ROBERT JULIAN
411
Suspicion
(making Cary Grant the object of his wife's suspicions rather than
her diabolical assassin) because the studio wanted to protect Grant's image,
Truffaut came forth with a surprising justification.
"It
would be wrong to say
that the [final] screenplay represented a compromise; it was simply
another
story ... Indeed, the various censors and laws of Hollywood [helped to] pu–
rify this mystery plot. ..." One may conclude that censorship was operative
only when creation, or a conflicting creative issue, was denied altogether.
Thus, in an important letter on his relation to "the establishment," his self-de–
fense becomes even subtler and stranger, lopping off the self. It can be
paraphrased: my sincerity as an artist is due to the fact that no one has ever
imposed the choice of a film on me, not even myself. The proof of his
independence
is
not that he had power or prestige enough to choose the films
he would make. His essential liberty may well have been geographical
(America in 1976, the Right Bank of Paris at other times), but it also in–
volved the most intimate kind of experience, that "progressive encroach–
ment" by which his films "chose him." The life ofa film is telescoped into a
creative process that needs to be protected and that he somehow felt was in
danger.
Truffaut is known as one of the most literary film-makers of the post–
war period. Doinel's dreams ofliterary grandeur are part of his charm, and
Truffaut himself wrote numerous essays, books, screenplays, and (we now
know) letters. Though he dropped out of school at the age of fourteen and
considered himself as "self-taught and self-hating"
(un autodidacte qui se
hait),
his artistic culture is essentially tied to European high culture, the written
word. Even more than a film-goer, the film-maker is steeped in literature.
And so it is logical that, along with his endless variations on the desire to
write, the discussion of censorship instinctively leads to an analogy between
film and the written word . The creative act is threatened in both cases, and
his defense of free expression (in terms recalling Montesquieu and Voltaire)
makes out a single claim for both forms. But there are passages in the letters
to show that censorship did not stand so clearly apart. IfTruffaut left his
mark as an "auteur" by projecting the desire to write upon the urge to make
films, he also recognized that the writer's
craft
could stifle cinematic creation.
Criticism offers the easiest example. Though he began as a polemical
critic for the
Cahiers du cinema
(and was often brilliant at it), he soon came to
feel that criticism was no less than an injury to works of art
and
to artists,
and that the only acceptable writing on film was done by what he called
"writers on film" rather than critics. He may even have discovered his own
film career through criticism, but the form was no less pernicious. He regu–
larly expressed his preference for "intuition" over "intelligence," yet it may
come as a surprise that he was no more comfortable at the other extreme.
