The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut

From Cineaste, Spring 1993. I must say that I continue to be stupefied that a very respected academic French film critic reviewed this book favorably in Sight and Sound.  But I’ve come to value Truffaut far more as a critic than I did in 1993, so I’m delighted that his writing for Arts was recently and belatedly collected in France. My favorite of all his pieces —  an early piece about Hitchcock called “Skeleton Keys”– has yet to be collected in either French or English, although Film Culture and the short-lived Cahiers du Cinema in English both ran an English translation back in the 1960s.– J.R.

The historical amnesia currently infecting much of film scholarship, in academic and mainstream publishing alike, is so pervasive that it might be said to affect our sense of the present as well as the past. In theory, then, the most valuable thing about this annotated collection of early film criticism by François Truffaut would be less what it has to tell us about individual films than what it has to impart about film criticism itself in Paris during the Fifties. In practice, however, it proves to be highly problematical on both counts. While I would find a first volume in English of the criticism of Serge Daney, Jean-André Fieschi, Luc Moullet, Claude Ollier, or several other French critics immensely more valuable than a second Truffaut collection (after The Films of My Life, not to mention his collected letters and many other related books in English), additional samplings of his critical work are still certainly welcome. Read more