Film Comment (1985) - The Man Who Loved
Details
- magazine article: The Man Who Loved
- author(s): Todd McCarthy
- journal: Film Comment (01/Jan/1985)
- issue: volume 21, issue 1, page 44
- journal ISSN: 0015-119X
- publisher: Film Society of Lincoln Center
- keywords: "The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock" - by Donald Spoto, Alfred Hitchcock, American Film Institute, André Bazin, Bernard Herrmann, Brian De Palma, Claude Chabrol, Donald Spoto, François Truffaut, Grace Kelly, Helen Scott, Hotels & motels, Ingrid Bergman, Marnie (1964), Martin Scorsese, Motion picture directors & producers, Peter Bogdanovich, Swimming, Tippi Hedren, Éric Rohmer
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Abstract
For Hollywood, Truffaut represented an elusive ideal, a director who always created and wrote his own films, whose films made enough money on average to allow him to continue as he pleased, who knew Hollywood and its history better than they did and respected its traditions, but still would not become involved in it as a participant.
Article
"Jean's got a lot of talent," Darryl Zanuck once said of Jean Renoir, "but he's not one of us." It could be said that the New Hollywood felt the same way about François Truffaut — but with feelings of respect, admiration, envy, jealousy, and cultural lust. This outsider was a complete success on his own terms, and helped validate Hollywood filmmaking to the intelligentsia of the Western world. They needed him more than he needed them.
For Hollywood, Truffaut represented an elusive ideal, a director who always created and wrote his own films, whose films made enough money on average to allow him to continue as he pleased, who knew Hollywood and its history better than they did and respected its traditions, but still would not become involved in it as a participant. He was, to them, a Holy Alien, much like the extraterrestrials Truffaut himself was to confront in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Since my teens I have respected his work, but over the last nine years — through a privileged accident — I observed him from the other side, from his point of view. In 1975 and 1976, 1 supervised distribution of The Story Of Adèle H. and Small Change in the United States. Since that time, I spent hundreds of hours in his company, at long lunches and dinners, parties, screenings, seminars and official functions, at the home of Jean and Dido Renoir, or translating his interviews with journalists. I saw him playing with his daughters, tipsy on a date, and working on a script. I helped wheedle a rare English-language performance out of him (the narration of the trailer for Small Change), and later "acted" a silent role in one of his pictures.
Along with Jean Renoir, Truffaut was the person in films I both liked and loved the most. His passion for the cinema was total and unquenchable; whenever my enthusiasm for new films ebbed any contact with him instantly revived it. His tremendous productivity was also contagious, and stands as the one possible consolation that can be taken from his early death. With his death, we who grew up with and were inspired by Truffa...
