Truffaut: A Biography - Softcover

Antoine De Baecque; Serge Toubiana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520225244 ISBN 13: 9780520225244

Publisher: University of California Press, 2000

Synopsis

Here is the definitive story of one of the most celebrated filmmakers of our time, an intensely private individual who cultivated the public image of a man consumed by his craft. But as this absorbing biography shows, Truffaut's personal story―from which he drew extensively to create the characters and plots of his films―is itself an extraordinary human drama.

About this title

Review:

The mass movie audience knows him best as the sweet French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but François Truffaut (1932-1984) made his first thunderous impact on world cinema as "that young thug of journalism." In the 1950s, as this culturally savvy biography by two French film journalists reminds us, Truffaut and a group of like-minded friends at the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma blasted traditional French film as too literary and polished. They proclaimed the birth of rougher, more personal moviemaking by "auteurs" (directors who wrote their own scripts) who were as intoxicated by the medium's possibilities as by the classic Hollywood movies these Young Turks adored. Truffaut practiced what he preached in early films like The Four Hundred Blows and Jules and Jim, which electrified a new generation of American directors who came of age in the 1960s. His private life was just as unconventional: though divorced from his first wife in 1965, they remained business associates through his many affairs with actresses (to whom he was also chronically unfaithful), and he even moved back in with her for a while when the brain tumor that ultimately killed him made it impossible to function alone. His biographers convey all this turbulent material with Gallic lucidity and toughness, seeing no need to make their subject conventionally lovable by softening his sharp edges. --Wendy Smith

From the Inside Flap:

ost celebrated filmmakers of all time, Francois Truffaut was an intensely private individual who cultivated the public image of a man completely consumed by his craft. But his personal story--from which he drew extensively to create the characters and plots of his films--is itself an extraordinary human drama. Now, with captivating immediacy, Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana give us the definitive story of this beloved artist.

They begin with the unwanted, mischievous child who learned to love movies and books as an escape from sadness and confusion: as a boy, Francois came to identify with screen characters and to worship actresses. Following his early adult years as a journalist, during which he gained fame as France's most iconoclastic film critic, the obsessive prodigy began to make films of his own, and before he was thirty, notched the two masterpieces The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim. As Truffaut's dazzling body of work evolves, in the shadow of the p

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0520225244
• ISBN 13: 9780520225244
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 510