Companion to François Truffaut by Andrew Dudley; Gillain Anne;

Author:Andrew, Dudley; Gillain, Anne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

The End of a Friendship

This period immediately following 1968 marked the beginning of a third phase, one that would cause a brutal rupture in the friendship of the two auteurs. We can see the private manifestation of this in Truffaut’s correspondence, published in 1988, parti­cularly in the May 1973 letter from Godard to Truffaut: “Yesterday I saw La Nuit ­américaine. In all likelihood no one will call you a liar, so I am doing it.” Truffaut responded to this letter with extraordinary violence, but also an extraordinarily lucid understanding of the personality of Jean-Luc Godard, a brilliant artist, but one whose sadomasochistic narcissism was often unbearable to even his closest friends.

This rupture was only indirectly public during the 1970s, glimpsed via malicious allusions from each of the two men, especially on Godard’s part, over the course of the many interviews that they gave throughout the seventies and into the eighties, until Truffaut’s death in 1984. Godard’s personal attack on La Nuit américaine (1973) gained public notoriety only in 1980 when Editions Albatros published a transcription of the lectures he delivered starting in the fall of 1978 in Montreal at the request of Serge Losique, director of the Conservatoire d’Art Cinématographique de Montréal. We know that these were largely improvised talks, Godard commenting on his own feature-length works and projecting them along with selected reels from other films. So on his second trip, discussing Le Mépris (1963), he showed three other films about cinema, and not just any three: Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) by Vincente Minnelli, and La Nuit américaine by his former friend Truffaut.

These lines from Godard’s commentary are revealing:

To me [he has had] a truly strange career. François Truffaut’s real life would be a grand film that would be horribly expensive to make. Because he has had a very strange career – when you watch his first film, The Four Hundred Blows, and you know a little bit about his life before – for me, there was a break right after The Four Hundred Blows. And I don’t know how that happened. He let himself be taken in by cinema, he became everything he hated.9

Truffaut responded indirectly to Godard in a long interview with Cahiers du Cinéma in September and October 1980, answering questions from Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, and Jean Narboni:

You refer to Godard, but the example is a bad one because he belongs directly in the group of compulsive enviers. As far as I’m concerned, Godard’s declarations of hate no longer matter; it seems I made him lose sleep. … Even at the time of the New Wave, friendship worked differently with him. Because he was very gifted and very good at making people feel sorry for him, we forgave him for his meanness, but everyone will tell you, the devious side that he is no longer able to conceal was already there. We always had to help him, to do him favors, and wait for a low blow in return.

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