Correspondence, 1945-1984

Cover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 01.06.1990 - 618 Seiten
The five hundred letters collected here span the whole of Tuffaut's extraordinary career, from the ardent and troubled adolescent to the years of grandest accomplishment in the French cinema. Noteworthy correspondents incude Jean-Luc Goddard, Alfred Hitchcock, Louis Malle, Helen Scott, Eric Rohmer, and lifelong friend Robert Lachenay.

Autoren-Profil (1990)

Francois Truffaut was one of the principal figures in the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. As a young critic for the avant-garde film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema, he formulated the politique des auteurs---the idea that directors with a personal vision are the true authors of films, rather than conventional screenwriters or script-bound directors. An admirer of American films, Truffaut was much influenced by Alfred Hitchcock (see Vol. 1). In several of his own films, Truffaut, who had an unhappy childhood and youth, portrayed a fictionalized version of himself, a character called Antoine Doinel, to create personal cinema. The first of these films, which was also his first feature film, was The Four Hundred Blows (1959). It is still one of the most popular of his works. Other notable Truffaut films are Shoot the Piano Player (1960), the lyrical menage a trois Jules and Jim (1961), the Academy Award-winning Day for Night (1973), The Last Metro (1980), and The Woman Next Door (1981).

Gilbert Adair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on December 29, 1944. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including A Night at the Pictures, Myths and Memories, Hollywood's Vietnam, Flickers, and Surfing the Zeitgeist. His novels, Love and Death on Long Island and The Dreamers, were adapted into films, the later by Adair himself. He also helped write the screenplays The Territory, Klimt, and A Closed Book. He won the Author's Club First Novel Award for The Holy Innocents in 1988 and the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void in 1995. During the 1990s, he wrote a regular column for the Sunday Times. He died in early December 2011 at the age of 66.

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