Totally Truffaut

Book excerpt: In Totally Truffaut, author Anne Gillain answers two complex riddles: How is experience imprinted into films? What draws audiences to theaters? François Truffaut, like Fellini, Bergman or Scorsese, worked with an autobiographical material and Totally Truffaut follows the coded inscription of major life events in his films from his illegitimate birth to his passionate and doomed relationship with Catherine Deneuve. The book focuses first on the process that embeds experience into fictions, and more specifically into visual forms and patterns. It also tries to define the mode of perception film language triggers in the spectator. When entering a movie theater, we expect perceptual pleasure. Truffaut's creative work is devoted to distilling this drug to audiences, an ambition central to the evolution of his style. These two issues are closely connected and Totally Truffaut follows, film after film, their crisscrossing paths. It also highlights the essential role several great actresses-Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Isabelle Adjani, Jacqueline Bisset, Fanny Ardant or Catherine Deneuve- played in the creation of the films.