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The Guardian (21/Aug/1998) - When I started breaking into cinemas, I knew I was hooked...

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When I started breaking into cinemas, I knew I was hooked...

One day in 1942, I was so anxious to see Marcel Carne's Les Visiteurs Du Soir, which at last had arrived at the Pigalle (my local cinema), that I decided to skip school. I liked it a lot. But that same evening, my aunt, who was studying violin at the Conservatory, came by to take me to a movie; she had picked Les Visiteurs Du Soir. Since I didn't dare admit that I had already seen it, I had to go and pretend that I was seeing it for the first time. That was the first time I realised how fascinating it can be to probe deeper into a work one admires, that the exercise can go so far as to create the illusion of reliving the creation.

A year later, Clouzot's Le Corbeau turned up; it fascinated me even more. I must have seen it five or six times between its release (May 1943) and the Liberation, when it was prohibited. Later, when it was once again allowed to be shown, I used to go to see it several times a year. Eventually I knew the dialogue by heart. The talk was very adult compared to the films I had seen, with about 100 words whose meaning I only gradually figured out. Since the plot of Le Corbeau revolved around an epidemic of anonymous letters denouncing abortion, adultery and various other forms of corruption, the film seemed to me to be a fairly accurate picture of what I had seen around me during the war and the post-war period — collaboration, denunciation, the black market, hustling, cynicism.

I saw my first 200 films on the sly, playing hooky and slipping into the movie house without paying — through the fire exit or the toilet 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 stomach aches, 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 theatre. I passed up period films, war movies and Westerns because they were more difficult to identify with. That left mysteries and love stories. Unlike most movie-goers my own age, I didn't identify with the heroes, but with the underdog and, in general, with any character who was in the wrong.

That's why Alfred Hitchcock's movies, devoted to fear, won me over from the start; and after Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, whose work is directed towards understanding... "The terrible thing is that everyone has his own reasons" (La Regie Du Jeu). The door was wide open, and I was ready for Jean Vigo, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry, Orson Welles, Marcel Pagnol, Ernst Lubitsch, Charlie Chaplin, of course, and all the others who, without being immoral, "doubt the morality of others" (Hiroshima,

I am often asked at what point in my love affair with films I began to want to be a director or a critic. Truthfully, I don't know. All I know is that I wanted to get closer and closer to films.

The first step involved seeing lots of movies; secondly, I began to note the name of the director. In the third stage I saw the same films over and over and began making choices as to what I would have done, if I had been the director. At that period of 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. Sometimes I saw the same film four or five times in a month and could still not recount the storyline 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.

I have not been able to find my first article, published in 1950 in the Bulletin of the Film Club of the Latin Quarter. I remember it was about La Regie Du Jeu. The original version of this film — including 14 scenes we had never seen — had just been discovered and shown. In my article I carefully enumerated the differences between the two versions, which was probably what led André Bazin to suggest that I help him research a book on Renoir he was planning.

By encouraging me from 1953 to write, Bazin did me a great favour. Having to analyse and describe one's pleasure may not automatically change an amateur into a professional, but it does lead one back to the concrete and to that ill-defined area where the critic works. The accompanying risk is that one may lose one's enthusiasm. Fortunately, that didn't happen to me. In a piece on Citizen Kane, I was at pains to explain how the same film might be viewed differently by a movie-lover, a journalist, a film-maker. This was as true of Renoir's work as it was of the big American movies.

Was I a good critic? I don't know. But one thing I am sure of is that I was always on the side of those who were hissed and against those who were hissing; and that my enjoyment often began where that of others left off; Renoir's changes of tone, Orson Welles's excesses, Pagnol's or Guitry's carelessness, Bresson's nakedness. I think there was no trace of snobbery in my tastes. Whether or not they were called commercial, I knew that all movies were commodities to be bought and sold. I saw plenty of differences in degree, but not in kind. I felt the same admiration for Kelly and Donen's Singin' In The Rain as for Carl Dreyer's Ordet.

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 14th-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 emphasise 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.

When I was a critic, I thought a successful film had simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of the cinema; Le Regie Du 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 interested in all those films that do not pulse.

When I was a critic, films were often more alive though less "intelligent" and "personal" than today I put the words in quotes precisely because I hold that there was no lack of intelligent directors at that time, but that they were induced to mask their personalities so as to preserve a universality in their films. Intelligence stayed behind the camera; it didn't try to be in evidence on the screen. At the same time, it must be admitted that more profound things were said around the dinner table in real life than were reflected in films that were being made, and that more daring things took place in bedrooms than in the movies' love scenes. If we had known life only through the movies, we would believe babies came from a chaste kiss.

All that is changed; not only has cinema caught up with life sometimes it seems to have gone beyond it. Films have become more intelligent — or rather, intellectual — than those who look at them. Often we need instructions to tell whether the images on the screen are intended as reality or fantasy, past or future; whether it is a question of real action or imagination.

As for erotic or pornographic films, without being a passionate fan, I believe they are in expiation of a debt that we owe for 60 years of cinematographic lies about love. I am one of the thousands of his readers who was not only entranced but helped through life by the work of Henry Miller, and I suffered at the idea that cinema lagged so far behind his books as well as behind reality. Unhappily, I still cannot cite an erotic film that is the equivalent of Henry Miller's writing but, after all, freedom for the cinema is still quite new. Also, we must consider that the starkness of images poses far more difficult problems than those posed by

Until the day he dies, an artist doubts himself deeply, even while he is being showered with his contemporaries' praise. When he tries to protect himself from attack or indifference, is it his work he defends or treats as if it were a threatened child or is it himself? The truth is that we are so vulnerable at the moment that we expose the result of a year's work to scrutiny that it would take nerves of steel to accept a hailstorm of bad reviews, even if, in two or three years, our own perspective will bring us closer to the critics' verdict and make us aware that we failed to blend the mayonnaise.

I use the word "mayonnaise" deliberately. When I was 20, I argued with André Bazin for comparing films to mayonnaise — they either emulsified or did not. "Don't you see," I protested, "that all Hawks's films are good, and all Huston's are bad?" I later modified this formula when I had become a critic: "The worst Hawks film is more interesting than Huston's best." This will be remembered as "la politique des auteurs" (the auteur theory); it was started by Cahiers Du Cinema and is forgotten in France, but still discussed in US periodicals. Today many of these Hawksians and Hustonians are movie directors. I don't know what any of them think of that ancient argument any more, but I feel sure we've all adopted Bazin's mayonnaise theory because making films has taught us a lot.

The public's desire to see a film — its power to attract — is a stronger motivation than the power of any criticism. Universally favourable reviews couldn't get people to see Alain Resnais's Nuit Et Brouillard (about deportation), Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Vidas Secas (about the famine and drought in Brazil), or Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (about a soldier who has lost his legs, arms, sight and speech).

These examples suggest two interpretations. First the filmmaker is wrong in believing his enemy to be the producer. The real enemy is the public, whose resistance is so hard to overcome. The second interpretation holds that there exists, in the very idea of cinematic spectacle, a promise of pleasure, an idea of exaltation, that runs counter to the downward spiral of life that lead only to death.

If we accept this vision, we will say that the spectacle, as opposed to journalism, has a mission to deceive, but that the greatest of those who create such spectacles do not resort to lies but instead get the public to accept their truth. We must never forget that an artist imposes his madness on an audience less mad, or at least unaware of its madness.

It might help to cite an example. Ingmar Bergman's Cries And Whispers was a worldwide success though it had all the elements of failure, including the slow torture of a woman dying of cancer — everything the public hates. But the film's formal perfection, especially the use of red in the decor of the house, constituted the element of exaltation — I would even say the element of pleasure — so that the public immediately sensed that it was watching a masterpiece.

Other Bergman films, no less beautiful, were treated coolly by the public — and perhaps all they lacked were the red walls. For an artist like Bergman there will always be a core of faithful viewers in every great city of the world — an encouragement for him to continue his work.

This is an extract of François Truffaut's The Films In My Life, translated by Leonard Mayhew, published by Da Capo Press, New York, 1994. It appears in Projections 8, Film-makers On Film-making, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, published by Faber and Faber.

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