Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) ranks among the greatest film directors and has had a worldwide impact on filmmaking as a screenwriter, producer, film critic, and founding member of the French New Wave. His most celebrated films include The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Day for Night, and The Last Metro. A Truffaut Notebook is a lively and eclectic introduction to the life and work of this major cinematic figure. In entries as brief as a page, as well as in full-length essays, it examines topics such as Truffaut's mentors, the autobiographical nature of his films, his place in the film tradition, his film criticism, his reputation, his relationships with other directors, and the formal and thematic coherence of his body of work. Sam Solecki also argues for Truffaut's continuing appeal and relevance by examining his influence on filmmakers like Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, Alexander Payne, Patrice Leconte, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and on writers such as Julian Barnes, Ann Beattie, and Salman Rushdie. Because the book returns regularly to the author's shifting responses to Truffaut's work over the last fifty years, it also offers an autobiographical meditation on his own lifelong fascination with film. Consisting of over eighty short entries and essays, as well as provocative lists, dreams, and quizzes, A Truffaut Notebook is an original and exciting text and a model of passionate engagement with cinema.

About the Author
Sam Solecki is emeritus professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Reviews
"In its idiosyncratic layering of personal memory with close scrutiny, A Truffaut Notebook duplicates how many of us relate to film, allowing it to infiltrate our lives in the same way that literature does. Solecki's digressive brilliance is exhilarating: without question, we are in the presence of a passionate mind that has absorbed an enormous amount of information not only about Truffaut but about cinema and its role in culture." Isabel Huggan, author of Belonging: Home Away from Home



Book Information
ISBN 9780773546240
Author Sam Solecki
Format Hardback
Page Count 356
Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press
Publisher McGill-Queen's University Press