...For the Vive la France Blogathon...
35 years after his death in 1984, François
Truffaut is best known today as the most successful of the youthful filmmakers
to emerge from the nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement that swept French
cinema in the late 1950s. But before he would write and direct his first
full-length feature in 1959, Truffaut would make his name as an enfant
terrible critic at the influential post-war film journal Cahiers du
cinema (Notebooks on Cinema). It was Truffaut who authored a
famous/infamous January 1954 article, an impassioned and polemic piece, that
advanced the “auteur theory.” This
theory maintains that auteur films reflect the filmmaker’s personal/artistic
vision and possess an identifiable style along with recurring themes and
motifs. Alfred Hitchcock, a director revered by Cahiers’ young critics,
personified the auteur concept and Truffaut was one especially smitten with his
work. He would author 27 articles on Hitchcock over the course of the 1950s.
