--- title: François Truffaut, 1932-1984: Read the TIME Obituary description: Read TIME's 1984 obituary for the filmmaker canonical: https://time.com/3833635/francois-truffaut-1932-1984-wild-child-movie-master/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 1984-11-05T05:01:08.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T06:38:00.864Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: François Truffaut, 1932-1984: Read the TIME Obituary og:description: Read TIME's 1984 obituary for the filmmaker og:url: https://time.com/3833635/francois-truffaut-1932-1984-wild-child-movie-master/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: François Truffaut, 1932-1984: Read the TIME Obituary twitter:description: Read TIME's 1984 obituary for the filmmaker twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # François Truffaut, 1932-1984: Wild Child, Movie Master > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Nov 5, 1984 5:01 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Nov 5, 1984 5:01 AM UTC _You are getting a free preview of a TIME Magazine article from our_ [_archive_](http://time.com/vault)_. Many of our articles are reserved for subscribers only. Want access to more subscriber-only content, click_ [_here_](https://subscription.time.com/storefront/subscribe-to-time/site/td-5optionBlk-0114.html?link=1021714&fpa%5Foc=TIME.com+Archive+Promotion+Test) _to subscribe._ Ten years ago, François Truffaut stood in the wings of Avery Fisher Hall at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, chatting with an admirer while waiting to go onstage to speak at a tribute for Alfred Hitchcock. On cue the lights went down and scenes from Hitchcock films flared onscreen. Stopping himself in, midsentence, Truffaut exclaimed, “Oh! _La projection_!” and turned, eyes bright, to a peephole that gave access to the magic images. The old lure was irresistible for this French movie master who was, first and forever, a child of the American cinema. America, in all its promise and excess, has long intoxicated the French. Truffaut’s achievement was to reconcile, with a uniquely canny buoyancy, the polar tugs of these two cultures. Six of the 21 features he directed were based on works by American writers, from Cornell Woolrich (_The Bride Wore Black_) to Henry James (_The Green Room_), yet they were unmistakably French in atmosphere and obsessions. In Truffaut’s pantheon of directors, Hitchcock rubbed shoulders with Jean Renoir, and his own films sizzled with the tension between Hitchcock’s manipulative elegance and Renoir’s sharp-eyed humanism. The French title of _Day for Night,_ the 1973 valentine to film making in which Truffaut plays a director, is _La Nuit Américaine_. So it seems sadly fitting that when he died of cancer last week, he was a patient at the American Hospital of Paris. The calendar says he was 52 at his death; but the enthusiasm he brought to his life and his work indicates that Truffaut remained in part a perpetual _enfant adorable_. That life began in rebelliousness. The son of a Paris architect, young François spent time in reform school (an ordeal he memorialized in his first feature, _The 400 Blows_) and was kicked out of the French army (an incident that begins _Stolen Kisses_). Luckily for Truffaut, the great film critic André Bazin saw in the layabout a ferocious intelligence begging to be channeled. By his early 20s, Truffaut the critic was trumpeting the cause of _auteurs_, directors whose point of view and command of visual style entitled them to the respect given novelists and painters. In 1958, at 26, he directed _The 400 Blows,_ brought the new wave of film makers to its crest and became a budding _auteur_. With fellow New Wavers Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, Truffaut yanked film into the modernist age. No longer would the screen serve merely as a window through which the spectator sees “real people.” Now it could show anything, in any and all fashions. Time could be stretched or collapsed, as in _Jules et Jim_; the narrative could be interrupted for capricious movie references, as in _Shoot the Piano Player_; the film could jettison the neat happy ending for a character frozen in indecision, as in _The 400 Blows_. With these first three features, Truffaut helped provide a new grammar for the international cinema vocabulary. If Truffaut were only the sum of his formal innovations, he would soon have become a footnote to film history. Not so. There were real people in his films, people driven to emotional extremes by something more compelling than a genre convention. The _Two English Girls_ fatally in love with the same Frenchman, the young woman who turns unrequited passion into suicidal ecstasy in _The Story of Adele H._, the scientist afflicted with a sort of Peter Pan satyriasis in _The Man Who Loved Women_—all were captured under the glass of Truffaut’s sympathetic scrutiny. Children, though, seemed closest to the heart of this gentle genius. In _Small Change_, a three-year-old topples out of a high window and survives, in a gift of life bestowed by Truffaut, the man who could work movie miracles. “Kids are in a state of grace,” he said in 1976\. So, for 52 years, was he. 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