"Are films more important than real life?" This query is a focal point in Day for Night (La Nuit Américaine), François Truffaut’s 1973 Academy Award-winning film about life behind the scenes of a film set. It’s voiced by Alphonse, a character in Day for Night who is both a young actor and a consummate film buff. He is played by Jean Pierre Léaud, a Truffaut lookalike (check out the picture of the two of them at right and decide for yourself if they resemble one another) who is best known for his continuing role as Antoine Doinel, Truffaut’s cinematic alter ego, in a series of autobiographical movies directed by Truffaut.*

     Within the narrative of Day for Night, the answer to this question is an emphatic yes. As Ferrand, the director of Meet Pamela, Day for Night’s film-within-a-film, Truffaut (who of course is also the director of Day for Night – I know it’s hard to keep this straight) claims that for some people, the filmmaking process is even more important than real life! But is this merely the character of Ferrand talking, or does it reflect the views of the real Truffaut? We need to look at the filmmaker’s own life for clues, as many relationships and/or events in Truffaut’s life – his unhappy childhood and a yearning for a father figure; a love of film and the novels of Balzac; an apprenticeship with Neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini; his libidinous nature; being hard-of-hearing; a lack of political zeal; even his mother’s maiden name (see below) – show up in his films.

     Truffaut was born out of wedlock to Frenchwoman Janine de Montferrand** in 1932. Around the time of her son's birth, Montferrand married architect-designer Roland Truffaut (not the boy’s biological father). The infant was immediately given to a wet nurse and  then sent to live with his maternal grandmother. He was eight years old when she died, and at that point, his parents reluctantly took him in. His unhappy experiences at home and in school would be mirrored in the first of his autobiographical films, The 400 Blows (1959). Like Antoine, the boy in this film, Truffaut became a truant, often skipping school to devour books at the library or slip into movies without paying. He was often joined by a friend who was also pretty much on his own, as his mother was an alcoholic who was usually drunk or sleeping it off. It was around this time that Truffaut started his "cercle cinémane," a film lovers’ club.

     By the age of 14, Truffaut was on his own, performing a variety of menial jobs. At one point, his father – that is, M. Truffaut – had him arrested, and he landed in Villejuif (literally "Jew Town"), an institution that was half jail, half mental institution. However, André Bazin, a real-life deus ex machina, intervened on Truffaut’s behalf. Bazin, editor of the influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, had met the boy, recognized his love for film, and gotten him released to his custody. Truffaut went to live with Bazin and his wife, and the couple became his de facto surrogate parents, though Bazin was relatively young himself, only 13 years older than his charge.***

     At 19, Truffaut enlisted in the French army, where he supposedly lost the hearing in one ear. He became a deserter just before he was supposed to leave for Indochina and was jailed for six months for "instability of character." Truffaut then went to work as a cinematographer for the Ministry of Agriculture but was fired after a few months. At that point, Truffaut served as an assistant to Rossellini and, with Bazin’s encouragement, began to write for Cahiers du Cinéma.

     With his love for film and Bazin as an encouraging father figure, it was natural for Truffaut to get involved with Cahiers. Over the next few years, he would become a prodigious writer, penning close to 500,000 words of film criticism. Along with his young cohorts, Truffaut wrote praises of Hollywood genres like the western and the gangster film, but the group's favorite genre is said to have been the hard-boiled detective picture.

     Truffaut ended up angering many people with his bombastic film criticism, as he castigated well-respected French filmmakers of the time for using the screen as a mere repository for theatrical and literary adaptations, instead of creating new filmic art. (It must be said, however, that Truffaut himself would go on to adapt books, including Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451, for the screen.)  Indeed, Truffaut would earn the sobriquet "the grave-digger of French cinema," because of his harsh judgments. The French newspaper L’Express, for example, called him "a hateful enfant terrible who puts his foot in his mouth with unbearable self-conceit." One year, Truffaut was banned from writing about features at the Cannes Film Festival because of his malicious prose. Ironically, the next year he was back with his first feature-length film, the aforementioned The 400 Blows, which would win a festival prize.

     It was in Cahiers in 1954 that Truffaut developed la politique des auteurs, the auteur theory that is a cornerstone of film analysis. Truffaut’s peers at the publication, including cinéastes Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, went along with Truffaut’s championing of the auteur approach. These Cahiers critics, along with others, would soon become directors themselves under the umbrella term la Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave – 24 of them debuting in 1959 and an additional 43 making their first films in 1960. They were all dissimilar, as they included documentarists as well as feature filmmakers of varying styles. But one thing they did all have in common was that they were individualists who injected new spirit, a breath of exuberance, into filmmaking. With their vast knowledge of film history, especially of American cinema, they were able to take film conventions and resurrect them in novel ways. For Truffaut, this meant showcasing unexpected details – things that prove nothing but look interesting – and suppressing expected clichés. (Halfway through Day for Night, for example, Ferrand receives a parcel of books. Through a close-up on the titles, we can see that they are all about directors whom the Cahiers critics designated as auteurs. This in no way furthers the narrative; however, it is an intriguing moment.)

     Truffaut’s first serious film, made when he was only 25, is a charming short called Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers). At its core are two themes that Truffaut would return to time and time again: the magic of childhood, perhaps because his own had been so miserable, and the mysteries of women. These themes, along with a passion for the cinema, show up in Day for Night.

     One of Truffaut’s best films is The Wild Child (1969). This is a period piece about a boy raised by wolves and brought back to so-called civilization, where he encounters a kindly teacher (played by Truffaut himself, in his first major acting role). Done in black and white, and based on a real-life case history, The Wild Child looks like a documentary.  However, the film can also be seen in term's of Truffaut’s own life: a "wild" kid without a kindly father figure (at least until Bazin came along to "tame" him). It has deeper resonance, though, as it also relates to Truffaut’s search for his biological father. Before he began to shooting this film, Truffaut hired a private detective to track down his real father. He turned out to be a married dentist from a bourgeois Jewish background. At one point, Truffaut watched the man from a distance, but for whatever reason, he never met him or even approached him.

     Although Truffaut was not a political filmmaker like his cohort Godard (a fact briefly alluded to in Day for Night), he’d always voiced disdain for bourgeois attitudes in both his life and in his writings. This doesn’t mean that he did not enjoy the good life. Truffaut married at a young age and convinced his wealthy father-in-law to bankroll his early films. Although he was a family man -- he and his wife had two daughters,**** Eva and Laura, named after film characters -- Truffaut's many publicly conducted extramarital affairs may have been his way of showing disdain for middle-class values. 

     In any case, from The Wild Child on, many of his films feature strong father figures. Perhaps it is more coincidence, but there are also references to Jewishness in some of his later films, including The Last Metro (1980), about a Jewish man hiding in a theatre basement throughout the war, and an oblique reference in Day for Night. In other words, since his real father’s identity was an issue in Truffaut’s own life, it was also fodder for his films.  

     Let’s return to the question at hand. Many of Truffaut’s own experiences ended up in his films, and films also impacted his off-screen life. Does this have any bearing? Of course it does. At one point, Truffaut even claimed that this was a question that had bedeviled him for 30 years! Thus, with real life and film so intertwined, Truffaut, like Ferrand, no doubt believed that the cinema was more important than actual life. Just as movies transformed Truffaut's life, he in return created memorable characters that changed the cinema.

  **Even his character’s name in Day for Night, Ferrand, is modeled on his mother’s maiden name.

****He also had a third daughter, Joséphine, with actress Fanny Ardant.