"Auteur Wars"
For my blog post this week, I found a truly remarkable article from The New Yorker, entitled "Auteur Wars"; this article goes into pain-staking depth on the realities and nuances faced by the two founders of the French New Wave cinema, Truffaut and Godard. Since we focused specifically on Truffaut in class this week, I will only be talking about the Truffaut sections of the article for this blog post; however, both auteurs were both readily expounded upon in the attached article and it is a worthwhile read to gain insight into the creative lives of both. It also interesting to read the article and note the avid differences between the creative styles of both Godard and Truffaut.
A section of the article I found most interesting, and one which closely related to class this week, focused on Truffaut's Day for Night, which we viewed in class, and the letter Godard wrote to Truffaut in response--the climax of the their falling-out. Day for Night opened in Paris on May 24, 1973; "On June 1st, Godard sent Truffaut a four-page letter (he also enclosed a note for Jean-Pierre Léaud, the film’s star), in which he denounced the film and Truffaut himself. He demanded that Truffaut, in effect, make amends for “Day for Night” by putting up the money for him to make a film in response. Truffaut answered by giving vent to fifteen years of pent-up grudges in a furious twenty-page letter."
Another section of the article, that I both liked and thought it closely related, content-wise, to our class this week, was the chronological context for Truffaut's book, which we are reading for class, Hitchcock:"...Truffaut was putting his artistically conservative thought into action in a series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock that he planned to package as a book. But, instead of devoting a few months to the project, as he had planned, he spent four years on it—a terrible distraction from filmmaking. Between 1962 and 1965, Truffaut made just one feature film, “The Soft Skin,” a painfully confessional melodrama about adultery, which alluded to his own impending divorce. In the same period, Godard made eight films, each more radical—artistically and politically—than the last."
A section of the article I found most interesting, and one which closely related to class this week, focused on Truffaut's Day for Night, which we viewed in class, and the letter Godard wrote to Truffaut in response--the climax of the their falling-out. Day for Night opened in Paris on May 24, 1973; "On June 1st, Godard sent Truffaut a four-page letter (he also enclosed a note for Jean-Pierre Léaud, the film’s star), in which he denounced the film and Truffaut himself. He demanded that Truffaut, in effect, make amends for “Day for Night” by putting up the money for him to make a film in response. Truffaut answered by giving vent to fifteen years of pent-up grudges in a furious twenty-page letter."
Another section of the article, that I both liked and thought it closely related, content-wise, to our class this week, was the chronological context for Truffaut's book, which we are reading for class, Hitchcock:"...Truffaut was putting his artistically conservative thought into action in a series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock that he planned to package as a book. But, instead of devoting a few months to the project, as he had planned, he spent four years on it—a terrible distraction from filmmaking. Between 1962 and 1965, Truffaut made just one feature film, “The Soft Skin,” a painfully confessional melodrama about adultery, which alluded to his own impending divorce. In the same period, Godard made eight films, each more radical—artistically and politically—than the last."
Here is the link to the article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/07/auteur-wars
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