François Truffaut’s favourite American directors: “Anyone who would reject them, stop going to the cinema”
Bored with the old way of French cinema, a young François Truffaut penned the essay A Certain Tendency in French Cinema in 1954, arguing that a new method of filmmaking – centred around the director as the author – was needed to revolutionise a medium becoming increasingly tired.
He subsequently made his debut feature, The 400 Blows, a phenomenal coming-of-age tale that lit up the screen with equally playful and moving explorations of a child trying to find his way, helping to kickstart one of cinema’s most influential periods, the French New Wave. Alongside the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Rivette, French cinema morphed into something entirely new, becoming a playground for experimentation.
While we often consider the nouvelle vague to be the antithesis of Hollywood, how many blockbusters break the fourth wall, use bizarre, choppy editing, champion handheld filming, and shoot without the restraint of a studio set? Many filmmakers of the era loved American cinema.
In fact, Truffaut in particular was a huge fan of certain Hollywood directors, whom he saw as revolutionary figures that were doing something truly groundbreaking in the arena of mainstream filmmaking.
Truffaut, whose career in cinema began as a critic at the film journal Cahiers du cinema, spent a lot of his time writing about American cinema, but there were two filmmakers who stood out as his favourites, and he’d go as far as to say that if you don’t like their work, then there’s no point watching movies anymore.
Writing in the publication in 1955, Truffaut called Nicholas Ray “an auteur in our sense of the word.”
He added, “The hallmark of Ray’s very great talent resides in his absolute sincerity, his acute sensitivity. He is not of great stature as a technician. All his films are very disjointed, but it is obvious that Ray is aiming less for the traditional and all-round success of a film than at giving each shot a certain emotional quality.”
Ray made many classics during his time, like In A Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without A Cause, and They Live By Night, which Truffaut called “still unmistakably his best film.” The French filmmaker couldn’t stop singing Ray’s praises, calling him “the Rossellini of Hollywood” and stating that, “In the kingdom of mechanisation, he is the craftsman, lovingly fashioning small objects out of Hollywood.”
In the same piece, Truffaut heralded Howard Hawks, the genius behind everything from Scarface, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Rio Bravo. “Hawks and Ray form an opposition rather like Castellani and Rossellini. With Hawks, we witness a triumph of the mind, with Nick Ray, it is a triumph of the heart,” he wrote.
For Truffaut, to appreciate the pair’s work was to truly know cinema. He concluded, “You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don’t watch any more films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty.”
