(via justftwo)
“Ultimately one makes the films one can love as a viewer. The cinema helped me endure life when I was an adolescent, it pleased me as an escape. That escape could only work through identification. I had a horror of costume films, for instance. Well, as a filmmaker I make the films I saw when I was thirteen, fourteen years old, that’s to say, with people in the wrong, weak, all fouled up, hiding out, always keeping aloof from groups, films with which it is easy to identify and which drag you into a kind of escapism that is nonetheless quite close to real life.”
François Truffaut
February 6, 1932 — October 21, 1984
(Source: strangewood)
(Source: colour-me-impressed)
![“I saw my first two hundred films on the sly, playing hooky and slipping into the movie house without paying—through the emergency exit or the washroom window—or by taking advantage of my parents’ going out for an evening (I had to be in bed, pretending to be asleep, when they came home). I paid for these great pleasures with stomachaches, cramps, nervous headaches and guilty feelings, which only heightened the emotions evoked by the films. I felt a tremendous need to enter into the films. I sat closer and closer to the screen so I could shut out the theater. […] At that period in my life, movies acted on me like a drug. The film club I founded in 1947 was called—somewhat pretentiously but revealingly—the Movie-mania Club (Cercle Cinémane). Sometimes I saw the same film four or five times within a month and could still not recount the story line correctly because, at one moment or another, the swelling of the music, a chase through the night, the actress’s tears, would intoxicate me, make me lose track of what was going on, carry me away from the rest of the movie.”
François TruffautFebruary 6, 1932 — October 21, 1984](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc94jb7y4z1qf7r5lo1_r2_500.jpg)
“I saw my first two hundred films on the sly, playing hooky and slipping into the movie house without paying—through the emergency exit or the washroom window—or by taking advantage of my parents’ going out for an evening (I had to be in bed, pretending to be asleep, when they came home). I paid for these great pleasures with stomachaches, cramps, nervous headaches and guilty feelings, which only heightened the emotions evoked by the films. I felt a tremendous need to enter into the films. I sat closer and closer to the screen so I could shut out the theater. […] At that period in my life, movies acted on me like a drug. The film club I founded in 1947 was called—somewhat pretentiously but revealingly—the Movie-mania Club (Cercle Cinémane). Sometimes I saw the same film four or five times within a month and could still not recount the story line correctly because, at one moment or another, the swelling of the music, a chase through the night, the actress’s tears, would intoxicate me, make me lose track of what was going on, carry me away from the rest of the movie.”
François Truffaut
February 6, 1932 — October 21, 1984
(Source: strangewood)
Jeanne Moreau and François Truffaut on the set of Jules et Jim (1962).
(Source: mizoguchi, via film-dot-com)
Filming the most famous scene from Jules et Jim (1962, dir. François Truffaut).
(Via)
(via film-dot-com)
"To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately. What’s the ultimate in representative painting? Color photography. Don’t you agree? There’s quite a difference, you see, between the creation of a film and the making of a documentary. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life. And in the process of that creation, there are lots of feelings, forms of expression, and viewpoints that have to be juxtaposed. We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it’s not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow."
—
Alfred Hitchcock talking to Francois Truffaut about THE 39 STEPS.
The 39 Steps is a film having far too much fun scrambling from one great moment to the next to have time for trifling things like “plausibility.”
(page 102 of Hitchcock / Truffaut, which is as essential a film book as has ever been published).
(via criterioncorner)
(Source: film-dot-com)
Notebook containing the first draft of the screenplay for The 400 Blows.
well, it’s either Truffaut’s notebook, or a prop from Moonrise Kingdom.
via: waltdisneywithblood:
Via)
(via film-dot-com)
I still find any hierarchy of kinds of movies both ridiculous and despicable. When Hitchcock made Psycho - the story of a sometime thief stabbed to death in her shower by the owner of a motel who had stuffed his mother’s corpse - almost all the critics agreed that its subject was trivial. The same year, under Kurosawa’s influence, Ingmar Bergman shot exactly the same theme (The Virgin Spring) but he set it in fourteenth-century Sweden. Everybody went into ecstasy and Bergman won an Oscar for best foreign film. Far be it from me to begrudge him his prize; I want only to emphasize that it was exactly the same subject (in fact, it was a more or less conscious transposition of Charles Perrault’s famous story “Little Red Riding Hood”). The truth is that in these two films, Bergman and Hitchcock each expressed part of his own violence with skill and freed himself of it.
Let me also cite the example of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, which is still discussed as if it were a tragedy about unemployment in postwar Italy, although the problem of unemployment is not really addressed in this beautiful film. It shows us simply - like an Arabic tale, as Cocteau observed - a man who absolutely must find his bicycle, exactly as the woman in the world of The Earrings of Madame de… must again find her earrings. I reject the idea that The Virgin Spring and Bicycle Thief are noble and serious, while Psycho and Madame de… are “entertainments.” All four films are noble and serious, and all four are entertainment.
When I was a critic, I thought that a successful film had simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema; La Régle de Jeu and Citizen Kane corresponded to this definition, perfectly. Today, I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interest in all those films that do no pulse.
- François Truffaut, 1975
(Source: oldfilmsflicker, via twiststreet)
oh Truffaut, you romantic bastard, you should have just waited until Saturday…
I saw my first 200 films on the sly, playing hooky and slipping into the movie house without paying—through the emergency exit or the washroom window—or by taking advantage of my parents’ going out for an evening (I had to be in bed, pretending to be asleep, when they came home). I paid for these pleasures with stomach aches, cramps, nervous headaches and guilty feelings, which only heightened the emotions evoked by the films.
(via film-dot-com)
