This article was published in a comprehensive collection of bibliographical entries on French film directors. This piece provides an in-depth study of the life of François Truffaut as shaped by cinema, cinephile culture and seminal journal Cahiers du Cinéma, exploring both the semi-autobiographical nature of his work as well as his literary.

Most well-known for his Antoine Doinel cycle of five films featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud in the lead role of Antoine Doinel, this piece explores Truffaut’s full body of work, from his early short films (Une Visite, 1955, and Les Mistons, 1957) to the ‘literary’ Truffaut (eg. Jules et Jim, 1962; Fahrenheit 451, 1966; Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, 1971), to the wider autobiographical nature of his films and indeed his role as actor-director in films such as L’Enfant sauvage (1968), La Nuit américaine (1972),La Chambre verte (1978).

The piece begins with the entangled Bazin-Truffaut-Léaud-Doinel relationship and Truffaut’s early forays in cinema, from his ciné-club Le Cercle cinémane to his writings for Cahiers du Cinéma, and his rejection of ‘la tradition de qualité’ in French cinema in favour of a new aesthetic and personal approach to filmmaking, ‘la politique des auteurs’. Highlighting Truffaut’s preoccupations with childhood and female sexuality, the piece dives deeper into Truffaut’s world in which obsession, a crisis of masculinity and impossible love permeate his narratives, while situating his life and work within the context of the French New Wave and the socio-political climate of 1960s France and beyond.