프랑수아 트뤼포, 프랑스 영화에 선전포고한 비평가에서 그 최고의 수호자가 된 감독

프랑수아 트뤼포

Photo: Unknown / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

출생	1932년 2월 6일 Paris, France
사망	1984년 10월 21일 (52)
직업	영화 감독
대표작	400번의 구타, 쥴 앤 짐, 아메리카의 밤
수상	Prix de la mise en scène, Cannes Film Festival (1959) · 아카데미상 · BAFTA · 세자르상

The twelve-year-old at the center of The 400 Blows stands in the film’s final shot with his back to the world and the Atlantic in front of him, offering nothing useful. François Truffaut had stood in something like that position himself — the illegitimate child nobody quite wanted, learning early that warmth is what the world withholds. When he cast Jean-Pierre Léaud, he was not finding an actor. He was recognizing a situation.

Truffaut was born in Paris in 1932, the illegitimate son of a mother who had not planned to keep him and a biological father whose identity he did not discover until adulthood. His maternal grandmother raised him; after her death, when he was eight, his mother and stepfather Roland Truffaut — whose surname he eventually carried — reluctantly took him in. He dropped out of school at fourteen and spent every available hour in the cinema. A minor arrest brought him to the attention of André Bazin, the film theorist who recognized obsession when he saw it. Bazin brought him to Cahiers du Cinéma, the journal that would become the intellectual engine of the French New Wave.

What Truffaut produced at Cahiers was not film appreciation — it was combat. His 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema” attacked what he called the “tradition of quality”: films that translated literary material with professional skill and no discernible personality. He argued for the director as primary author, the auteur whose individual sensibility shapes every decision on screen. The argument was not entirely original, but Truffaut wrote it with a deliberate fury that made enemies and declared a movement. The 400 Blows arrived at Cannes in 1959 and won the Prix de la mise en scène. The irony that the man who had attacked sentiment in French cinema had just made its most emotionally unguarded film was not lost on anyone.

He had also, in that same film, established what would become cinema’s most sustained fictional autobiography. Over the next twenty years Truffaut followed Léaud as Antoine Doinel — through the reform school of The 400 Blows, the tentative romances of Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970), the retrospective accounting of Love on the Run (1979) — in a series that tracked a single fictional life across five films. The Doinel cycle is patient in the way actual time is patient: it shows the accumulation of small defeats and the slowness of anyone becoming themselves.

Jules and Jim (1962) arrived three years after The 400 Blows and remained his most daring structural film: Jeanne Moreau at the volatile center of a triangle that began as an essay in pre-war bohemian freedom and ended in something that resembled tragedy without quite earning its weight. The film spun, literally — the camera moved around characters as though trying to contain something that couldn’t be contained. Truffaut would never again risk quite that level of formal restlessness. Subsequent films were more formally controlled, which some critics read as retreat and others as maturity.

Between the Doinel films Truffaut ranged in ways that resisted a single description. Fahrenheit 451 (1966) took him to England for his only English-language production, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel where his evident unease with the language became part of the film’s cool, slightly stranded quality. The Wild Child (1970) cast him as a nineteenth-century doctor attempting to educate a feral boy found in the forest — another displacement, another self-portrait of the man who shapes the child nobody else wanted. The Story of Adele H. (1975) found Isabelle Adjani in a performance of almost pathological intensity, playing Victor Hugo’s daughter destroying herself over a man who would not have her.

Day for Night (1973), in which a film shoot in Nice devours its own cast and crew with cheerful efficiency, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It also triggered the most damaging rupture of Truffaut’s personal life. Jean-Luc Godard, who had been close enough to co-direct a short film with Truffaut before either had made a feature, sent him a letter accusing him of dishonesty: that Day for Night lied about what filmmaking actually involved, presenting it as a collaborative pleasure rather than a site of labor, ideology, and contradiction. The letter was specific and excoriating. The break was permanent. What the argument made visible was a genuine disagreement about what cinema was for — Godard’s position that film should dismantle received ideas; Truffaut’s, less articulable but more consistent across twenty-five films, that it should keep faith with particular lives.

The question that divided critics — whether Truffaut’s warmth was a concession or the point — was never settled during his lifetime and has not been settled since. He spent his early career as the most feared critic in French film, whose byline guaranteed enemies. When he began making films, the tenderness struck some as a retreat from the radical gesture, a softening that placed him on the wrong side of the New Wave’s political evolution. This reading treated accessibility as a lesser ambition. From a longer view, his films are harder to make than they look: it takes more discipline to care about people on screen than to deconstruct the apparatus that films them.

The Last Metro (1980) won ten César Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress for Catherine Deneuve, and Best Actor for Gérard Depardieu — a record at the time. Set during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, it follows a theatre company that hides its Jewish director in the basement while his wife runs the company above. It is formally conventional — Truffaut had stored away his New Wave restlessness by this point — but the conventionality is earned: a story about maintaining something worth preserving under conditions designed to extinguish it, made with precisely the kind of care its subject required.

A brain tumor was diagnosed in the spring of 1983. He died on October 21, 1984, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, at fifty-two. His final film, Confidentially Yours (1983), was a noir comedy shot in black and white, starring Fanny Ardant — his last companion and mother of his daughter Joséphine. He appeared, three years before his death, as the French scientist Lacombe in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) — a cameo that suggested he remained, at whatever level of recognition, someone who still just wanted to watch how films were made. His production company, Les Films du Carrosse — named after Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach — continues to administer his work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9_pNmzcGGk

The book of conversations with Alfred Hitchcock, which Truffaut assembled across several years and published in 1967, remains one of the essential texts in cinema. The Doinel films keep finding new audiences. Day for Night still plays wherever cinema takes itself seriously enough to examine its own machinery. For a man who grew up understanding that warmth is what the world withholds, Truffaut managed, across twenty-five films, to put a remarkable amount of it on screen — and to demonstrate, against everything his early writing argued, that it was the harder thing to do.