A Companion to Francois Truffaut

by Andrew, Dudley; Gillain, Anne

• ISBN13: 9781118321591
• ISBN10: 1118321596
• Edition: 1st
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2013-04-23
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The 34 essays of this collection by leading international scholars reassess Truffaut's impact on cinema as they locate the unique quality of his thematic obsessions and his remarkable narrative techniques.  Almost 30 years after his death, we are presented with strikingly original perspectives on his background, influences, and importance.Bridges a gap in film scholarship with a series of 34 original essays by leading film scholars that assess the lasting impact of Truffaut’s work

• Provides striking new readings of individual films, and new perspectives on Truffaut’s background, influences, and importance
• Offers a wide choice of critical perspectives ranging from current reflections in film theories to articles applying methodologies that have recently been neglected or considered controversial
• Includes international viewpoints from a range of European countries, and from Japan, New Zealand, and Brazil
• Draws on Truffaut’s archives at the BiFI (Bibliotheque du film) in Paris
• Includes an extended interview with French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin concerning Truffaut’s shifting stature in French film culture and his manner of thought and work as a director

Author Biography

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Major Film Theories, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005), What Cinema Is! (2010), and Opening Bazin (2011), which won the SCMS Best Anthology Award for 2011. 

Anne Gillain is a Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College. She is known for her work on French cinema, particularly Francois Truffaut, in books that include Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (1988), Les 400 Coups (1991) and François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (2013).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Preface

Filmography

Part I: LA PLANETE TRUFFAUT

1. Interview, Part I: Truffaut and the Generations
Arnaud Desplechin

2. Truffaut and his “Doubles”
Martin Lefebvre

3. Aesthetic Affinities: Truffaut, Modiano, Sirk
Anne Gillain

4. Interview, Part II: Truffaut and his Methods
Arnaud Desplechin

Part II: STYLE AND SENSIBILITY

5. Flashes of Happiness
Alain Bergala

6. Truffaut and the Photographic: Cinema, Fetishism, Death
Junji Hori

7. The Impasse of Intimacy: Romance and Tragedy in Truffaut’s Cinema
John Orr

8. A Fine Madness: Digressions on Pathologies in Truffaut’s Films
Francis Vanoye

9. The Ecstatic Pan
Phil Powrie

10. The Untimely Moment and the Correct Distance
Adrian Martin

Part III: THE MAKING OF A FILMMAKER

11. Every Teacher needs a Truant (Bazin and L’Enfant Sauvage)
Dudley Andrew

12. Certain Tendencies of Truffaut’s Film Criticism
Richard Neupert

13. Truffaut-Hitchcock
Jonathan Haynes

14. The Paradox of “Familiarity”: Truffaut, Heir of Renoir
Ludovic Cortade

15. Cain and Abel: Godard and Truffaut
Michel Marie

16. Friction, Failure, and Fire: Truffaut as Adaptive Auteur
Timothy Corrigan

Part IV: TRUFFAUT AND HIS TIME

17. Growing up with the French New Wave
James Tweedie

18. Bad Objects: Truffaut’s Radicalism
Sam Di Iorio

19. Between Renoir and Hitchcock: The Paradox of Truffaut’s Women
Ginette Vincendeau

20. Truffaut in the Mirror of Japan
Kan Nozaki

Part V: FILMS

21. Directing Children: the Double Meaning of Self-Consciousness (Les 400 Coups)
Angela Dalle Vacche

22. Jules et Jim …et Walter Benjamin
Dudley Andrew

23. Digging up the past: Jules et Jim
Elizabeth Ezra

24. The Elevator and the Telephone: On Urgency in La Peau douce
Michel Chion

25. La Peau douce: A Psychogeography of Silky Cinephilia
Tom Conley

26. La Peau douce: Truffaut’s passionate object
Hilary Radner

27. An Unsettling Passage: From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte
Carlos Losilla

28. The Structural Role of Intervals in L’Argent de poche
Alain Bergala

29. To Die or to Love: Modern Don Juans in Truffaut and Oliveira  (L’Homme qui aimait les femmes)
Luiza Jatobá

30. Film as Literature, or the Truffauldian Malaise (L’Homme qui aimait les femmes)
Lúcia Nagib

31.  The Elegist: François Truffaut inside La Chambre verte
Philip Watts

32. La Chambre verte, and the Beating Heart of Truffaut’s Oeuvre
Françoise Zamour

33. Le Dernier Métro, an Underground Golden Coach
Jean-Michel Frodon

34. Disillusionment and Magic in La Nuit américaine and Le Dernier Métro
Marc Vernet