvie stages a witty protest against her parents. Brothers give a friend a haircut. A toddler falls from a window and is unhurt. Everybody goes to the cinema. At camp, Martine catches Patrick's eye. A teacher explains: "Life is hard, but it's wonderful."

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No pass

François Truffaut - La Chambre Verte aka The Green Room (1978)

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Quote:

The Green Room is a thoughtful, reverent adaptation of Henry James'The Altar of the Dead. Julien Davenne (François Truffaut) is a lonely, disillusioned widower who writes for The Globe, an obsolete, nearly defunct newspaper (with a target audience of elderly people, its subscription base is literally dying). From his methodical, dispassionate demeanor, it is obvious that he is sleepwalking through life. He is, in fact, emotionally dead (Truffaut's cold, deadpan performance is intriguing to watch). He spends his evenings looking at slides of war casualties, and sitting alone in a green room, where he has carefully assembled his late wife's possessions. He attempts to console his recently widowed friend, Gerard, by telling him to channel his grief into serving his wife's memory: "The dead only belong to us if we agree to belong to them." He is later appalled to learn that Gerard has become involved with another woman. When Julien meets a pensive, charming auction secretary named Cecilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye) who has experienced a similar loss, they decide to build a memorial in the bombed ruins of an abandoned church to honor their lost loved ones (note the effect of a similar act in Rene Clement's Forbidden Games). The haunting tragedy of the story lies in the characters' motives for the shrine. Cecilia envisions the memorial as a means of achieving healing and closure. To Julien, it is the culmination of his dedicated service to the memory of the dead. Having completed his life's work, his reason for existence is lost. The Green Room is a touching, cerebral film about grief, guilt, and survival.

François Truffaut uses a color palette that is washed and pale to set the thematic tone of the film (similar techniques are used in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice). The opening battle scenes, filmed in black and white with blue tint, are almost monochromatic. The house, including the commemorative green room, appears dark, cold, and uninviting in tepid, washed colors. Julien is pale, unremarkable, and relatively expressionless. The effect is brooding and somber, a reflection of Julien's morbid preoccupation. The Green Room is a devastating portrait of a man consumed by such profound grief that he is incapable of experiencing the beauty and joy of life. It is a highly disturbing and provocative film about a man's self-destructive myopic obsession with loss and mortality.

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