François Truffaut

Start Free Trial

François Truffaut

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Testa considers religion and spirituality in Truffaut's work, contrasting his cosmology with the beliefs of his mentor André Bazin.
SOURCE: "François Truffaut," in Religion in Film, edited by John R. May and Michael Bird, University of Tennessee Press, 1982, pp. 210-18.

Among film makers whose work has received treatment by critics considering the religious dimension of cinema, a particularly complex figure is François Truffaut. The leading student of André Bazin, Truffaut reflects in his films his own belief that human consciousness and experience must be bound to language and culture. For Bazin, human consciousness is directly grounded in Being, and for him the special role of film is to express this grounding in a manner free of "those piled-up conceptions, that spiritual dust and grime," which our culture has imposed upon our grasp of reality. In contrast to his mentor, Truffaut believes rather that experience is always mediated by culture and that human consciousness is constituted by language. This conviction is increasingly evident during the progress of Truffaut's career, attaining mature expression in Fahrenheit 451 and The Wild Child.

Bazin's film theory was evolutionary. He argued that the tradition of "faith in reality" exerted pressure on the history of film such that there was a gradual withering away of cultural accretions on the essential photographic realism of the film medium. Bazin expressed this theory by writing a history of film style that showed the realist tradition progressively displacing the tradition based on "faith in montage and the image." Certain of Bazin's views come to forceful expression in Truffaut's critical writings, as, for example, in his discussion of two adaptations of Georges Bernanos' novel The Diary of a Country Priest, one by the leading French scenarist Jean Aurenche (it was never filmed) and the famous version later made by Robert Bresson.

In his comparison, Truffaut reveals how close he is to Bazin and even establishes his argument by drawing upon Catholic phenomenological film criticism that had extended Bazin's realism into an explicitly theological approach to film. He draws on this critical school's position that film can go beyond psychology to express religious consciousness. Truffaut adapts this view to support his own contention that the auteur can share and express Bernanos' religious sensibility in film. Conventional French film makers, represented for example by Jean Aurenche, had thought such a sensibility in a novel to be "unfilmable."

The "certain tendency" Truffaut uncovers is that the French cinema of the fifties is dominated by a tradition of quality in which the work of a few scenarists determines the aesthetics of French film as a whole. The position developed by Aurenche and others is that many classical novels are at least in part impossible to convey to the screen unless mediated by psychological realism, a system of equivalents devised by the scenarist. Nevertheless, as Truffaut points out (citing Bazin's "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson"), the finished Bressonian adaptation of Bernanos is totally faithful, thus proving that the "unfilmable" is but a determination made within the narrow confines of certain formulas. Truffaut then sarcastically suggests that the whole tradition of quality is but an impoverished set of formulas that allows script writers to dominate the directors who shoot their scripts. Consequently, when adaptations are made, says Truffaut, all novels seem to be the same novel since they have to conform to the same formula and their vision of human nature is limited to psychological realism. In contrast, the auteur like Bresson, when he sets out to do an adaptation, struggles to find true filmic equivalents and achieves greater fidelity because, paradoxically, he exercises greater freedom.

Truffaut's first three feature films indicate the kind of cinema he was to make over a twenty-year span. The 400 Blows (1959) opens the autobiographical Antoine Doinel cycle starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, to which Truffaut returned periodically through the 1960s, concluding with Love on the Run (1979). Shoot the Piano Player (1960) initiates the series of genre films that run through the 1960s and seem to have ended with the nearly self-parodic disaster Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1972). Jules and Jim (1961) is the first of two Henri-Pierre Roché adaptations; the second is Two English Girls (1971). Both works deal with the agonized passage from the romanticism of the nineteenth century into the modern period. Close to the Roché films are the curious The Story of Adele H. (1975), based on the journal of Adele Hugo but thematically treated as a gloss on both the Roché films and the Doinel cycle, and The Green Room (1978), based on Henry James' "The Altar of the Dead." The Wild Child (1969) stands somewhat apart from the kinds of films Truffaut has made, almost as a thematic essay, though it too is a film based on a journal, from the eighteenth-century Doctor Itard, whom Truffaut himself plays in the film. Day for Night (1973) and The Last Metro (1980), appearing after several lesser works, are Truffaut's hommages to film and theater respectively.

Seeds are planted in The 400 Blows that spring up in the subsequent Doinel films and separate Antoine from the tradition of the Bazinian realist hero. The love of the child Antoine for Balzac anticipates the growth of the character into a "symbolizer" who does not confront his reality but dreams and insists on his romantic projections. Truffaut both sympathizes with and chides this later Antoine. The sympathy is everywhere—in Antoine's quirky loves, in his comic eagerness and aching seriousness, and in his immersion in the working world around him, most often figured by Truffaut as a social collective (a figure borrowed from Renoir), such as the detective office in Stolen Kisses and the courtyard in Bed and Board. The recurring critique of Antoine is placed by Truffaut in those privileged moments where Antoine's direct encounters with women divest him of the enchanted image he has projected on them.

In Bed and Board, Antoine becomes a novelist of autobiographical persuasion. This not only cues the viewer to his cultural self-interpretation and to the privileges of language as his special medium, but Antoine's novel-writing also doubles the process of the Doinel cycle as a whole, reflecting the ethical problems of Truffaut's autobiographical cinema. James Monaco in The New Wave (1976) sees this doubling as a self-reflexive meditation on the role of the film maker; one might also add that it expresses Truffaut's deliberate "fall" from the aspiration of a direct realism into the complexities of the languages of writing and film. The re-flexivity of Antoine, however self-involved, points out that the films, too, are the products of reflection, that they are constructed bits of language: in short, that they are writing.

Monaco observes, "Our main sense of [Antoine] in Bed and Board as in The 400 Blows is deeply colored by his isolation." But this isolation is of a new sort, for it is grounded in Antoine's novel-writing rather than on his bold dash for freedom as in the earlier film. Still, the novel itself is being written in service to that dash, for Antoine is now reinventing himself through memory, through writing. In this way, Bed and Board recalls the solitude of The 400 Blows not only to remind us of Antoine's irreducible humanity, but also to acknowledge his growth from an unguarded child into a self-mythologizing artist. And that artist is now re-creating the child just as Truffaut himself re-created himself as Antoine.

That Truffaut has refused to allow the cycle's resolution in Bed and Board to stand, but takes it back with Love on the Run, marks just how far he has moved from Bazin, for whom a character's growth should lead to a reconciliation with Being, to facing reality itself. Truffaut never allows this final reconciliation; his characters remain forever self-complicating. Why? Because for Truffaut there is no humanity outside culture, no "really real," no "ground of being" to which human consciousness has access. There is for Truffaut only the ethically frail, much-flawed means of language that we have all inherited from our culture.

Outside the Doinel cycle, Truffaut also mounts a somewhat more systematic consideration of his concerns with the exploration of characters as inheritors of culture and users of language, and he sometimes does so with greater urgency than is found in the gently unfolding story of Antoine. It is in Fahrenheit 451 and The Wild Child that Truffaut's theological anthropology is most fully thematized. At stake here is the question of what constitutes the human and what connects the individual to reality. For Truffaut, reality is always mediated by culture, the "producer" of meaningful language, even though its results are ambiguous: for language loses the reality that it opens to love at the same moment it discloses it. This is why Truffaut at once celebrates and criticizes Antoine's romanticism, for Antoine's love would be impossible without a specific cultured language to evoke it and give it form even as it distorts love and has to be corrected-by, humanly enough, the beloved.

The expository sequences of Fahrenheit 451 are surprisingly undramatic. The absence of books and of all but the most functional language has reduced the people of the future into unfeeling, sedated monads, typified by the hero Montag (Oscar Werner) and his wife, Linda (Julie Christie). In films within the dystopian subgenre of science fiction movies (like THX 1138 or Nineteen Eighty-four) to which this Truffaut film belongs, interpersonal love, the bearer of authentic humanity, is conventionally placed in rebellious opposition to the inhuman coldness of the futurist society. But Truffaut sets up a conflict on a very different plane, between culture and society. The characters in this film remain as impersonal as the society around them. The acting is muted and even Montag's relationship with Clarisse (also played by Julie Christie) is cold.

The film narrates Montag's discovery of literature through which he discovers his human identity. Eventually, he and Clarisse move to the fringes of society where they join the book-people, those who individually memorize a single book and become that book, even changing their names. And it is there, among the book people, that human discourse, and with it humane existence, is resumed as recitation. Not human nature or its usual manifestations, love, rebellion, or freedom, but human work, the work of culture and language, is the basis of humanity discovered and cultivated in Fahrenheit 451.

Truffaut treats the same theme, though with far greater depth and grace, in The Wild Child. Some have seen the life of Victor before his capture as a nature idyll. But Truffaut clearly does not. Although, as Monaco reports, Truffaut has toned down the violence originally planned for the opening sequences, the finished film still shows Victor either desperately struggling to survive or rocking back and forth in his tree-top perch in an autistic trance. The middle of the film, while hardly a paean to civilized society, shows that the boy is reviled as subhuman precisely because he fails to live up to the myth of the noble savage—the very myth that predisposes viewers to misread the film's opening as an idyll.

Dr. Itard (Truffaut himself) proves to be the serious representative of human culture. Itard conceives humanity to be the product of work, the labor of education. Once Victor arrives at Itard's home-laboratory, and his senses are loosened from the rictus his constant struggle for survival has induced, The Wild Child becomes the story of the acculturation of the boy, a process that consists of his learning language (broadly understood to include table manners, dress codes, and so on) and each step in this process is accompanied by Victor's emergence as a human personality.

Itard's journal, read off-screen to cover ellipses and to double for narrative with commentary, at times expresses the doctor's doubts about the benefits of civilization, but the film moves inexorably toward the disclosure of Victor's soul, the final experiment Itard performs. This is the painful sequence in which Itard unjustly punishes Victor during one of his lessons. The boy rebels, thus showing he has the power to tell right from wrong. It is no accident that this episode should become the final experiment, for the emergence of personhood in Truffaut's cinema does not occur through any exfoliation of human essence but through the power of language to expose the soul.

The Story of Adele H., also from a "found text," the solipsistic journals of Adele Hugo, reverses the process of The Wild Child. We are told through titles that Adele invented her own language. She is shown writing obsessively throughout the film, inventing a whole universe of romance for herself and the military officer who has already jilted her—and will do so again and again. Eventually, Adele leaves the real world, which she physically wanders through like a specter, and enters wholly into a fantasy universe. In a sense, she is an extreme version of what Antoine could have become had he lived in a period of high romanticism as Adele did. Next to Two English Girls and The Green Room, Adele H. is easily the darkest, most pessimistic of Truffaut's films, for it relentlessly traces, with immense tenderness and detail, a descent into what for this director could only be a damnation—the delusion of language itself. Its inevitable successor, The Green Room, is a long meditation on a dying sensibility that seems in space to exist in the anteroom of hell, in time to teeter on the edge of muted apocalypse. Julien Davenne (Truffaut) sinks into an obsessive contemplation of his dead wife; another woman, Cecilia, speaks to him of life and the future, but unlike so many Truffaut heroines, she fails to draw Julien out of his symbolized universe.

Over the span of two decades, and a diversity of film themes and subjects, Truffaut has constructed a cinematic opus that both derives from and departs from his mentor André Bazin. The spirituality of these varied works, beginning in psychological realism, tends toward an evocation of a religious transcendence (or depth) through images of fugitive flights, the act of writing (a re-invention through memory), the struggle between a romantic past and a modern present, between rapture and realism. There is no articulated spirituality in that there is no readily recognizable relationship of events and images to an ultimate reality or ground of being. Rather what emerges is the gently latent possibility that one comes face to face with the problem of individual and collective destiny only when confronted with the catastrophic threat of the deterioration and ultimate loss of language and culture. Truffaut's ambiguous evocations invite, in fact require, bringing to these films an independent theological judgment which for Bazin and the films of the Neorealists and Bresson would have been inherent in the artistic work itself.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Adaptation of an Auteur: Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1961) from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché

Next

Antoine's First and Final Adventure

Loading...