The movie scene François Truffaut called “an abuse of cinematic power”
French New Wave pioneer François Truffaut rose to prominence in 1959 when he released his debut feature, The 400 Blows. The charming yet emotionally poignant coming-of-age tale was a landmark of French cinema, winning the Best Director award at Cannes Film Festival.
Over the following decades, Truffaut proved himself to be a master filmmaker, producing other successful works such as Day for Night, Jules and Jim, and four more instalments in the Antoine Doinel saga, which follows the protagonist through adulthood. However, Truffaut’s journey to becoming one of France’s most well-respected directors began years before he released his first film. Aged just 16, Truffaut started a film club, where he met film critic Andre Bazin, who befriended the young cinephile. After Truffaut joined the army aged 18, he spent two years attempting to escape. Eventually, he was arrested for his attempts, but Bazin used political contacts to get him released before giving him a writing job at his new magazine, Cahiers du cinema.
As a critic and eventual editor, Truffaut became known for his scathing reviews and critique of mainstream French cinema, which he recognised as stale and outdated. Despite his criticisms of popular culture, Truffaut was a big advocate for the films of British director Alfred Hitchcock, which many American critics couldn’t wrap their heads around. Truffaut shared: “In 1962, while in New York to present Jules and Jim, I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question: ‘Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock so seriously? He’s rich and successful, but his movies have no substance’.”
“From my past career as a critic, in common with all of the young writers from Cahiers du Cinéma, I still felt the imperative need to convince,” he added. “It was obvious that Hitchcock, whose genius for publicity was equalled only by that of Salvador Dalí, had, in the long run, been victimised in American intellectual circles because of his facetious response to interviewers and his deliberate practice of deriding their questions.” Thus, Truffaut penned Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book based on conversations the pair had together in 1962.
Truffaut stated: “In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art form than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to responding seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock.” The book helped establish Hitchcock as a respectable auteur in America and has been cited as a significant influence on filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson.
As a massive fan of Hitchcock, Truffaut gave his opinion on practically everything the director released, and he wasn’t afraid to hold back. In 1936, Hitchcock released Sabotage, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Praised upon its release as “a masterly exercise in suspense,” Hitchcock surprised viewers with one shocking scene, which writer Mark Fleischmann referred to as “virtually an act of cinematic terrorism”.
In one scene, the lovable young Stevie is given a package by Verloc, a secret government agent, which he must deliver before 1:45pm. Unbeknownst to Stevie, the box contains a bomb, and after multiple delays to get to his destination, the young boy and everyone else on the bus are blown to pieces. The tragic event is built up with master precision, yet, later in his career, Hitchcock revealed that he regretted the scene.
He agreed with Truffaut’s damning statement: “Making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it comes close to an abuse of cinematic power.” Nevertheless, Sabotage has since been voted one of the greatest British films of all time, and Quentin Tarantino even paid homage to the bus scene in Inglorious Basterds.
