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François Truffaut

Bed and Board - Domicile conjugal (1970)

Bed and Board (1970) | Review by Pauline Kael

As this series of Antoine Doinel films has gone on, Truffaut has had less and less to say about his once semi-autobiographical hero, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, who has played Antoine since The 400 Blows, has grown away from the role.

Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966)

Pauline Kael on François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury’s idea of censorship lacks depth. But even worse is the on-screen depiction of the renegades’ solution to book burning—to have people “become” books. An issue intended to be serious becomes comic at the thought that people might devote their lives to some of the volumes shown burning on-screen.

Day for Night (La Nuit Américaine, 1973) – Review by Pauline Kael

Day for Night has the Truffaut proportion and grace, and it can please those who have grown up with Truffaut’s films — especially those for whom Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel has become part of their own autobiographies, with Antoine’s compromises and modest successes paralleling their own.

ADAPTATION OF AN AUTEUR: TRUFFAUT’S JULES ET JIM (1961) FROM THE NOVEL BY HENRI-PIERRE ROCHÉ – by Stuart Y. McDougal

In 1956, François Truffaut was browsing in a Paris bookstore when his eyes fell on a copy of Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché. He was immediately drawn to the title and, as he studied the jacket, intrigued to discover that it was a septuagenarian’s first novel. At the time Truffaut was twenty-four and supporting him­self by writing film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts. He purchased the novel, took it home, and pored over it until, like a character in Fahrenheit 451, he knew it by heart.

JULES AND JIM – Review by Pauline Kael

Jules and Jim is not only one of the most beautiful films ever made, and the greatest motion picture of recent years, it is also, viewed as a work of art, exquisitely and impeccably moral.

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