“He’s so solemn and humourless”: The legendary director who bored François Truffaut to tears
François Truffaut‘s 1959 debut feature, The 400 Blows, was so different from traditional French cinema because Truffaut had made the decisive effort to go against what he believed to be a stale and uninteresting mode of filmmaking.
As a result of the Nouvelle Vague, which prioritised a more naturalistic mode of filming on location, often with handheld cameras, yet also unconventional editing that brought our attention to the very artificiality of the medium, cinema far and wide changed. The New Hollywood era owes a lot to this period of French New Wave, and its influence is apparent in titles like Bonnie and Clyde, which bears the obvious influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, which emerged two years prior.
But one of the most important influences on the New Hollywood era and mainstream American cinema’s forward trajectory was actually the British drama Blow-Up by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Released in 1966, the success of the film in America, despite its raunchy scenes and nudity, encouraged the demise of the Hays Code, which had otherwise banned anything remotely explicit and discouraged ambiguous endings.
Blow-Up might’ve been a hit, but Truffaut wasn’t convinced by Antonioni, unable to see the humour in the film, which was admittedly subtle and knowing.
While it’s understandable if the former started to dislike Antonioni’s work once he made Zabriskie Point, it seems like he hated him from the very beginning, once spewing some pretty harsh words, not caring for any of his movies and noting, “Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he’s so solemn and humourless”.
Set in Death Valley, making it Antonioni’s only ‘American’ movie, Zabriskie Point was widely panned by critics, and people found this countercultural portrait devoid of what made his earlier movies so beautiful and evocative. People were put off by the orgy sequence, while the younger countercultural crowd that producers had hoped would flock to the movie just didn’t seem that interested; after all, by the ‘70s, the hippie movement was basically dead.
Antonioni might never have made something as era-defining as Blow-Up again, but his next film, Chung Kuo, China, was hailed as a masterpiece by Andrei Tarkovsky, while further success came with The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, which was widely praised.
Antonioni’s peak, however, was the ‘60s, in which he delivered a series of masterpieces, like L’Avventura, Le Notte, L’Eclisse, and Blow-Up, all of which were breathtaking, and while he often revelled in slowness, he revealed poignant truths about the human condition, the state of modern society, and isolation in the process.
Truffaut’s assessment of him is undeniably harsh because to be bored by a film sometimes just means that you’re not paying enough attention. Not every director wants to inject as much Hitchcockian drama into their work as Truffaut.
