Truffaut was an auteur. He was the "author" of the French New Wave in cinema. His first film, the autobiographical THE 400 BLOWS (an idiom for "raising hell") was made in 1959. Many critics consider it one of the best ever.
As I watched THE 400 BLOWS tonight on YouTube, I found myself identifying and empathizing with the troubled young protagonist of the movie. Why is that? I guess it's because I have always had a propensity to sense, as early as grade school, the unconscious angst of those classmates who exhibited untoward behaviors. There was, for example, a classmate in 3rd grade at Gage Elementary School, Darrell Chandler, who bullied other students. Rather than scorn Darrell as the vast majority of my classmates did, I said hello to him, wound up talking to him, asked him how he was doing, and in time, became friends with him. Truffaut came from a difficult childhood, and in the end, directed many great movies during his comparatively short career that made him not only rich and famous, but more importantly, saved himself from darkness. Truffaut was an auteur both of remarkable films and his own life.
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawls
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet, an essayist, a writer of aphorisms, a novelist, and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.
