A Companion to François Truffaut	5
	Copyright	6
	Contents	7
	Acknowledgments	10
	Notes on Contributors	11
	Preface	17
	Filmography	25
	Part I La Planète Truffaut	27
	1 Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I: Truffaut And His Position	29
	Paris, June 18, 2010	29
	Notes	48
	2 Truffaut and His “Doubles”	49
	Reflecting on Reflections of Truffaut In His Films	61
	Photographs from a Family Album	62
	Picasso, Masked in the Filigree of Jules et Jim	65
	On Details	70
	Motifs Repeated and Inflected	84
	Other Kinds of Mirrors	87
	Notes	91
	3 Aesthetic Affinities: François Truffaut, Patrick Modiano, Douglas Sirk	97
	Imagination: “La Reine des Facultés”	97
	Emotion and Hypnosis	100
	David Stern’s Infant and the Spectator	103
	Tirez sur le pianiste: The Metaphoric Network	106
	Patrick Modiano: Literature and Amodal Perception	111
	La Femme d’à côté: Stylization and Repetitions	117
	Douglas Sirk: Deciphering Style	120
	Fiction and the Intersubjective Matrix	122
	Conclusion: The Obscure Side of the Moon	124
	Notes	126
	4 Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part II: Truffaut and His Methods	131
	Paris, June 19, 2010	131
	Part II Style and Sensibility	151
	5 Flashes of Happiness	153
	Communities, Good and Bad	153
	When the Stalling Stops	157
	Love is Not Cheerful	158
	Touching the Ground	160
	Untimely Joys	160
	6 Truffaut and the Photographic: Cinema, Fetishism, Death	163
	Cinema	164
	Fetishism	167
	Death	171
	Notes	176
	7 The Impasse of Intimacy: Romance and Tragedy in Truffaut’s Cinema	179
	Triangulating Truffaut	179
	Reverse Triangles: Jules et Jim and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent	183
	Shadows of Absence: La Sirène du Mississippi and L’Histoire d’Adèle H.	187
	Personal Catastrophes: La Peau douce and La Femme d’à côté	193
	Conclusion: Truffaut and the Modernist Psychodrama	197
	Notes	198
	8 A Fine Madness: Digressions on Pathologies in Truffaut’s Films	199
	Prowling Madness	199
	Intoxications	201
	Traps, Ramparts	202
	Perversions?	204
	Collapse and Dissolution	206
	The Madness of the Real	209
	9 The Ecstatic Pan	210
	The Case of the Missing Camera (Movement)	212
	Methodological Issues	214
	Stairs: “Women’s Legs Are Compasses”	216
	The Work of Art: “I Have the Religion of Love”	218
	Ecstasy: “Films Are More Harmonious Than Life”	221
	The Agony and the Ecstasy	223
	Conclusion	225
	Acknowledgment	227
	Notes	227
	10 The Untimely Moment and the Correct Distance	231
	The Untimely Director	231
	A Logical Game	233
	Secret Shocks	234
	Linkage and Balance, Repertoire and Score	236
	Birth of the Lyric	237
	The Essential Part of the Superfluous	238
	Brutality and Nuance	240
	“A Riddle in the Book of Love, Obscure and Obsolete”30	241
	Notes	242
	Part III The Making of a Filmmaker	245
	11 Every Teacher Needs a Truant: Bazin and L’Enfant sauvage	247
	From Year Zero to Maturity	247
	Bazin	249
	Deligny	253
	Itard	259
	Notes	265
	12 Certain Tendencies of Truffaut’s Film Criticism	268
	A Critic Before a Filmmaker	268
	Truffaut’s Critical Strategies	271
	Provocation on the Front Lines of Criticism	276
	Toward “Tomorrow’s Cinema” and a New Wave	279
	Conclusions	285
	Notes	286
	13 Truffaut–Hitchcock	291
	The Hitchcock Correspondence	291
	Pneu-ma-tique!	293
	The “Hitchbook”	296
	The Man We Loved to Be Hated By	298
	What Truffaut Knew	303
	Acknowledgment	306
	Notes	306
	14 The Paradox of “Familiarity”: Truffaut, Heir of Renoir	309
	Renoir at the Heart of the Politique des Auteurs	310
	Renoir’s System of “Checks and Balances”	313
	Conclusion	319
	Notes	321
	15 Cain and Abel: Godard and Truffaut	326
	Decade by Decade	327
	The End of a Friendship	329
	Mutual Fascination, Mutual Support	331
	Reflections: Film to Film	334
	“François Is Perhaps Dead. I Am Perhaps Alive.”	339
	Notes	341
	16 Friction, Failure, and Fire: Truffaut as Adaptive Auteur	343
	The Failure to Adapt: Antoine Doinel and Honoré de Balzac	345
	Reenacting Authors and Books	347
	A Lover of Books, Lost in the Flames of Films	353
	The Flame of the Candle	355
	Notes	355
	Part IV Truffaut and His Time	359
	17 Growing Up with the French New Wave	361
	The Young Critic and the New France	362
	A Young Director and a Young Cinema	369
	Belated Modernism	372
	Notes	379
	18 Bad Objects: Truffaut’s Radicalism	382
	La Grande Illusion	383
	The Reluctant Schoolmaster	389
	A Patricide	393
	Acknowledgment	397
	Notes	397
	19 Between Renoir and Hitchcock: The Paradox of Truffaut’s Women	401
	Autobiography and New Wave Cinephilia	402
	Jeanne Moreau: The Femme Fatale of the New Wave	404
	Catherine Deneuve: The Blonde Mermaid of the Post-1968 Years	406
	Bernadette Lafont: Truffaut’s Carnivalesque Woman	408
	Notes	412
	20 Truffaut in the Mirror of Japan	414
	A Vulnerable Director	415
	An Exemplary Friendship	417
	A New Generation	421
	Notes	424
	Part V Films	427
	21 Directing Children: The Double Meaning of Self-Consciousness	429
	Children on the Screen	429
	Children in De Sica’s Shoeshine	432
	Les 400 Coups	434
	Humans and Insects	436
	The Search for the Absolute	440
	Notes	444
	22 Jules et Jim … et Walter Benjamin	446
	Benjamin’s Ambivalence at the Cinema	446
	The Virulent Modesty of the New Wave	448
	The Art of Life and the Life of Art	450
	Adapting Life to Literature and Literature to Film	453
	Adoration, Translation	455
	Notes	457
	23 Digging Up the Past: Jules et Jim	460
	The Frozen Image	460
	The Whirlwind of Life	465
	Newsreels: Fiction Meets History	468
	Acknowledgments	471
	Notes	471
	24 The Elevator and the Telephone: On Urgency in La Peau douce	474
	Note	479
	25 La Peau douce: A Psychogeography of Silky Cinephilia	480
	Cinephilia, 1960	481
	A New Geography	483
	The Gas Station	486
	A Montage of Affect	488
	Notes	491
	26 La Peau douce: François Truffaut’s Passionate Object	495
	Revising the Romantic Melodrama	495
	A Critique of Middle-class Domesticity	498
	Cinema: A Passionate Object	502
	Notes	510
	27 An Unsettling Passage: From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte	515
	Truffaut’s Proustian Obsessions	517
	Not Alone but with a Ghost …	520
	Blanchot and Truffaut	523
	Spelling the Death of Present Desire	526
	Quivering Tributes to Stillness	531
	Notes	532
	28 The Structural Role of Intervals in L’Argent de Poche	533
	The Social and Political Dimension of a Children’s Film	533
	A Film Built on The Interval	534
	The Game of the Reel	534
	Child-adults and the Reversal of Roles	535
	A Double Exclusion	537
	Desire and Chance	538
	The Game with The String	539
	On the Interval as a Recurring Figure	540
	Notes	542
	29 To Die or to Love: Modern Don Juans in Truffaut and Oliveira	543
	Beginnings	545
	Erotic Drive, a Mythical Being?	547
	Bertrand’s Mille e Tre	549
	Paulo’s Mille e Tre	551
	Endings	554
	Notes	554
	30 Film as Literature: or the Truffaldian Malaise ( L’Homme qui aimait les femmes)	556
	The Self-Questioning Signature	556
	The Death of the Author	558
	Malaise and the Phallic Women	565
	Autofiction and the Emancipated Spectator	568
	Acknowledgments	570
	Notes	570
	31 The Elegist: François Truffaut inside La Chambre verte	572
	“The Cult of the Dead”	572
	Life Stilled	575
	There Is No “Holiday from History”	579
	Notes	584
	32 La Chambre verte and the Beating Heart of Truffaut’s Oeuvre	587
	“A Handwritten Letter”	588
	A Magic Lantern for a Dark Film	591
	An Aesthetic Autobiography	593
	Notes	595
	33 Le Dernier Métro: An Underground Golden Coach	597
	The Sweet Smell of Success, and the Weird Distortion of Historical Backgrounds	597
	Holes and Dark Sides	599
	An Apparently Simple Film Freighted with Heavy Questions	602
	Marguerite Duras and the Jewish Question	602
	The Story of Jean and François	604
	Renoir’s Moral Position in a Post-Holocaust World	606
	Notes	607
	34 Disillusionment and Magic in La Nuit américaine and Le Dernier Métro	610
	A Few Differences	610
	A Fragmented Film	612
	Two Intriguing Scenes	613
	A Few Similarities	615
	Magic and Communion	617
	Notes	619
	Index	620