I cant believe theres never been an official Truffaut thread on this board.
Ive just recently seen 400 Blows and last night watched Jules et Jim. I liked both, but Jules et Jim was better. Ive got a total thing for Jeanne Moreau now. Im getting Shoot The Piano Player next.
Any Truffaut lovers in the house? Holler back, if you wish.
Seen Fahrenheit 451, Jules et Jim, and 400 Blows, I really liked them and would like some other reccomendations.
Comes out Tuesday:
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Came out two weeks ago:
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Also recommended:
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i think farenheit 451 is the coolest title for a novel/film, ever.
Love him!
I love and own The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim and, Shoot the Piano Player. I actually have Small Change right now, from netflix...haven't gotten around to watching it.
I gotta see Day For Night and Fahrenheit 451. There's a lot I still want to see from him.
QuoteIve got a total thing for Jeanne Moreau now
Oh, so do I man. Jeanne Moreau is very very very beautiful. I was calling her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen before I discovered Audrey. She was the reason I bought Jules and Jim blindly, the first french film I ever saw about a year or two ago. I saw her for the two seconds they show her in Vanilla Sky...in the little clips, I was like making the order to amazon the very night I saw just those little clips. The movie looked way too cool to be real...it still seems so. One of my favorites, definitely. I couldn't think of a better introduction to french film.
If you're a Godard fan, don't forget about this leading lady:
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Or this one, on the left:
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Quote from: PawbloeIf you're a Godard fan, don't forget about this leading lady:
Or this one, on the left:
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What movie is that! :shock:
Quote from: PawbloeIf you're a Godard fan, don't forget about this leading lady:
whos that on the left
Quote from: Duck Saucewhos that on the left
Brigitte Bardot.
Quote from: Duck SauceWhat movie is that! :shock:
A good one.
Quote from: Duck SauceWhat movie is that! :shock:
contempt.... but i dont remember seeing her breasts in that film. is that a still from the actual movie?
Does ANYBODY know where I can get my paws on a Day For Night DVD that ISN'T dubbed??
I'm pretty sure theres a European one.. but aside from that.. I mean thats terrible.
Quote from: CinephileDoes ANYBODY know where I can get my paws on a Day For Night DVD that ISN'T dubbed??
I'm pretty sure theres a European one.. but aside from that.. I mean thats terrible.
Like I posted above, came out two weeks ago:
http://www.dvdempire.com/Exec/v4_item.asp?userid=15623002921494&item_id=463044
Quote from: Pawbloe(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.google.com%2Fimages%3Fq%3Dtbn%3A5fWOkddfmqoC%3Amembers.eisa.net.au%2F%7Ejohben57%2Fbrigitte-bardot-12.jpg&hash=bd918b7570344cdc5d222ef9adde368a41f0e625)
best av ever.
Sorry about that MacGuffin, I just assumed it was the same DVD I saw on here http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00007G1ZE/701-3268381-4617149 several weeks ago. In the edition details it says "Language: English" and so I assumed it was another dubbed version. When I'd read it before, it didn't have the reviews it has now. Sorry for the mixup.
i saw jules et jim and shoot the piano player. i honestly didn't find either one to be amazing or anything. at times, visually stunning, yes - but besides that, it all seemed pretty bland. i did like shoot the piano player a little better though.
that still isn't from Contempt.....that must be a much younger Bardot........i just got Criterion Contempt a couple weeks ago
Truffaut is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors. I have the Antoine Doinel collection and I love 400 Blows, Love at 20, Stolen Kisses & Bed and Board. It's a shame that Love on the Run isn't very good. I've seen Jules et Jim and Shoot the Piano PLayer and I liked both, but not as much as the Antoine Doinel films. Last night I watched Day for Night and loved it. I don't think a movie has ever made me want to make a film more than that one did. By the end of the film I was sad that Truffaut only lived to 50 or so.
PS: Where can I buy Day for Night. Is it out of print? I've only found copies on Amazon for $40+.
Quote from: SHAFTRTruffaut is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors. I have the Antoine Doinel collection and I love 400 Blows, Love at 20, Stolen Kisses & Bed and Board. It's a shame that Love on the Run isn't very good.
What did you like about Stolen Kisses? I bought the Antoine Doinel box set myself and really liked 400 Blows but after seeing Stolen Kisses was really turned off in watching the rest. The character Antoine Doinel seems completely different in Stolen Kisses and the film feels based off a genre story instead of a character first. It felt like Truffaut tagged the character "Antoine Doinel" just for the sake of it. It never was the contuining of one person's biography, but a pretty mundane genre film.
i'm pretty sure i saw Day for Night on DVD at Best Buy sometime last year.
Quote from: bigideasi'm pretty sure i saw Day for Night on DVD at Best Buy sometime last year.
I saw it once, didn't have the money for it, forgot to get it later, and now BOOM, I don't see it there anymore.
unless Best Buy gets rid of stock that doesn't sell after a certain period, i imagine it would still be at this store.
Day for Night DVD is at Barnes and Noble in Green Bay, WI. Shaftr may be able even pick it up there.
I got Day For Night really cheap about two years ago. Used bin bargain.
i haven't had a chance to watch the Criterion Jules et Jim yet.
Fahrenheit 451 is starting just now on TCM.
Hey, "small change" is prolly my favorite Truffaut film. "Bed and Board" runs a close second to that...Julie Delpy's apartment in "Before Sunset" might be shot in the same place as "Bed and Board", too... wondering if anyone else thought so...
Anyways...I really love "Small Change" and would probably reccomend it to anyone. really great movie and it's really cheap on DVD from MGM, even though the disc is basically bare.
Quote from: ThebirdinsectmanJulie Delpy's apartment in "Before Sunset" might be shot in the same place as "Bed and Board", too... wondering if anyone else thought so...
Actually I did. I'm convinced at this point that it's just that it's just Paris but it seems like that would be the sort of thing Linklater would do.
The 400 Blows is showing at the Dundee theatre in Omaha this Saturday/Sunday at noon for 6$
Right now, I'm thinking the most underrated Truffaut movie is Mississippi Mermaid. For all who haven't, you need to go see it...
Any opinions on The Green Room or Two English Girls?
I saw the Green Room a while ago, and I really liked it, but I'd have to see it again to cite specific things about it.
I've seen 400 Blows, Jules et Jim and Les Mistons.
400 Blows was my favourite. I gotta get round to seeing the rest of his Antoine Doinel films now.
never seen the green room, but two english girls is tied with the soft skin and small change for what i consider his best film...
Saw Jules et Jim today. I fucking hated this movie, and I love Truffaut. I think 400 Blows is just incredible. But goddamn, the character Catherine is such a stupid bitch. I did remark that Jules and Jim should've gotten together Brokeback style. I just don't get how Truffaut could make a boring film with such subject matter. It's interesting to read into the sexism of the scene where Jim goes back into town to meet Theresa after all this time. She yaps and yaps and no one listens, then he goes the bar and meets the man with the woman who won't speak, all she's good for is sex. I don't know who Truffaut is commenting on: the characters in the film, men in the film, or men in real life?
A Troublemaker Who Led a Revolution
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY; New York Times
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT'S "400 Blows" is now an official classic of French cinema, but when it had its premiere, at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, it didn't much look like one. And that was the point. Mr. Truffaut, then just 27, had spent his youth as an extremely combative critic for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, in whose pages he regularly savaged the older, established French filmmakers who represented what was called the "tradition of quality." (When he used the term, it didn't sound like a compliment.)
So when, thanks to a prosperous father-in-law, he got the chance to direct a feature film, he undoubtedly felt some pressure to put his money where his big critical mouth had been: to show that a thoroughly French movie could be made without beautiful sets and costumes, exquisitely refined Comédie Française-style acting or a high-literary tone. "The 400 Blows" proved it, and in the best possible way. The film was so fluid, so graceful, so apparently natural, that it seemed not to have any agenda at all. It didn't feel willful; it felt (as revolutions too rarely do) inevitable.
The movie has its historical significance as the first great popular success of the freer-form style of filmmaking that came to be identified with the French New Wave, but if you go to Film Forum in Manhattan, where, starting Wednesday, a nice fresh print of "The 400 Blows" will be showing, you probably won't get the unpleasant sensation of having wandered into an old argument between spluttering, red-faced cinéastes.
Although a certain polemical ardor may have helped stoke Mr. Truffaut's creative fires while he was making his debut film (he was very French), the smoke from those life-and-death aesthetic debates has long since cleared. What remains is a lyrical and surprisingly tough-minded little picture about a 12-year-old troublemaker named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), as seen by a sympathetic and slightly more seasoned troublemaker named François Truffaut.
The originality of "The 400 Blows" lies in its willingness to trot along to the quotidian rhythms of a boy's life. Antoine's childhood (which bears some similarity to Mr. Truffaut's own) is crummy, but in unexceptional ways. The Montmartre apartment where he lives with his self-absorbed mother and his buffoonish stepfather is, in the time-honored tradition of Paris living spaces, painfully cramped.
He's bored with school, and his teachers are on to him. Whenever he lies — which he does no more or less often than any other boy trying to squeeze a bit more fun out of life than his elders think is good for him — he's caught. Until near the end, when events take a more serious turn, Antoine, alone or in the company of his impish friend René, mostly just bounces from one dopey, tolerably amusing activity to another — ditching school to go to the movies, lying around smoking pilfered cigars — and, when he has to, deals with the minor crises that crop up too frequently in the classroom and at home.
He moves through the Paris streets (photographed with exhilarating clarity by Henri Decaë) confidently but a little anxiously, a trace of unease betrayed by an odd scurrying half-run he breaks into from time to time, as if he he'd suddenly remembered that someone was chasing him. It's the gait he uses in the movie's famous final sequence, when he escapes from the reform school he has wound up in and, his pursuers well behind him, makes his way across a bleak beach for his first-ever glimpse of the sea.
The camera travels with him, recording every jerky small step until he reaches the edge of the water, looks at the big-deal sea for all of about five seconds and then turns back, expressionless, to face us in what quickly becomes a freeze-frame: the last, powerfully ambiguous image of the film.
This sort of ending wasn't common in 1959, and viewers were impressed. Mr. Truffaut, overcoming the considerable ill will he had earned as a Cahiers critic, won the prize for best director at Cannes; the movie was a hit in France and all over the world.
That freeze-frame stuck in people's minds as if it were a sharp, nagging memory of their own. What looks most remarkable now, though, isn't the blank still face that closes the film, but the daringly long run that brings us to it, that allows our emotions to gather and build with each short, stiff step until, without quite understanding why, we end up overwhelmed. It's the movie in miniature, really.
Right from the start of his career Truffaut had the sly gift of holding our attention while appearing to be doing almost nothing, just moving at his own casual pace away from the traditions that dogged him and toward something that might have looked to him as huge and vague and daunting as the ocean.
In "The 400 Blows" he hit the ground running, along with his young alter ego Antoine, and they ran side by side a few more times in the next 20 years: in the charming short film "Antoine and Colette" (1962), which Film Forum has extracted from its original context in an anthology movie called "Love at 20" and has paired with "The 400 Blows"; and in the features "Stolen Kisses" (1968), "Bed & Board" (1970) and "Love on the Run" (1979).
All of them are, to one degree or another, romantic comedies with light overtones of melancholy. And while not one of them achieves anything like the emotional complexity of "The 400 Blows," and some viewers may feel that Truffaut should have left the frame frozen, allowing little Antoine's fate to remain tantalizingly in doubt, it's good to have the later, lesser Doinel movies too. They tell us, in their way, that Antoine was right not to make such heavy weather of life's irritations, and that his wary personality — the defense mechanism that in "The 400 Blows" is represented by a shot of him pulling his sweater up over his mouth and retreating like a turtle into its shell — has served him, somehow, has helped keep him on the move, where he needs to be.
And François Truffaut kept running, too, until 1984, when everything stopped for him, left him freeze-framed at 52. It's what led up to there that counts, though, and it's hard not to wish that the story, good, bad, or indifferent, had found a way to go on.
Quote from: Gamblour. on March 13, 2006, 10:41:05 PM
Saw Jules et Jim today. I fucking hated this movie, and I love Truffaut. I think 400 Blows is just incredible. But goddamn, the character Catherine is such a stupid bitch. I did remark that Jules and Jim should've gotten together Brokeback style. I just don't get how Truffaut could make a boring film with such subject matter. It's interesting to read into the sexism of the scene where Jim goes back into town to meet Theresa after all this time. She yaps and yaps and no one listens, then he goes the bar and meets the man with the woman who won't speak, all she's good for is sex. I don't know who Truffaut is commenting on: the characters in the film, men in the film, or men in real life?
It gets better and better the more you watch it.
Maybe it would help not reading into it so much; maybe Truffaut wasn't making any explicit "commentary" in the regard of which you speak; perhaps for this story/group of characters/scene Theresa and the other woman are essentially one-dimensional (certainly people in real life take great pains to appear one-dimensional, and others take great pains to only see them as one-dimensional... or in the context of the "romantic novel" -- and I use that term broadly here -- on which the movie is based, the other female characters are deliberately held at arms-length as supporting roles while Moreau's is reserved as a starring one... which is generally an effective technique).
Quote from: SoNowThen on September 23, 2007, 06:35:53 AM
Quote from: Gamblour. on March 13, 2006, 10:41:05 PM
Saw Jules et Jim today. I fucking hated this movie, and I love Truffaut. I think 400 Blows is just incredible. But goddamn, the character Catherine is such a stupid bitch. I did remark that Jules and Jim should've gotten together Brokeback style. I just don't get how Truffaut could make a boring film with such subject matter. It's interesting to read into the sexism of the scene where Jim goes back into town to meet Theresa after all this time. She yaps and yaps and no one listens, then he goes the bar and meets the man with the woman who won't speak, all she's good for is sex. I don't know who Truffaut is commenting on: the characters in the film, men in the film, or men in real life?
It gets better and better the more you watch it.
Maybe it would help not reading into it so much; maybe Truffaut wasn't making any explicit "commentary" in the regard of which you speak; perhaps for this story/group of characters/scene Theresa and the other woman are essentially one-dimensional (certainly people in real life take great pains to appear one-dimensional, and others take great pains to only see them as one-dimensional... or in the context of the "romantic novel" -- and I use that term broadly here -- on which the movie is based, the other female characters are deliberately held at arms-length as supporting roles while Moreau's is reserved as a starring one... which is generally an effective technique).
This might seem a little weird or something, but I kind of see Catherine as a personification of the
nouvelle vague itself. She breaks rules, she's unpredictable, she's uncompromising, she's passionate yet distant and, like cinema itself, she's mortal and tragic. And she's someone trying to find her place in the world.
I dunno, but it's kind of how I see it, which I guess makes some sense, taking into consideration what that film movement was.
Anyway, this is one of the greates movies I've ever seen and, along with
Vivre Sa Vie, the peak of the
nouvelle vague.
I love 400 Blows and Shoot, but Jules does not resonate with me. On a technical level it's great all around, but there's something about it that just doesn't gel with me.
I'm wishing Criterion would put out more of his films.
Anyone know what The Soft Skin or The Bride Wore Black have not been released (unless I"m overlooking non-Criterion versions)?
I believe Bride was the one where he was going for a Hitchcock-esque film.
I've seen the trailer for Soft Skin on my Fox Lorber edition of Shoot and it looks promising as well.
Criterion has been holding onto a lot of Truffaut for a long time. They own the rights to every film you mentioned but seemingly have not found the right time or way to release any of them. I assume The Bride Who Wore Black and maybe a few others would get an individual release by Criterion but the others are destined for a box set under either Eclipse or Criterion.
I think Jules and Jim is a great work, but if you're going to be critical, do so in a way that doesn't criticize the likability of the characters. That's a Roger Ebert tactic.
Well, I have the Soft Skin DVD right here. It's not a great transfer, but it's not bad either, and if I remember correctly, it does include an interview with Truffaut about the movie and the trailer. It came out on a box set which also included "Shoot the Piano Player", "The Woman Next Door" and "Vivement Dimanche!". Unfortunately, there are only portuguese subtitles. See this (http://www.dvdpt.com/p/pack_francois_truffaut_2.php).
As for the movie itself, it's a little bit more contained and not as flashy as regular Truffaut, but it has a great screenplay (with a lot of those very Truffaut moments that seem unnecessary but end up telling a lot about the characters). I liked it pretty much, and even though I may not be a great fan of the ending, it still makes it a great watch. And what's funny (and can be seen even more in "The Woman Next Door") is that Truffaut doesn't waste a single oportunity to make some Hitch-cock moves in there, playing a lot with suspense, even in these movies about adultery. Great fun.
As for "The Bride Wore Black", I don't know of any version available. I've seen it once in a not so legal way and even though it has some nice moments, it's probably my least favorite Truffaut movie (but still good). And we can easily see the influence on "Kill Bill". Even still, I think he's mad better Hitchcockian movies (and "Vivement Dimanche!" is a great example).
Bride Wore Black, along with loads of other Truffaut's, is available on an MGM World Classics dvd. It looks fine.
For my money, Mississippi Mermaid is one of Truffaut's most accomplished films, and it is also available in this format, for a pretty cheap price.
ok, i saw a picture the cover of Bride on the imdb page but it looked like an old vhs cover.
hmm, if Criterion owns these it's hard to put down the money for these versions.
the covers look horrible. i guess they were hoping middle age women who didn't know who Truffaut was would see these and buy them.