Totally Truffaut 23 Films for Understanding the Man and the Filmmaker

In Totally Truffaut, author Anne Gillain answers two complex riddles: How is experience imprinted into films? What draws audiences to theaters? François Truffaut, like Fellini, Bergman or Scorsese, worked with an autobiographical material and Totally Truffaut follows the coded inscription of major life events in his films from his illegitimate birth to his passionate and doomed relationship with Catherine Deneuve. The book focuses first on the process that embeds experience into fictions, and more specifically into visual forms and patterns. It also tries to define the mode of perception film language triggers in the spectator. When entering a movie theater, we expect perceptual pleasure. Truffaut's creative work is devoted to distilling this drug to audiences, an ambition central to the evolution of his style. These two issues are closely connected and Totally Truffaut follows, film after film, their crisscrossing paths. It also highlights the essential role several great actresses-Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Isabelle Adjani, Jacqueline Bisset, Fanny Ardant or Catherine Deneuve- played in the creation of the films.

After earning a PhD at Harvard, Anne Gillain taught courses on French cinema at Wellesley College. She met François Truffaut in 1979 while writing a memoir on his films and remained in touch with in until his death in 1984. This was the prelude to a series of books that have been translated in
English by Alistair Fox: François Truffaut: The Lost Secret, Truffaut on Cinema. She also published A Companion to François Truffaut, a volume of articles edited in collaboration with Dudley Andrew.

Foreword by Martin Scorsese
The Secret Rediscovered: Preface by Michel Marie
Foreword
Les Mistons (1958)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
Jules and Jim (1962)
Antoine and Colette (1962)
The Soft Skin (1964)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
The Bride Wore Black (1967)
Stolen Kisses (1968)
Mississippi Mermaid (1969)
The Wild Child (1970)
Bed & Board (1970)
Two English Girls (1971)
A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972)
Day for Night (1973)
The Story of Adele H (1975)
Small Change (1976)
The Man Who Loved Women (1977)
The Green Room (1978)
Love on the Run (1979)
The Last Metro (1980)
The Woman Next Door (1981)
Confidentially Yours (1983)
Appendix
List of Works Cited
Index