Francois Truffaut
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The Cine-Ghosts of Shirkers
Some of my best conversations have been with people who weren’t there. Absent was OK—even nonexistent was OK. As long as I imagined somebody was there. I did that as a prolific letter writer, I did that as a novelist, and most recently, I did that as a filmmaker. More than 20 years after the defining trainwreck of my youth—having my teacher/mentor disappear with all the footage of a 16mm film we’d shot together—I decided to make a film that would both document the joys and perils of teenage creativity and unfurl the detective work behind the mystery of the […]
by Sandi Tan on Sep 17, 2018 -
Personal Shopper: Assayas, Garrel, Truffaut, Godard, Lagerfeld and the Anxiety of Economic Influence
It only dawned on me last week — midway through four consecutive days spent at Lincoln Center’s Jean-Pierre Léaud retrospective — that Olivier Assayas and Philippe Garrel are essentially contemporaries. This isn’t obvious if you look at their filmographies: Garrel made his first short in 1964 (when he was all of 16!) and his first feature three years later. Assayas didn’t make his first short until 1979 and his first feature until 1986; looking at those dates, they’d appear to be filmmakers from different generations, even if at least somewhat temperamentally aligned in their backgrounds (both began as painters). Garrel was born in 1948, Assayas in 1955, and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 3, 2017 -
Watch: “François Truffaut On Roberto Rossellini & Alfred Hitchcock”
Kent Jones’ 2015 documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut airs tonight, August 8, on HBO at 9 p.m. EST. Inspired by François Truffaut’s book of the same title from 1966, the film delves into the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Here is a clip from the AFI Harold Lloyd Master Seminar where Truffaut discusses how Hitchcock and Roberto Rossellini influenced his own work.
by Marc Nemcik on Aug 8, 2016 -
“I Don’t Want to Make Audiovisual Historical Aids”: Kent Jones on Hitchcock/Truffaut
The formal title of Hitchcock/Truffaut (alternately Hitchcock and The Cinema According to Alfred Hitchcock) is a vexed question mooted by its famous title design: Hitchcock’s name on one side, François Truffaut’s on the other. First published in 1966 and revised before Truffaut’s death, it’s one of the most commonly name-checked starter texts for anyone looking to learn more about film. In a series of extensive, probing and relatively unguarded conversations, Truffaut guides Hitchcock through his work film-by-film. Illustrated by numerous stills (including one- and two-page layouts showing every shot choice from particularly famous/intense sequences, breaking them down in a lucid, teachable way), the book allows a director in total command […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 4, 2015 -
Lady Vengeance: The Bride Wore Black Review
Loaded with recognizable tropes just begging to be tampered with, genre film is fertile spoof material, as can be evidence by obvious examples like the pointless Scary Movie franchise, or even within the same film as in those slasher film that knowingly straddle the line between terror and comedy, or B-Movies so tongue-in-cheek campy they function both as a good-humored critique of the genres the are playing against as well as a standalone narratives in their own right. Francois Truffaut’s sometimes goofy, sometimes chilling 1969 film The Bride Wore Black is genre lampoonery in the hands of a French auteur, […]
by Farihah Zaman on Nov 14, 2011
