- The Bride Wore Black
Today at 5:30 PM (and once more tomorrow at 6 PM), the Gene Siskel Film Center hosts a screening of Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. (It screens alongside Andrzej Zulawski’s horror classic Possession, part of a dual bill featuring films starring Isabelle Adjani.) Among a certain strand of hardcore cinephilia, Truffaut, a stalwart of the influential French New Wave, is very lowly regarded. True, he didn’t inspire the cult following of Godard or Rivette, or amass a filmography like Chabrol’s or Rohmer’s, but Truffaut played as crucial a role in the formation of contemporary film culture as any of his Cahiers du Cinema peers. Perhaps it’s the perceived sentimentalism of his work (a wistful longing for childhood and innocence is a major Truffaut theme) that tends to turn people off, or the fact that his style ultimately proved the least radical of his cohorts. The fact remains that all of Truffaut’s films spoke eloquently of cinema, its possibilities, its limitations, its past, present, and future. You can catch my five favorites after the jump.
- Fahrenheit 451 (1966) Credit Truffaut for not adhering to the strict rules of adaptation. Disassembling what’s already a loose, impressionistic narrative, Truffaut incorporates his own ideas of image consumption and the threat of identity loss, resulting in a film that extols the virtues of Bradbury’s novel, but reorients some of its finer points to better fit (and more properly critique) a visual medium.
