François Truffaut as an Auteur: An Analysis Based on “Jules et Jim”
Is Truffaut an auteur in the act of love?
“Young film-makers will speak in the first person in order to tell what happened to them: their first love, a political awakening, a trip, an illness, and so on. Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love.”
François Truffaut, 1957
In 1954, François Truffaut wrote his famous essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” attacking the current norms of the film industry. In his essay, Truffaut claimed that the film was a great medium for directors to externalize their inner thoughts and feelings while the French cinema lacked the originality and creativity in that aspect. Thus, the writings of Truffaut and his colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers du cinéma created the base of a new theory along with paving the way for the French New Wave.
Dwelling on the works of French critics, Andrew Sarris transformed the thoughts around the authorship into a theory. Strongly agreeing with Truffaut, Sarris expanded the auteur theory based on certain criteria to judge if a director was truly an auteur. (Sarris, 562) The criteria of Andrew Sarris consisted of three main elements.
The first premise Sarris mentioned is concerned with the technical competence of the…
