A Companion to François Truffaut -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Notes on Contributors -- Preface -- Filmography -- Part I La Planète Truffaut -- 1 Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I: Truffaut And His Position -- Paris, June 18, 2010 -- Notes -- 2 Truffaut and His "Doubles" -- Reflecting on Reflections of Truffaut In His Films -- Photographs from a Family Album -- Picasso, Masked in the Filigree of Jules et Jim -- On Details -- Motifs Repeated and Inflected -- Other Kinds of Mirrors -- Notes -- 3 Aesthetic Affinities: François Truffaut, Patrick Modiano, Douglas Sirk -- Imagination: "La Reine des Facultés" -- Emotion and Hypnosis -- David Stern's Infant and the Spectator -- Tirez sur le pianiste: The Metaphoric Network -- Patrick Modiano: Literature and Amodal Perception -- La Femme d'à côté: Stylization and Repetitions -- Douglas Sirk: Deciphering Style -- Fiction and the Intersubjective Matrix -- Conclusion: The Obscure Side of the Moon -- Notes -- 4 Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part II: Truffaut and His Methods -- Paris, June 19, 2010 -- Part II Style and Sensibility -- 5 Flashes of Happiness -- Communities, Good and Bad -- When the Stalling Stops -- Love is Not Cheerful -- Touching the Ground -- Untimely Joys -- 6 Truffaut and the Photographic: Cinema, Fetishism, Death -- Cinema -- Fetishism -- Death -- Notes -- 7 The Impasse of Intimacy: Romance and Tragedy in Truffaut's Cinema -- Triangulating Truffaut -- Reverse Triangles: Jules et Jim and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent -- Shadows of Absence: La Sirène du Mississippi and L'Histoire d'Adèle H. -- Personal Catastrophes: La Peau douce and La Femme d'à côté -- Conclusion: Truffaut and the Modernist Psychodrama -- Notes -- 8 A Fine Madness: Digressions on Pathologies in Truffaut's Films -- Prowling Madness -- Intoxications -- Traps, Ramparts -- Perversions?.

Collapse and Dissolution -- The Madness of the Real -- 9 The Ecstatic Pan -- The Case of the Missing Camera (Movement) -- Methodological Issues -- Stairs: "Women's Legs Are Compasses" -- The Work of Art: "I Have the Religion of Love" -- Ecstasy: "Films Are More Harmonious Than Life" -- The Agony and the Ecstasy -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgment -- Notes -- 10 The Untimely Moment and the Correct Distance -- The Untimely Director -- A Logical Game -- Secret Shocks -- Linkage and Balance, Repertoire and Score -- Birth of the Lyric -- The Essential Part of the Superfluous -- Brutality and Nuance -- "A Riddle in the Book of Love, Obscure and Obsolete"30 -- Notes -- Part III The Making of a Filmmaker -- 11 Every Teacher Needs a Truant: Bazin and L'Enfant sauvage -- From Year Zero to Maturity -- Bazin -- Deligny -- Itard -- Notes -- 12 Certain Tendencies of Truffaut's Film Criticism -- A Critic Before a Filmmaker -- Truffaut's Critical Strategies -- Provocation on the Front Lines of Criticism -- Toward "Tomorrow's Cinema" and a New Wave -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 13 Truffaut-Hitchcock -- The Hitchcock Correspondence -- Pneu-ma-tique! -- The "Hitchbook" -- The Man We Loved to Be Hated By -- What Truffaut Knew -- Acknowledgment -- Notes -- 14 The Paradox of "Familiarity": Truffaut, Heir of Renoir -- Renoir at the Heart of the Politique des Auteurs -- Renoir's System of "Checks and Balances" -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 15 Cain and Abel: Godard and Truffaut -- Decade by Decade -- The End of a Friendship -- Mutual Fascination, Mutual Support -- Reflections: Film to Film -- "François Is Perhaps Dead. I Am Perhaps Alive." -- Notes -- 16 Friction, Failure, and Fire: Truffaut as Adaptive Auteur -- The Failure to Adapt: Antoine Doinel and Honoré de Balzac -- Reenacting Authors and Books -- A Lover of Books, Lost in the Flames of Films -- The Flame of the Candle -- Notes.

Part IV Truffaut and His Time -- 17 Growing Up with the French New Wave -- The Young Critic and the New France -- A Young Director and a Young Cinema -- Belated Modernism -- Notes -- 18 Bad Objects: Truffaut's Radicalism -- La Grande Illusion -- The Reluctant Schoolmaster -- A Patricide -- Acknowledgment -- Notes -- 19 Between Renoir and Hitchcock: The Paradox of Truffaut's Women -- Autobiography and New Wave Cinephilia -- Jeanne Moreau: The Femme Fatale of the New Wave -- Catherine Deneuve: The Blonde Mermaid of the Post-1968 Years -- Bernadette Lafont: Truffaut's Carnivalesque Woman -- Notes -- 20 Truffaut in the Mirror of Japan -- A Vulnerable Director -- An Exemplary Friendship -- A New Generation -- Notes -- Part V Films -- 21 Directing Children: The Double Meaning of Self-Consciousness -- Children on the Screen -- Children in De Sica's Shoeshine -- Les 400 Coups -- Humans and Insects -- The Search for the Absolute -- Notes -- 22 Jules et Jim … et Walter Benjamin -- Benjamin's Ambivalence at the Cinema -- The Virulent Modesty of the New Wave -- The Art of Life and the Life of Art -- Adapting Life to Literature and Literature to Film -- Adoration, Translation -- Notes -- 23 Digging Up the Past: Jules et Jim -- The Frozen Image -- The Whirlwind of Life -- Newsreels: Fiction Meets History -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- 24 The Elevator and the Telephone: On Urgency in La Peau douce -- Note -- 25 La Peau douce: A Psychogeography of Silky Cinephilia -- Cinephilia, 1960 -- A New Geography -- The Gas Station -- A Montage of Affect -- Notes -- 26 La Peau douce: François Truffaut's Passionate Object -- Revising the Romantic Melodrama -- A Critique of Middle-class Domesticity -- Cinema: A Passionate Object -- Notes -- 27 An Unsettling Passage: From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte -- Truffaut's Proustian Obsessions.

Not Alone but with a Ghost … -- Blanchot and Truffaut -- Spelling the Death of Present Desire -- Quivering Tributes to Stillness -- Notes -- 28 The Structural Role of Intervals in L'Argent de Poche -- The Social and Political Dimension of a Children's Film -- A Film Built on The Interval -- The Game of the Reel -- Child-adults and the Reversal of Roles -- A Double Exclusion -- Desire and Chance -- The Game with The String -- On the Interval as a Recurring Figure -- Notes -- 29 To Die or to Love: Modern Don Juans in Truffaut and Oliveira -- Beginnings -- Erotic Drive, a Mythical Being? -- Bertrand's Mille e Tre -- Paulo's Mille e Tre -- Endings -- Notes -- 30 Film as Literature: or the Truffaldian Malaise ( L'Homme qui aimait les femmes) -- The Self-Questioning Signature -- The Death of the Author -- Malaise and the Phallic Women -- Autofiction and the Emancipated Spectator -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- 31 The Elegist: François Truffaut inside La Chambre verte -- "The Cult of the Dead" -- Life Stilled -- There Is No "Holiday from History" -- Notes -- 32 La Chambre verte and the Beating Heart of Truffaut's Oeuvre -- "A Handwritten Letter" -- A Magic Lantern for a Dark Film -- An Aesthetic Autobiography -- Notes -- 33 Le Dernier Métro: An Underground Golden Coach -- The Sweet Smell of Success, and the Weird Distortion of Historical Backgrounds -- Holes and Dark Sides -- An Apparently Simple Film Freighted with Heavy Questions -- Marguerite Duras and the Jewish Question -- The Story of Jean and François -- Renoir's Moral Position in a Post-Holocaust World -- Notes -- 34 Disillusionment and Magic in La Nuit américaine and Le Dernier Métro -- A Few Differences -- A Fragmented Film -- Two Intriguing Scenes -- A Few Similarities -- Magic and Communion -- Notes -- Index.