François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and the French New Wave, Re-viewed

Authors

  • Robert J. Cardullo University of Michigan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1344/fh.2019.1-2.57-68

Keywords:

François Truffaut, French film, New Wave, Jules and Jim, Henri-Pierre Roché

Abstract

Truffaut’s early protagonists, like many of those produced by the New Wave, were rebels or misfits who felt stifled by conventional social definitions. His early cinematic style was as anxious to rip chords as his characters were. Unlike Godard, Truffaut went on in his career to commit himself, not to continued experiment in film form or radical critique of visual imagery, but to formal themes like art and life, film and fiction, and art and education. This article reconsiders a film that embodies such themes, in addition to featuring characters who feel stifled by conventional social definitions: Jules and Jim.

Author Biography

Robert J. Cardullo, University of Michigan

His work appear in such journals as the Yale Review, Cambridge Quarterly, Film Quarterly, and Cinema Journal. For twenty years, from 1987 to 2007, he was the regular film critic for the Hudson Review in New York. Cardullo is the author or editor of a number of books, including Soundings on Cinema: Speaking to Film and Film Artists (SUNY Press, 2008) and In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art (McGill-Queens UP, 2004). He is also the chief American translator of the film criticism of the Frenchman André Bazin. Cardullo’s own film criticism has been translated into the following languages: Russian, German, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Korean, and Romanian. Cardullo earned his doctoral degree from Yale University and received his B.A. from the University of Florida. He taught for four decades at the University of Michigan, Colgate, and New York University, as well as abroad.

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Published

2020-01-22

Issue

Vol. 29 No. 1-2 (2019)

Section

Essays

License

Authors retain copyright. Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike


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