Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes Page B

and Films to “those film-makers who are known to the public as the ‘New Wave’ and whose preoccupations are also mine.” The nouvelle vague was denunciatory and iconoclastic in manner; but while knocking the heads off a few statues it none the less carried on building the cathedral. It developed and promoted the auteur theory, while also retrospectively applying it to American cinéastes like Howard Hawks; it loosened the financial garrotte with which film backer had long held film maker; it confirmed a move away from studio shooting to a sort of plein-airisme; and it turned its back on the established star system, while inevitably producing stars of its own, some of whom duly behaved with traditional megalomania.
    By 1982 Truffaut could take a historial view of the Cahiers du cinéma row of the 1950s. He told the American critic Jim Paris that he still looked out for examples of le cinéma de papa when they came around again on television. He always hoped for a “pleasant surprise.” But the distinguished film maker of fifty found that his objections remained the same as those of the feisty young critic: “These relate mainly to the representation of love, the female characters, the anti-bourgeois statements, the absence of children and above all the falseness of the dialogue.” He concluded:
The revolt, to use a very grand word, of Cahiers du cinéma was more moral than aesthetic. What we were arguing for was an equality of observation on the part of the artist vis-à-vis his characters instead of a distribution of sympathy and antipathy which in most cases betrayed the servility of artists with regard to the stars of their films and, on the other hand, their demagoguery with regard to the public.
    To each his own revolt: for Godard it was chiefly aesthetic and political, for Truffaut financial and moral. “Why don't you make political films?” the tiresome German fan demands of the film director Ferrand (played by Truffaut himself) in La Nuit améri-caine. “Why don't you make erotic films?” Ferrand doesn't reply; he is too busy getting on with the job. And in Truffaut's case, too, the main answer must come from a body of work whose character was settled early, and more by cinematic instinct than ideological decision. “A film-maker shows what his career will be in his first 150 feet of film,” Truffaut wrote of Jean Vigo. Apply this test to his own first feature, Les Mistons, and what sort of film maker do we discover? One attracted to the love story that ends badly, and with a singular empathy for the child on the nervous edge of adolescence; one with a taste for cinematic quotation, borrowed gags, and surprise cameo moments, plus a reliance on the literary device of voice-over narration; a storyteller imbued with charm, lyricism, aigre-doux humour, and a predilection for sunlit woodlands. (Is there a danger of sentimentality? Perhaps. But we might recall Alain-Fournier's reply to this charge: “Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrow.”) And if we look behind the film, we discover an equally vital element: Les Mistons was largely financed by Truffaut's wife. This is a key lesson of the nouvelle vague, and one on which Truffaut and Godard could agree: that in an essentially collaborative medium, collaboration with the wrong money destroys individualism.
    “When I was a child … I hated my family, I was bored by my family.” The young Truffaut dropped out of school at fourteen, and diversified into petty theft and minor vagabondage. When he stole a typewriter, his father committed him to a psychiatric “observation centre.” (A few years previously, Godard had stolen from Swiss Television, and been put in a mental hospital by his father.) Truffaut next joined the army, only to spend his time there in a constant state of near desertion. These experiences fed directly into the Antoine Doinel cycle of films, with the febrile, burning eyed