François Truffaut: His films show how to kiss

The films of François Truffaut, who died in 1984, are old and vulgar – and this is wrong, as is the case with retrospective events. Nobody embodies the love of cinema like him.

Friedrich Schlegel once said in Lucind that he who does not despise cannot be respected. There is hardly a filmmaker who does this like François Truffaut. To this day, his film-critical scripts sparkle with scorn or fervor, and his films delight with obsessive love stories and shocking with agonizing loss. Ninety years after his birth, Filmarchiv Austria now dedicates a retrospective to the director of Nouvelle Vague, who died of a brain tumor in 1984.

Of the Austrian interest in this film show, Truffaut collaborated with acting legend Oskar Werner on “Jules and Jim” and “Fahrenheit 451”. In recent decades, Truffaut’s work has begun to gather some dust. His fascination with realistic forms of literature (Balzac, Stendhal) and classic Hollywood cinema (Hitchcock, Chaplin) pushed him to the side of the dominant bourgeois taste that he once opposed. Today, Truffaut symbolizes a vulgar form of French cinema, complete with light love affairs, intellectual eroticism and thoughtful café dialogues in front of the Eiffel Tower panorama. prejudice? It is worth searching again.