Left-wing critics in this country seem to have been thrown distinctly off-balance by Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste. No one has had the nerve to write, though some people have said, that Truffaut may have to be written off as a serious film-maker if this is the way he intends to carry on. Apparently the audience which saw the film at a meeting of the French Federation of Ciné Clubs towards the end of last year shared some of these reservations. At any rate, Cinéma 61 in its January issue published Truffaut's detailed answers to the questions asked him; answers which are revealing of the artist's position, and not irrelevant in relation to the critic's.

The basis of these critics' dissatisfaction is nothing more or less than a sense of let-down. Les Quatre cents coups was humanist, engaged, autobiography with a conscience. It was also a film which satisfied everyone, arousing instantaneous sympathy and liking. Yes, Truffaut says rather bitterly, "I started out to make a little film, something which the press would quietly encourage but which people wouldn't go to see. Then I saw this modest little family enterprise become a big international success … It belonged to the public which has no affection for the cinema, to the man who goes to the pictures once a year to see Bridge on the River Kwai or the new Clair film, the public I mistrust most in the world." And so: "This time I wanted to please only the real enthusiasts … and my only rule in making Tirez sur le pianiste was my own pleasure … I would call the film a respectful pastiche of the Hollywood B-film, from which I have learnt such a lot."

"I know," Truffaut says, "that there is nothing the public dislikes more than abrupt changes of mood, but I have always loved them …" Practically speaking, the remarkable thing is that he was able to carry out this disregard for audience tastes, to make the film as he wanted. And what did he want to make? A record, almost, of a love affair with the cinema, a film full of jokes and allusions and tricks and charm. Godard's dedication of A Bout de Souffle "to Monogram Pictures" and Truffaut's avowed desire to do a pastiche of the B-picture are very personal variations on the French intellectuals' passionate attachment to a dream America. Truffaut has clearly haunted the cinema since his childhood. Tirez sur le pianiste exists so much in the context of other films that you feel anyone who hasn't followed at least something of his own route to it could only be mystified.

To be pompous about a film like this, treating its director like a youth club leader who has been caught carrying a flick-knife, is merely trying to dragoon the artist into one's own camp. He has no intention of being pinned down, as his film makes sufficiently clear. His answer to the second question asked him—"why dodge the big issues of our time?"—is even more specific.

"You can," he says, "find my film useless, a misfire, a negation, anything you like. What I don't accept is your right to tell me that I ought to have been making something else instead … When a journalist asks me 'Why aren't young filmmakers doing pictures about Algeria?', what I'd like to answer is 'Why don't you write a book about Algeria?' Because you wouldn't know just what to write? Well, then, I wouldn't know what to film!" He goes on to attack the Stanley Kramer type of problem picture, with its holier than thou self-righteousness, its lack of urgency or desperate conviction. "You can only," he says, "talk of the 'big problems' with devastating sincerity if they really keep you from sleeping at night." And consequently: "If, being what I am, I had tackled one of these 'big subjects' you want me to film, approaching it from the outside, I would have been dishonest since there would still have been in my heart a sleeping pianist …"

One's sympathies are all on Truffaut's side. This is the way an artist functions; and for the critic to stand on the sidelines and try to shout the players down is not only futile but mannerless. Truffaut has chosen an obvious example to quote against his critics: films like Kramer's The Defiant Ones and On the Beach, so respectable, so genuinely well-meaning, so unassailably correct, are empty precisely because the sense of involvement at a personal level is missing. The element of evasive smugness in the social conscience film has itself become a cliché, from Kazan's Pinky, which made it easy to sympathise with its Negro heroine because, after all, she was really Jeanne Grain, to Guy Green's The Mark, which appeals for a more tolerant attitude to sex criminals but won't take the risk of making its hero guilty of anything more substantial than an impulse.

All the same, Truffaut is really taking us down a false trail. No one expects the filmmaker dutifully to sit down with a list of "big subjects" and tick them off one by one. What one could say is that his understandable retreat from the intimidating difficulty of the social subjects needn't lead him all the way to a private fantasy world of his own. We can't, again, presume to tell him that he ought to be concerned with some aspect of social reality; but we can ask why he isn't, what is the condition of the society he's living in which makes him so unwilling to come to grips with it. Tirez sur le pianiste is almost a classic example of the kind of work John Berger means, I think, in the quotation I've used earlier in these notes. To enjoy it fully you must "accept what the artist himself is trying to do … that it is necessary for him to create a kind of tidal world of flux …"

It isn't very difficult to do this: to enjoy the mixture of character study, gangster fantasy, comedy and pathos; to take Truffaut's film precisely at his own evaluation of it and to recognise the honesty as well as the impudence which has gone into its making. It throws off sparks like a catherine-wheel, a fizzing, dazzling, short-lived divertissement. It comes not from an uncommitted artist, but from an artist who recognises in himself the necessity to be committed all the way. And his emphasis on the difficulty (the emotional, rather than the economic problem) of this is something on which critics of the left might usefully comment.