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PARTISAN REVIEW
Truffaut refused to adapt a number of great literary works in the course of
his career. These include novels by Proust, Camus, Celine, and others, which
he said it would be "sacrilege" to film. Respect for the masterpiece probably
mingles here with remembered animosity. The so-called "Tradition of Qual–
ity" in French cinema, which the New Wave began by revolting against, was
based on the idea that adapting great literature would almost automatically
yield great movies. For Truffaut, the cinema did not need any help. And yet,
he himself adapted a considerable number ofliterary works, by authors in–
cluding William Irish, David Goodis, Bradbury, Henri-Pierre Roche, and
Henry James. Although he vowed in 1963 that
Fahrenheit
would be his last
adaptation (no more books!), he did not keep his word. Along with the names
mentioned, he also contemplated works by Nabokov, Wiesel , O ' Henry,
Malraux, and Simenon. At best, he began a complex game of hide-and-seek
with literature, in which his ambivalence was allowed full rein. After writing
the script of
Pocket Money,
he rewrote it as a novel. For
The Man Who
Loved Women,
in contrast, he first wrote a novel on the basis of his idea for a
film and then set about turning it into a screenplay. Whereas he had the
novel of
Fahrenheit
distributed at the premier of the film, Truffaut asked his
collaborators not to reveal that
The Green Room
was based on two short
stories by Henry James.
These last examples suggest that what [Tom the critic's point of view is
conflict between literature and film may well be for the artist cross-fertiliza–
tion. Whatever one calls it, though, even Truffaut's mature judgements re–
main contradictory on the question of how an idea becomes a screenplay and
then a film. Indirectly, they point toward problems in the art (and not just the
industry) of film-making, problems which involve more than finances or re–
ception: they concern the status of film as a modern art form. In a letter to
Hitchcock (the director "with the finest sense of film as spectacle and as
writing"), he can praise the adaptation of literary works because they possess
an extra dimension, a complexity, where the original screenplay is merely
bent on depicting action. But writing to the Italian novelist Mario Soldati, he
submits that when "action and dialogue" are overshadowed in the novel by
the author's commentary, the work can be only "disfigured" by being brought
to the screen. This insight did not prevent him on another occasion from
urging a team of script-writers to forego dialogue as they worked (it can al–
ways be improvised later) and simply concentrate on describing the scenes in
prose, or in the Hitchcock book from praising the "laws of Hollywood" for
"dedramatizing" the novel Hitchcock adapted for
Suspicion.
It becomes
difficult to know if the literary imagination is an obstacle to film-making or the
road itself toward film-making. And what, for that matter, is literature?
A panacea: in 1974 he admitted having been "afraid of the blank
