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PARTISAN REVIEW
of nudity and alleged immorality. His experience of censorship was not un–
common for the period and for the New Wave in particular. It moved him to
make what is probably his worst film,
Fahrenheit
451 in 1967, based on Ray
Bradbury's novel, an attempt to visualize a world where books are no longer
allowed to exist (the enemies of books burn them; the friends learn them by
heart and so come to replace them). Truffaut spent years on the script, and
he intended to shoot the film in America as his first English-language produc–
tion. He also meant for the film to evoke an Eastern bloc nation, with cos–
tumes reminiscent of the Russian army: the film's question was meant to
take in the globe. Although none of his films after 1961 were censored, his
letters even in the 1970s remain sensitive to the issue. He writes that in his
own work he has learned ruses to beat the censor, and he criticizes the si-
lence forced upon films dealing with abortion and sexuality in France; upon
some of his own films in socialist Algeria; upon books dealing with the French
police and politics; and on television programs dealing with the cinema.
Literally invited to do so, he refuses to make the issue into a personal cru–
sade or to become paranoid about it. Unlike some radical members of the
film
industry after May 1968, he does not even care to see censorship disappear
\
entirely. But there is good reason to think it was his personal apocalypse.
When he wrote in 1976 that he "owed his present liberty [as a film–
maker] to America," Truffaut was easily the most touted French director of
the last fifteen years. However, the correspondence makes no secret of the
material difficulty of operating in the film industry of the 1960s and 1970s,
even when one was successful. But Truffaut's American "liberty" involved
more than ease at finding a producer (Hollywood did give him financial sup–
port) or having his films well received (as they were in the United States).
He meant having them received, that is, shown, at
all.
Although he was often
derided for having "gone establishment," abandoning the marginal ethos of
the New Wave for a more "respectable" kind of film, he did not defend him–
self as one might have expected: to be able to keep on making films of any
kind, you need to be able to please the public. The argument is wrong on a
nuance, confusing the masses, and the producer's bank account, with a public
that does have "personalized reactions." Such a public exists, and it does not
need to be catered to. In addition, this routine argument leaves one free to
think, erroneously, that the major studios can censure as effectively as
Church or State.
Without denying the power of the studios, Truffaut claimed that, any
more than a publisher would seek to limit a book's success, would a studio
seek to do anything but circulate its films . In his book of dialogues with
Hitchcock, he even defended the studio's right to massively intervene in a
film project. When Hitchcock was obliged to reconceive his screenplay for
