Film-maker charmed millions

Press, 23 October 1984, Page 6

Film-maker charmed millions

NZPA-Reuter Paris Francois Truffaut, the French film director who died of cancer yesterday, aged 52, charmed millions of fans with what he called “a cinema of feelings ... of the relations that people have with each other.” A founder of French "new wave” in the 19605, Truffaut won wide acclaim with sensitive and humorous* portrayals of the difficulties of loving, and the innocence and lonelineess of adolescence. “I always make films about love — never war and violence,” he once said. “I don’t understand the argument that showing violence makes people turn against it.” He said that his main concern was to respect the public’s desire for enjoyment without presenting a falsified, misleading picture of life. “In a film the director gives the audience a promise of pleasure,” he told an interviewer. “One keeps one’s promise by providing an exultant ending ... in

the last 10 minutes of each of my films there is a rising, mounting curve upwards.” His work, which won dozens of international awards, was strongly influenced by the late Alfred Hitchcock. Truffaut was born on February 6, 1932. He was so physically weak as aagjiild

that his parents sent him to live with his grandmother in the country until he was eight. Separation from his parents had a profound effect on him and was reflected in his many films about a child’s loneliness. Back in Paris the young Truffaut sought refuge from his real-life problems in the cinema and often played traunt to watch films. He watched many of them over and over again to study the technique Of the directors. Years later he estimated that he had seen more than 3000 films. At 14 he left school and took jobs such as messenger boy, shop assistant, clerk, and factory welder. His chief aim was to raise sufficient funds for a cinema club. A less respectable way of getting cash — stealing brass doorknobs — led to a brief spell in a reform school. At 19 he was conscripted into the French Army when France was fighting in IndoChina. He contested his conscription and was detained as a conscientious objector

until his release from the Army as “an unstable personality,” in 1953. Truffaut entered the film industry through a side door as a critic, and for eight years he attacked established film institutions such as the Cannes Festival and noted producers such as Ignace Morgenstern. ’ ’•/ His criticisms were so savage that he was barred from the Cannes Festival in 1958. Ironically he -had fallen in love the year before with Morgenstern’s daughter, Madelaine, and they were married in October 1957. The couple had two daughters before being divorced. Truffant had always set his sights on directing. His first feature, “The 400 Blows,” catapulted him to fame in 1959 with its autobiographical portrayal of a juvenile delinquent. The low-budget film financed in part by his wealthy father-in-law used unknownactors and only a dozen technicians. But it won 12 international awards. Truffaut gained the prize as the

best director at the Cannes Festival, which had banned him'the year before. He continued his autobigraphical series with Kisses,” and, “Bed and Board.” In 1973 he won /the American Film Acad- ' emy’s best foreign film Oscar for “Day for Night ” a fictional look at the movie industry. Truffaut worked with established stars such as. Charles Azanvour, Jeanne .Moreau, and Julie Christie, but he never disguised his preference for less wellknown actors. /; “The audience already has an image of those stars, while the way I use them is against their image. My people are weak, vulnerable, fragile,” he said. / The notable exception was Jeanne Moreau, who starred in “Jules and Jim,” in 1961. That, said Truffaut, was a rare example of balance between the role and the actress. At the start of his career the pale, chain-smoking director forecast, “The film of tomorrow seems to, me ■ to

even more personal than a novel ... like a confession or a private diary.” Although he avoided political themes, Truffaut was active during the 1968 French student-worker upheavals, which he regarded as the end of passive obedience. “Today most young people refuse to obey orders they find idiotic. I consider this most positive,” he said. Truffaut died at the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly. He was admitted to hospital about 10 days before. Hospital sources said that he then went into a coma, regaining consiciousness only briefly from time to time. For the last few months his health had been deteriorating and he began living a secluded life. Just months ago Truffaut became the father of a small girl, born to his companion of several years, Fanny Ardant, a French film actress. She was the leading lady in his movie, “The Woman Next Door.”