François Truffaut
Our online tribute to a leading figure of the nouvelle vague.
A leading light of the nouvelle vague, François Truffaut made films that were innovative and personal yet highly accessible, writes season programmer Geoff Andrew Though Truffaut (like Chabrol and early Godard) flirted with genre, he was essentially (like Rohmer) a humanist. For all his cinephilia and abiding interest – whether playful or allusive – in film form, his movies were primarily about people, particularly their emotional lives and their relationships with one another. Love, loss, loneliness; desire, doubt, disappointment; trust, betrayal, guilt: these preoccupations permeate his work. A former critic who felt his life had been transformed by the arts, he imbued his films with personal passions.