Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut

Before turning to filmmaking, Franiois Truffaut was a film critic writing for "Cahiers du Cinema" during the 1950s. "The Early Film Criticism of Franiois Truffaut" makes available, for the first time in English, articles that originally appeared in French journals such as "Cahiers du Cinema" and "Arts". Wheeler Winston Dixon puts Truffaut's commentary in context, and the articles translated for this study give the reader an overview of these formative years of the great French film director's career. Truffaut discusses films by such acknowledged masters as Hitchcock, Huston, Dymytryk, and Lang, but also examines the work of lesser-known directors such as Robert Wise, Don Weis, and Roger Vadim. In reviews of American and European films, he ignores the artificial boundaries between Hollywood and 'foreign' films and 'A' and 'B' productions. As these articles make clear, what Truffaut prized most was the cinematic 'truth' in those films he admired; he despised the then-current 'literariness' of French cinema. He calls here for a New Wave in both production and criticism. Truffaut's writing style has been carefully preserved in these translations, allowing the reader access to writings that shaped his later film career and changed the face of modern film criticism.