The iconic director François Truffaut called “solemn and humorless”
For many cinephiles around the world, it was François Truffaut who kickstarted the French New Wave with his seminal masterpiece The 400 Blows. One of the most prominent artistic voices in French cinema, Truffaut changed the cinematic landscape forever with fascinating works, such as Jules and Jim and Day for Night, that played with the medium as well as genre frameworks. However, before he became a pioneering auteur, Truffaut started out as a critic who deeply loved films.
Alongside other notable figures such as Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut started his journey in the world of cinema by working as a film columnist. Influenced by the auteur theory that was developed by André Bazin, he studied the works of directors like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock to identify what was lacking in contemporary French films. Since nobody came forward to rectify those glaring absences, it was the critics who stepped up to revolutionise the medium.
While Truffaut had a lot of positive things to say about masters like Alfred Hitchcock and Werner Herzog, there was one specific auteur whose works failed to move him. “Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about,” Truffaut once said while talking about Antonioni’s cinematic style. “He bores me; he’s so solemn and humorless.” Interestingly, the Italian filmmaker wasn’t too impressed by Truffaut’s cinematic output either.
During a conversation with Charles Thomas Samuels (via Scraps From The Loft), Antonioni claimed that watching Truffaut’s films made him feel dirty. When asked about his opinions, the acclaimed director answered: “I think his films are like a river, lovely to see, to bathe in, extraordinarily refreshing and pleasant. Then the water flows and is gone. Very little of the pleasant feeling remains because I soon feel dirty again and need another bath.”
Antonioni added: “I don’t know why Truffaut’s leave me unmoved. I’m not trying to say that he has no significance. I only mean that the way he tells a story doesn’t come to anything. Perhaps he doesn’t tell my kind of story. Perhaps that’s it.” Their dislike for each other’s work ended up inspiring one of Truffaut’s most well-known films, providing a creative outlet for the intensely negative feelings that Truffaut harboured for Antonioni’s cinema.
When asked about it by Samuels in a separate interview, Truffaut admitted that it was his “hostility” toward Antonioni that helped him make The Wild Child. Based on the life of Victor of Aveyron, it tells the incredible story of a young boy who spent the first decade of his life without any proper human contact. “I wanted to show a real lack of communication in my film, not the modish variety that involves Antonioni,” Truffaut declared, criticising the representations of alienation and isolation that Antonioni had portrayed throughout his career.
Watch the trailer for Wild Child below.
