Truffaut, Godard, Day For Night, and a link

There was the letter Jean-Luc Godard wrote to Francois Truffaut after the release of Truffaut's Day for Night, his movie about the making of a movie.

Truffaut was a liar, Godard wrote, "because the shot of you and Jacqueline Bisset the other night at Chez Francis is not in your film, and one wonders why the director is the only one who doesn't fuck in Day for Night."

Truffaut played the director in the movie.

Godard may have had a point there, I suppose. Truffaut was carrying on a highly publicized affair with Bisset while they were making Day for Night. But Truffaut was the only major character who doesn't have a sex scene in the movie. In fact, we keep seeing Truffaut's character alone in bed dreaming of himself as a child stealing movie posters from the local theater.

Well, it's okay with me. Truffaut was playing a character. He didn't need to do a love scene if he didn't want to.

What bothered me about it was that we know what Truffaut looked like as a kid. He looked like the kid in The 400 Blows. Jean-Pierre Leaud. He had a crew cut and a big nose. But in the dream sequences, he had a cute dutch boy haircut and an adorable little button nose.

And remember Truffaut's comment in his book on Alfred Hitchcock. He talks about the kid in Hitchcock's Sabotage. The boy keeps getting into trouble. Truffaut commented that, in movies, kids doing things they're not supposed to endears them to the audience.

Were the shots of himself as a child stealing a poster a shameless attempt to endear himself to the audience? And why on earth would a child want a poster for Citizen Kane?

Day for Night was still a pretty good movie. Truffaut not having sexual intercourse in it wasn't a major flaw. I should probably say, though, that that wasn't Godard's central objection to it.

Truffaut had been a critic himself. Like many critics, he could dish it out but he couldn't take it. Roger Ebert wrote an angry letter to the local newspaper here after one of his books got a bad review. And Truffaut wrote a twenty page letter to Godard attacking him back.

"I've always felt that true militants are like cleaning women," Truffaut wrote, "performing a thankless, daily, necessary task. But you, you're like Ursula Andress. You make a four-minute appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, for you to make two or three startling pronouncements, then you disappear, shrouded in appealing mystery."

But, anyway, here's a link to an edited English translation of an interesting interview with Godard. He discusses his split Truffaut, the Oscar they're awarding him, the accusations made against him by Zionist groups, among other topics:

http://landscapesuicide.blogspot.com/2010/11/everything-or-nothing-2.html