François Truffaut

Biography

François Roland Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. He came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin as a young man and was hired to write for Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma, where he became a proponent of the auteur theory, which posits that a film's director is its true author. The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining film of the New Wave. The films Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979) continued to chronicle the story of the couple Antoine and Christine. Truffaut contributed to another significant milestone of the movement with his work on Breathless (1960), a film directed by his Cahiers colleague Jean-Luc Godard.