François Truffaut was born in Paris on February 6, 1932. He left school at fourteen to work as a welder and at a variety of other jobs. From his youth, movies were his great interest. Truffaut began a career as a journalist which was interrupted by military service in 1951. In 1953 he returned to civilian life, and with the help of his friend and adviser, the film critic André Bazin, began to publish his sharply critical movie reviews in Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts.
In 1955 Truffaut made his first short film. His first feature-length film was The 400 Blows, a partly autobiographical work about a young boy. It was awarded the 1959 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize for Direction, the New York Film Critics Award for the year’s best foreign film, and a host of additional prizes. Other highly acclaimed films followed, at the rate of almost one a year. They dealt with the stronger emotions, and chiefly love, presented in a variety of modes: farcical, lyrical, passionate.
In addition to writing screenplays and directing, Truffaut often acted in films. He continued to write criticism and was the author of Hitchcock and The Films in My Life, a collection of critical pieces.
Truffaut was a leader of the group of French film makers known as the New Wave, and was one of the most important directors in the history of the cinema. He was, as Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, “a quiet revolutionary who worked in conventional modes to make most unconventional films.” He died near Paris on October 21, 1984.
I believe a work is good to the degree that it expresses the man who created it.
ORSON WELLES
These books were alive and they spoke to me.
HENRY MILLER,
The Books in My Life