PVA magazine (Mars-Avril 2020)

“This misunderstood teenager raised him- self. What saved him were the movies he secretly watched instead of going to school.” The problem child of the Paris streets We must imagine the pupil Truffaut – rst in his class at truancy – a Paris urchin, trickster, and free- loader bouncing from cinema to cinema around the Pigalle-Barbès axis, the home of nearly 30 movie theatres. Long-extinct theatres Le Mirage, l’Ag- ora, l’Artistic, and Le Delta were some of his many refuges, where he would sneak in at night and prise movie posters of Humphrey Bogart or Lau- ren Bacall from their windows with a screwdriver. But his headquarters was the 6,000-seat Art Deco- style Gaumont Palace on the Boulevard de Clichy: “the largest in Europe, if not the world”, af rms Lombard. The theatre was demolished in 1973 and replaced with a hardware chain store, a loss from which Truffaut never recovered. During this period the free-spirited youth discovered Paris neigh- bourhoods through the works of Orson Welles and Sacha Guitry. When he was hungry, Truffaut pil- fered from church donation boxes and stole milk bottles left in front of apartment buildings. He wielded his rst camera in the same spirit of inde- pendence and adaptability. A founder of the French New Wave, Truffaut’s “lack of money pushed him to shoot on the spot, in the street, without the per- mission of passersby”, emphasises Lombard. “He wanted to show real people and depict the reality of the streets. To connect with this bygone era it’s essential to see his lms”, adds Dubois. Truffaut’s uvre creates a vivid portrait of the postwar era, conveying a feeling of otherworldliness. In Bed and Board (1970) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960) the characters take platform buses and talk to their

Le cinéma Gaumont Palace, boulevard de Clichy. The Gaumont Palace cinema, on the Boulevard de Clichy.

Les Quatre Cents Coups avec Patrick Auffay et Jean-Pierre Léaud, 1959. The 400 Blows , with Patrick Auffay and Jean-Pierre Léaud (1959).

concierge in a world without entry codes. “When we look at the images in his lms now we realise the extent to which Batignolles and Pigalle, then working-class neighbourhoods, have changed and have become bourgeois, with clean façades”, notes Dubois. François Truffaut was an important chronicler of a soon-to-be forgotten Paris. 1) Le Paris by François Tru aut, Philippe Lombard (Parigramme, 2018).

Listen to our podcast in the footsteps of Truffaut in the Batignolles.

2) cine-balade.com, at exploreparis.com

1981 César dumeilleur lm, réalisateur et scénario pour Le Dernier Métro . Wins the César award for best lm, director, and screenplay for The Last Métro .

1984 Décès à Neuilly-sur-Seine. Death in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

2014 Rétrospective à la Cinémathèque française. Retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

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