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Stolen Kisses was Francois Truffaut’s third exploration of the character Antoine Doinel, to whom we were introduced when he was a child in The 400 Blows and was glimpsed a few years later in a short segment Antoine and Colette that was part of an omnibus film titled Love at 20. Here we see Antoine as a young man, as he stumbles into adulthood working a variety of unskilled entry-level jobs, impulsively falling in love and gliding from one scrape with authority into another as he seeks to find his way through the world. The tone of this film is lighter, more overtly a romantic comedy, and seemingly inconsequential in terms of enduring substance and social commentary when compared to The 400 Blows. It could have been easily plausible to make this same movie with a lead character of a different name,...

The two faces of Jean-Pierre Léaud: (left) as the young rebel with a cause in his first film The 400 Blows and the veteran actor today Photo: Cannes Film Festival

French actor and New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud, who started his career in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups) will receive an honorary Palme d’or at the closing ceremony of the Festival’s 69th edition on Sunday 22 May.

Léaud made his first appearance on the Croisette in 1959 as the young and rebellious hero Antoine Doinel, a character who continued through Antoine Et Colette (1962), Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses) (1968), Domicile Conjugal (Bed And Board) (1970) and L'Amour En Suite (Love On The Run) (1979).

Other previous recipients of the honorary Palme include Agnès Varda in 2015 as well as Clint Eastwood, Manoel de Oliveira, Woody Allen and Bernardo Bertolucci in recent years.

Leaud stars as King Louis Xiv in Spanish director...

This month on the Newsstand, Ryan is joined by Aaron West, Mark Hurne and David Blakeslee to discuss the April 2016 Criterion Collection line-up, update a few theories on the wacky New Year’s drawing, as well as discuss the latest in Criterion rumors, news, packaging, and more.

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Shownotes Topics Wacky New Year’s Drawing Follow-up The April 2016 Criterion Collection Line-up Teases: Kurosawa’s Dreams, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, Antoine Doinel Phantom Pages: King Hu, some names related to Tampopo Chimes at Midnight poster Artificial Eye announces Tarkovsky titles. Maybe an end to the Andrei Rublev drum? Arrow splits up Fassbinder set, releasing The Marriage of Maria Braun. Janus Films’ new homepage Dragon Inn, A Touch of Zen, The Story of Last Chrysanthemums on Janus new page. Ettore Scola passes away at 84. Episode Links Help Send...

This month, Criterion marches out a little know title from Francois Truffaut, 1964’s The Soft Skin. Technically his fifth feature, and following behind the monolithic success of Jules and Jim and the 1962 short “Antoine and Colette,” (which served as the second segment in what would flourish into his Antoine Doinel series), the feature did not receive a celebrated reception. Playing in competition at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival (marking the second and last time Truffaut would compete at the festival), the title has since lapsed into a sort of oblivion, which is not surprising considering the winner of the Palme d’Or that year was Jacques Demy’s musical confection, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (launching Catherine Deneuve in stardom, younger sister of Truffuat’s headlining actress, Françoise Dorleac, already a celebrity). Described by its creator as ‘an autopsy of adultery,’ it’s a cold, bitter film about a rather unappealing affair.

I don’t make films myself, but it seems obvious to me there are but two places to learn how to make movies: in the outside world constrained by so-called reality, and in the inside world of the cinema’s darkness, constrained by so-called illusion. Travelogue tales and quotidian reportage being of little interest here, a log for illusionary research and experience, I must duly deliver my film report on the films that came upon me in the darkness of the Melbourne International Film Festival, which ran from July 31 - August 17, and the lessons learned.

Awe Sum

Epic of Everest

So many academics and cinephiles alike seem consternated by Walter Benjamin's paen to the the aura of an original artwork, something squandered, lost, obfuscated, or obliterated in the mechanical reproduction of art in post cards, photographic duplicates, and, of course, cinema. But upon encountering at the festival a restoration...

Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" is a masterpiece. Full stop. It's an effortless piece of humanist filmmaking we don't often see, particularly on these shores where the Hollywood machine has forever altered the concept of what a movie should be, where independent cinema is pushed to the fringes while soaring budget gambles dominate the status quo and the middle ground of American cinema is consistently eroded. "Boyhood" is, at last, I think, the film Linklater has been striving toward his whole career. It is his Truffaut film. When the director was making the press rounds last year for "Before Midnight," I sat down with him and star/co-writer Julie Delpy to discuss their journey with that story and those characters over the course of three films and 13 years. The expectation for more adventures in the life of Celine and Jesse had already set in, and Linklater joked that he would like...

Blu-ray/DVD Review

“Riot In Cell Block 11” (Don Siegel)

“The 400 Blows” (Francois Truffaut)

(The Criterion Collection)

Two Gems From The 50s

By Raymond Benson

Two new releases from The Criterion Collection spotlight low-budget filmmaking in the 1950s—American and European—and couldn’t be more stylistically and thematically diverse. And yet, there is a personal stamp on the pictures that is very similar. Both films also tackle social problems with brutal frankness and feature anti-heroes as protagonists.

Riot in Cell Block 11 was produced by longtime Hollywood independent producer Walter Wanger (he was also responsible for two earlier Criterion releases, Stagecoach and Foreign Correspondent) as a hard-hitting, gritty, realistic picture depicting the inequities and maltreatment prisoners receive in American prisons. Wanger had a personal reason to make a film like that. He had barely missed spending some time in one. He’d caught his wife with another man,...

For its doodle marking what would have been François Truffaut's 80th birthday today, Google needed an iconic image. Not Catherine Deneuve or Gérard Depardieu in The Last Metro (1980) or Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H. (1975) or even Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim (1962), but rather, and most obviously, the young Antoine Doinel on the beach. The doodle's not exactly the famous final freeze frame but nevertheless very recognizably the young Jean-Pierre Léaud in what would be both the director's and the actor's debut feature, The 400 Blows (1959).

"It's fascinating to consider the similarities and the differences between François and Antoine," wrote Kent Jones in a 2003 essay for Criterion on Antoine and Colette (1962), the short film in which Antoine, all of 17, falls in love for the first time. Kent Jones notes that Truffaut has shifted the "cultural meeting ground" of the young lovers "from the cinematheque," where Truffaut,...

French actor, novelist and director who starred in films by Truffaut and Buñuel

Those who followed the adventures of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) in a series of lyrical and semi-autobiographical films directed by François Truffaut – incorporating adolescence, marriage, fatherhood and divorce – will know that Doinel's first and (perhaps) last love, Colette Tazzi, was played by the stunningly beautiful Marie-France Pisier, who has been found dead aged 66 in the swimming pool of her house near Toulon, in southern France.

Doinel and audiences first caught sight of Pisier in Antoine et Colette, Truffaut's enchanting 32-minute contribution to the omnibus film L'Amour à Vingt Ans (Love at Twenty, 1962), during a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. She is conscious of Antoine's stares, and pulls down her skirt. We soon realise that Colette is going to break Antoine's heart.

Léaud and Pisier were born in...

After taking on Jean Luc Godard in last weeks Not In The English Language it seemed only appropriate to place his contemporary Francois Truffaut in the frame this week.

Following the literary adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 and the film that would later go on to inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series The Bride Wore Black, Francois Truffaut returned to the Antoine Doinel series in 1968 with Stolen Kisses.

We pick up on the story that began in The 400 Blows and Antoine et Colette with Antoine freshly discharged (dishonorably) from the army, and on the lookout for his sweetheart (although not Colette the earlier object of his affections from the second film in the series). Through a series of events Antoine ends up working for a private detective agency, fall for the boss’s wife and finally end up working as a TV repairman. It’s all very scattershot but works incredibly well on screen.