After the Revolution, There Is Movement

Skolimowski, Godard, and Le Départ

In 1967, Jerzy Skolimowski made a film that, at first glance, looks unmistakably like a child of the French New Wave.
Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the lead. The camera, handled by Willy Kurant, moves with a loose, improvisational freedom. The score, by the Polish jazz composer Krzysztof Komeda, pulses with nervous energy. Everything about Le Départ suggests an easy kinship with the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard.

And yet the film quietly breaks away from that lineage.
Where the New Wave saw rebellion—sometimes even revolution—Skolimowski sees something smaller and more stubborn: a young man trying, quite literally, to get moving.

Chapter I

Le Départ — a point of rupture

In the spring of 1967, Skolimowski was thirty years old and newly arrived in Western Europe. His film Ręce do góry! had been blocked by Polish censors, and the director found himself working abroad for the first time. Brussels became the unlikely setting for his next film, a Belgian production shot in French—a language he barely spoke.

The cast seemed designed to flatter the expectations of the moment. Léaud, already the emblematic face of the New Wave, had carried the restless spirit of a generation through films by François Truffaut and Godard. Catherine Duport appeared alongside him. Kurant, whose camera had helped shape the visual language of French modernism, handled the cinematography. Komeda supplied the music.

On paper, it looked like a continuation of the same cinematic revolution.

But very quickly the film reveals another intention.

Marc, the young man Léaud plays, works as an assistant in a hair salon. His dream is simple to the point of absurdity: he wants to enter a car rally. What he needs is a Porsche, and the entire film becomes a series of improvised attempts to obtain one. He borrows, begs, schemes, and drags the young woman Michèle into the whirl of his plans.

The film moves at the tempo of his agitation. Léaud runs through the city, bursts into nervous laughter, throws himself into one desperate idea after another. Scenes unfold in long takes that seem to follow the actor’s body rather than a script: wigs tried on in front of mirrors, late-night wanderings through the hair salon, sudden detours through the streets of Brussels.

Then, abruptly, the motion stops.

Marc never gets the car. Instead, the film slows to a quiet moment in a hotel room, where the frantic chase dissolves into something unexpectedly intimate.

When Le Départ won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1967, it was widely seen as a triumph of youthful cinema—light, improvisational, almost carefree. The film seemed less interested in making an argument than in capturing the energy of a young body in motion.

Yet that lightness conceals something else.

Formally, the film speaks the language of the New Wave: spontaneity, fragmented narrative, a camera that appears to discover the scene as it unfolds. Léaud brings with him the entire vocabulary of that cinema—the darting glances, the sudden laughter, the fragile intensity that had become inseparable from the heroes of Godard and Truffaut.

But beneath the resemblance lies a difference that is difficult to miss once it appears.

In Godard’s films, escape is often an act of destruction. His characters run in order to break something—social order, bourgeois morality, sometimes the narrative itself. Movement becomes a political gesture.

Marc runs for another reason.

He is not trying to blow up the world. He is trying to slip out of it.

The distinction has less to do with style than with history. The Poland in which Skolimowski had grown up—shaped by Stalinism and by the uneasy stagnation that followed the political thaw—had already lived through its own version of revolutionary transformation. In that context, grand promises of collective emancipation had a way of turning into mechanisms of control.

For someone formed in that environment, revolution was not an idea. It was a fact.

Marc therefore seeks no historical upheaval. What he wants is something much smaller: a private miracle.

The Porsche he dreams of is not a symbol of capitalist desire or Western freedom. It is simply the possibility of movement. A moment when the body can escape the place that confines it. Marc does not want to overthrow capitalism in Brussels. He wants, for a few minutes, to leave the hair salon and feel speed.

That is why Le Départ marks a quiet rupture.

It adopts the formal language of the New Wave only to reveal its limits. Where Godard still believes that cinema can ignite a revolution, Skolimowski looks at the world with the wary knowledge of someone who has already seen revolutions happen—and seen what follows them.

His hero does not try to repeat that story.

He runs away from it.

Chapter II

The Boy Who Has Already Seen the End of the World — Léaud as the Mirror of Two Rebellions

In the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the man often remains a boy. Nervous, impulsive, prone to sudden gestures—yet still convinced that the world might be overturned by a single decisive act. The heroes of his films rebel against their parents, against the bourgeoisie, against the social order itself. Their rebellion can be ironic, hysterical, sometimes absurd, but it almost always carries a trace of hope.

One need only recall Ferdinand in Pierrot le fou, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who flees with Marianne on a blood-soaked romantic odyssey, paints his face blue, and ultimately blows himself up like a comic-book hero at the end of the world. Or the young radicals of La Chinoise, or the grotesque revolutionary of Made in U.S.A.. In these films violence, irony, and revolutionary rhetoric mix into a strange youthful energy. Even when the characters are misguided, they remain convinced that a gesture, a word, or a bullet might still change something.

This is precisely why Jean-Pierre Léaud became one of the defining faces of this cinema. Since The 400 Blows, where he played Antoine Doinel for François Truffaut, Léaud carried with him the image of a young man unable to fit into the world yet certain that the world might still be remade.

When Léaud appears in Le Départ, the spectator brings this entire legacy with him. The gestures are familiar: the restless movements, the sudden bursts of laughter, the wide-eyed gaze of a boy who reacts faster than he thinks. The score seems the same. Yet the music sounds different.

Marc is neither an intellectual nor a revolutionary. He quotes no philosophers, reads no Marx, and engages in no ideological debate. He is an assistant in a Brussels hair salon with a single obsession: a car. A Porsche that would allow him to enter a rally race.

In a Godard film, such a motif would immediately become a political metaphor. In Skolimowski’s film it remains something far more elementary. It is not a project of collective freedom. It is an attempt to recover movement itself.

Marc does not want to overthrow any system.
He wants to slip out of it.

This difference arises from something deeper than cinematic style. It arises from historical experience. For Godard’s generation, revolution was largely an image—a political promise yet to arrive. For Skolimowski’s generation it was something that had already happened and had left behind a landscape of ruins.

Communism in Eastern Europe was not an abstract idea from books. It was a daily reality: a system of censorship, propaganda, queues, small humiliations, and constant supervision. In such a world, the grand language of liberation easily turned into an instrument of power.

The hero of Skolimowski’s film therefore rebels differently. His rebellion is not directed outward toward the world. It turns inward.

Marc does not dream of revolution. He dreams of a moment in which he will no longer be a cog in a machine. The Porsche becomes his private totem—not because it symbolizes capitalist success, but because it represents the possibility of movement: a brief instant in which a person ceases to be administered by a system.

Léaud plays the role with the same nervous temperament we know from the New Wave. Yet in Le Départ his laughter has a different resonance. It is no longer the laughter of youthful rebellion. It is the laughter of someone who already suspects that rebellion alone is not enough.

This is why the ending of the film feels so unexpected. Marc does not give up the rally because he loses. He gives it up because, in a hotel room with Michèle, he discovers something speed cannot provide: an ordinary moment of presence. A moment in which he no longer has to pretend that he is changing the world.

In this sense, Skolimowski’s hero seems strangely older than Godard’s characters. Not because he has lived longer, but because he carries within him the knowledge of how the great projects of collective transformation end.

Godard’s films continue to ask a certain question: how can the order of the world be overthrown?
Skolimowski asks another: how does one live when that order has already collapsed?

It may be for this reason that his cinema feels unexpectedly contemporary today. His hero promises no salvation. He announces no great transformation.

He promises something far more modest:
the possibility of continuing to live.

Chapter III

Woman: Instrument of Revolution or an Other Who Cannot Be Possessed

In the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the woman is rarely the autonomous center of the story. More often she appears as a figure through whom the man attempts to articulate his own rebellion. She becomes a projection, a surface upon which his desires are written—a body that gathers together his fantasies of freedom, violence, and escape.

A clear example is Marianne in Pierrot le fou, played by Anna Karina. For Ferdinand—Belmondo’s character—she is everything at once: an escape from bourgeois life, erotic fulfillment, inspiration for romantic revolt. Their journey through the south of France resembles a revolutionary fantasy of two lovers determined to blow up the world. Yet the structure of that fantasy remains unmistakably masculine. Marianne exists primarily as part of his project—as the body through which his rebellion can take shape.

When the project collapses, she collapses with it.

In Godard’s cinema the woman often shares the fate of the ideas the male hero tries to experience through her. She appears as the promise of freedom, only to vanish, be betrayed, abandoned, or turned into a victim.

Nor is this confined to a single character. In many of Godard’s films—from the early works with Karina to later films with Anne Wiazemsky—the woman remains primarily a site of projection. The camera celebrates her presence, her body, her gaze, yet rarely grants her genuine narrative initiative. Even when the heroines appear “liberated” by cinematic modernism—through long takes, direct looks into the camera, or improvised dialogue—they remain part of a structure built around male experience.

In Le Départ, Skolimowski does something far simpler—and for that reason more radical.

Michèle, played by Catherine Duport, is neither symbol nor metaphor. She is simply someone other.

The film shows the world through Marc’s eyes: a nervous, impulsive boy incapable of thinking about anything except his Porsche. The camera follows his panic, his agitation, his obsession. Yet Michèle never becomes fully absorbed into this projection. She accompanies him through his improvised adventures—trying on wigs, wandering through the city at night, participating in his chaotic schemes to obtain a car—but she does so with a distance that signals difference from the very beginning.

Her calm contrasts with his hysteria.
Her self-possession with his nervous urgency.

When Marc launches into new plans, she often watches him with mild amusement—as if observing a boy who has not yet realized that the world does not revolve around his obsessions.

Paradoxically, it is precisely this asymmetry that gives her presence.

Skolimowski does not attempt to turn her into an ideological heroine. Nor does he pretend that Marc “liberates” her. Instead he shows something simpler—and truer: a man so absorbed in his own fantasy of freedom that he cannot fully possess another person.

One of the film’s most revealing moments takes place before a mirror. Michèle tries on wigs, plays with her reflection, multiplies her image across the surface of the glass. The camera refuses to fix her in a single identity. Instead it disperses her, duplicates her, lets her slip away from definition.

In Marc’s world everything converges toward a single goal: the rally race.
In Michèle’s world things remain open.

This is why the film’s ending does not resemble the triumph of male desire. When Marc abandons the race, he does not win the woman as a prize. He simply stops beside her.

The intimacy that follows emerges from renunciation—from the moment when the boy stops chasing his fetish and begins to see another person.

In Skolimowski’s cinema the woman therefore remains someone who cannot be fully possessed or defined. She is another presence within the hero’s world, not the projection of his idea.

Here lies the final difference between the two filmmakers.

In Godard’s films the woman often becomes the instrument of a great idea—revolution, freedom, political transformation. In Skolimowski’s world such ideas no longer organize human relationships. The director, shaped by a society that had already experienced the consequences of grand promises of collective salvation, no longer believes in telling human stories through them.

His hero neither liberates the woman nor attempts to dominate her.
He simply has to accept that he does not fully understand her.

And paradoxically it is precisely this renunciation that opens a space for freedom.

Skolimowski does not proclaim a manifesto about the emancipation of women. He does not need to. It is enough that he stops pretending the man is the center of the world.

Once that illusion disappears, the woman can remain something more than a symbol.

She can remain a person.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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Truffaut Does Not Confuse Day with Night

Cinema loves to talk about itself. Like any narcissist, it is rarely honest when it does. Perhaps only Truffaut truly tried.

In 1973, François Truffaut, one of the most recognisable voices of the French New Wave, made a film that, at first glance, seems like the most intimate declaration of love ever addressed to cinema. La Nuit américaine (released internationally as Day for Night) is a fictional chronicle of the chaotic shooting of a melodrama entitled Je vous présente Pamela. In a Provençal hotel, an international crew gathers: the weary director Ferrand (played by Truffaut himself), the capricious Hollywood star Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset), the ageing, alcoholic veteran Séverine (Valentina Cortese), the neurotic young actor Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the ageing leading man Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), and an entire army of technicians, stand-ins, assistants, and cats unwilling to cooperate.

The film unfolds almost entirely on the set and in the corridors of the hotel. Every day, something goes wrong: an actress forgets her lines, an actor flies into a jealous rage, a cat refuses to climb onto a windowsill, and the director has to rewrite the script on the spot to save a scene. In spite of disasters, in spite of personal dramas—affairs, betrayals, breakdowns, and even the death of one of the actors—the film somehow gets made. At the end, Ferrand, watching the crew drive away, murmurs to himself: “Films are like trains in the night” — fleeting, magical, never entirely comprehensible.

Since its release, La Nuit américaine has been read above all as a self-portrait of the director. Truffaut plays Ferrand here as an alter ego who shares with him not only a profession, but also fatigue, neurosis, and an obsession with cinema. The film became a tribute to filmmaking as craft, a manifesto of love for the medium despite its absurdities and lies. The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974, the César, the enthusiasm of critics—all of it seemed to confirm that here, at last, was a director of the New Wave reconciled to cinema as a collective, artisanal art: sometimes kitsch, sometimes makeshift, but always worth the effort.

And yet this reading, tempting and comfortable though it is, is too simple. For if we look more closely, we begin to see that Truffaut does not merely play Ferrand—he disperses himself into him, divides himself, multiplies himself. In the very same film in which Ferrand directs a classical melodrama of “quality,” Truffaut returns to his own manifestos of the 1950s in order to confront them with what he is now doing. The self-portrait he offers us is not a single mirror, but a whole labyrinth of mirrors, reflecting not only himself but also his former ideals, his old battles, and his earlier condemnations.

Return to the Source

To understand why La Nuit américaine produces such a strong sense of dissonance today, one has to go back almost twenty years—to the period between 1951 and 1954, when François Truffaut was not yet a director but the youngest and most combative critic at Cahiers du cinéma. It was during these years, under the guidance of André Bazin—his mentor, godfather, and spiritual guide—that Truffaut forged the ideas that would shake French cinema.

Bazin was no ordinary critic. He was a philosopher of cinema, deeply rooted in personalism—the intellectual tradition associated with Emmanuel Mounier, which emphasised the dignity of the human person, free will, relationships with others, and ethical responsibility toward reality. For Bazin, cinema was neither entertainment nor propaganda. It was an instrument for understanding the world, almost sacramental in nature. In his essay “The Myth of Total Cinema” (Le Mythe du cinéma total, written between 1946 and 1958), he argued that humanity had long dreamed of the total reproduction of reality—colour, sound, depth, movement—not because of technological ambition, but because of an obsession with truth. Cinema was a “machine of the mind,” allowing us to contemplate the world without manipulation.

This is why Bazin celebrated long takes, deep focus, and minimal editing—everything that allowed reality to “breathe” and speak for itself. Soviet montage (Eisenstein) represented manipulation in his eyes; true cinema should be observation rather than construction. The director does not impose a vision—he reveals it.

It was precisely this personalist ethic—this respect for both the human person and for reality itself—that shaped the young Truffaut. Bazin quite literally saved him from reform school, gave him a place to live, and introduced him to Cahiers du cinéma (founded in 1951). At the age of twenty-one, Truffaut began writing hundreds of reviews—sharp, sometimes vulgar, always uncompromising. By 1953 he was already defending American directors such as Hitchcock, Hawks, and Nicholas Ray as genuine auteurs—artists who imprint their personality, style, and moral vision upon a film. This was the embryo of what would later be called the politique des auteurs—the “auteur policy”—though the term itself came slightly later.

The culmination came in January 1954 with the publication of Truffaut’s manifesto, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” in Cahiers du cinéma, issue no. 31. It was an act of war.

In it, Truffaut attacked the entire “tradition of quality” (tradition de qualité)—the literary French cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, represented by directors such as Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, René Clément, and Yves Allégret, but above all by the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. These filmmakers adapted great novels—Balzac, Stendhal, Gide—adding anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-bourgeois undertones. Yet in Truffaut’s view they did so in a manner that was artificial, rhetorical, and theatrical. Film became an illustration of literature rather than an autonomous cinematic work. Dialogue was “nuanced,” psychological—but empty; realism was superficial; spectacle was escapist.

A key passage from the manifesto reads:

“If French cinema exists thanks to the hundred films made each year, only ten or twelve deserve the attention of critics and cinephiles. […] These films are the work of screenwriters. […] Aurenche and Bost are men of letters, and I reproach them for despising cinema by underestimating it. They treat the screenplay as if they were rehabilitating a delinquent by giving him a job; they always believe they have done their utmost when they add subtleties drawn from that science of nuance which is the feeble merit of modern novels.”

Truffaut rejected what he called “psychological realism” as a falsehood: always the same story—the victim (usually a cuckold), a family consumed by hatred, the injustice of the world, cynical priests, brutal policemen, rich cynics, poor idealists. This was not a portrait of human beings; it was literary rhetoric dressed in cinematic costume. True cinema, he argued, should be a portrait—intimate, psychological, moral—focused on the face, the gaze, the authenticity of experience. The director as auteur fights the system, imprints his free personality upon the film, and respects reality rather than training it like an animal.

Here one can see Bazin’s influence in its purest form: cinema as an ethical observation of the human person in the world, anti-escapist and anti-manipulative. Truffaut radicalised his mentor, attacking the establishment with a fury Bazin himself never displayed. (Indeed, in 1957, in the essay “De la politique des auteurs,” Bazin warned against the cult of personality and the abuses of auteurism—but by then Truffaut was unstoppable.)

For the young Truffaut, cinema was anti-spectacle. He rejected spectacle, effects, and conventions in favour of truth, observation, and an individual vision. It was a rebellion against the cinéma de papa—the cinema of the fathers: conformist, literary, respectable, and “quality” driven.

Why, then, when we look at La Nuit américaine nineteen years later, do we feel such discomfort? Because in this film Ferrand is directing precisely what the young Truffaut had condemned most fiercely: a banal psychological melodrama, full of betrayals, sentimentalism, schematic roles, literary dialogue, and rhetorical outbursts. The cat on the windowsill must look poetic—so the crew spends hours chasing it until it complies. An affair between actors becomes part of the script. A death forces a change in the ending. Reality’s chaos is absorbed into the mechanism of “quality cinema” in order to nourish a fictional drama.

Did Truffaut betray his own ideals? Has the mature director capitulated before what he once sought to destroy? Or does the deepest truth of La Nuit américaine lie precisely within this paradox?

The sharpest response to the film, in any case, did not come from a critic but from Truffaut’s former friend, Jean-Luc Godard. After the film’s release in 1973, Godard sent him a long letter that quickly became legendary in the history of cinema. In it he accused Truffaut of presenting a false image of filmmaking—of transforming what should be the truth of the film set into a sentimental legend about a harmonious crew and a benevolent director. “Your film lies,” he wrote bluntly. In Godard’s eyes, Day for Night was not a tribute to cinema but an embellishment of it: a film that concealed hierarchies, conflicts, and the economic realities of production beneath the mask of romantic solidarity. Truffaut responded with an even harsher letter, accusing Godard of cynicism and contempt for the people who actually make films. Their exchange ended their friendship definitively.

A Problematic Night

If, after watching La Nuit américaine, we return to the 1954 manifesto “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” and read it aloud, the effect is almost comic—and at the same time painful. For at the very heart of the film that is supposed to be a tribute to cinema, director Ferrand is shooting precisely what the young Truffaut once denounced as the worst that French cinema could produce: a classical literary melodrama, saturated with betrayals, sentimentalism, rhetorical outbursts, and a merely superficial emotional realism.

The film within the film—Je vous présente Pamela—is the “tradition of quality” in miniature. A young woman marries an older man, falls in love with his son, and a family drama unfolds: betrayal, confrontation, and finally either catharsis or tragic separation, depending on what survives of the screenplay by the time the film reaches its ending. The dialogue sounds as though lifted straight from a psychological novel of the 1930s: “Do you really love me?”, “You will never understand how I feel,” “This is bigger than the two of us.” The scenes take place in elegant interiors filled with symbolic props—flowers, letters, rain against the window. The actors perform roles rather than themselves; their faces are masks rather than windows onto the soul.

All of this the young Truffaut would have condemned with fury. In his manifesto he accused Aurenche and Bost of always telling the same story: the cuckolded husband, the unfaithful wife, the hypocritical priest, the sadistic policeman, the cynical rich man, the idealistic poor man—all wrapped in anti-clericalism and anti-militarism, but fundamentally conformist and empty. Ferrand is filming something very similar, except that here anti-clericalism has been replaced by an anti-bourgeois romance tinged with a Freudian family drama.

Now consider the mechanisms that Truffaut once called the “training” of reality. In one scene, a cat must jump onto a windowsill, look into the distance, and then leap down—the script demands it, because the cat is meant to symbolise loneliness and longing. In reality, the cat refuses to cooperate. The crew spends hours chasing it, calling it, tempting it with milk, until at last it can be forced into the desired “natural” behaviour. This is not observation of reality—it is the forcing of reality into obedience to a literary template. The young Truffaut would probably have written: “Instead of allowing reality to speak, the director strangles it until it produces the desired poetic cry.”

Consider also the affair between Alphonse and the actress who plays his mother in the film within the film. Their real quarrel on set—jealousy, accusations, tears—is immediately woven into the script. The marital scene in Pamela gains authenticity because the actors are actually living through the conflict. But is this a triumph of realism? Not at all—it is opportunism. Reality becomes fuel for a fictional drama. Truffaut in 1954 would have called this “stealing life for the sake of literary convention.”

Then there is the death of Alexandre. A genuine tragedy: the actor dies in a car accident during production. What does Ferrand do? He immediately rewrites the script of Pamela: the father now dies, giving the son and daughter-in-law the occasion for a dramatic climax. Fiction absorbs reality, transforming tragedy into a moving plot twist. This is precisely the cynicism that Truffaut once reproached in the screenwriters of “quality cinema”: death treated as a dramaturgical device rather than an existential fact.

In one of the film’s most ironic moments, Ferrand tells the crew: “We must finish the film, even if it means that all of us will be unhappy.” It sounds like the justification of the very establishment against which Truffaut once fought. For in the “tradition of quality,” cinema was always more important than people—actors were instruments, screenplays were sacred, and the director had to “save” the film at any cost. As one of the actresses remarks upon hearing that the script girl has run away with a stuntman: “I can understand leaving a man for a film. But leaving a film for a man?”

Had the young Truffaut watched La Nuit américaine, he would probably have written a review in his most cutting style: here is a paradoxical tribute to cinema—a tribute offered by the very man who once sought to liberate it. Ferrand is directing a melodrama whose screenwriter could easily be a disciple of Aurenche and Bost. The chaos of the set? A pretext. The real dramas of the crew? Material for new scenes. The cat? A symbol to be trained. The affair? Ready-made dialogue. Death? The perfect ending. Everything serves a single purpose: to make a film that looks like art but is, in truth, merely a crafted product. Truffaut, once the rebel, has become the godfather of what he once called the cinema of the fathers. This is not self-reflection—it is capitulation dressed in tenderness.

And yet here the real problem emerges—the reason La Nuit américaine is such an ambiguous film. Truffaut does not simply make “quality cinema”; he shows it with affection, humour, and melancholy. He does not mock it. He loves it. He loves its absurdity, its compromises, its illusions. Is this a betrayal of the ideals of the 1950s? Or is it a mature acceptance of the fact that cinema will never be a pure portrait of reality—because it will always also be spectacle, deception, and craft?

The answer is not simple. For Truffaut is no longer only Ferrand—he disperses himself, multiplies himself, hides within other characters. And it is precisely in this dispersion that the key lies to understanding why this film is neither a manifesto nor a betrayal, but something far more subtle—and more painful.

A Tribute to Himself?

At this point, the interpretation of La Nuit américaine ceases to be a simple paradox and becomes a labyrinth. Truffaut is not merely Ferrand—the director struggling to control chaos, issuing orders, rewriting the script on the spot, repeating the mantra about trains in the night. If that were the case, the film would remain nothing more than a self-ironic tribute to craftsmanship and a capitulation before his former enemies. But Truffaut disperses himself, splits himself, multiplies himself among the characters on set—and he is reflected most strongly in Alphonse, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud.

Alphonse is not just a random supporting character. He is played by the same Léaud who, since 1959, had embodied Antoine Doinel—Truffaut’s alter ego at different stages of life: the rebellious boy in The 400 Blows, the awkward lover in Stolen Kisses, the husband in crisis in Bed and Board, and finally the reflective fugitive in Love on the Run. Antoine was the Truffaut who did everything Truffaut himself did not—or did, but in a softened, more controlled version. Alphonse is Antoine grown older, yet never grown up. He still asks, “Are women magical?” He still falls apart over love, dramatizes every telephone call, still believes life should resemble a film—and when it does not, he panics and runs away from the set.

Between Ferrand and Alphonse there emerges a tension that is both paternal and filial, mentor and disciple—but also the tension between the present self and the former self. Ferrand looks at Alphonse with a mixture of tenderness, irritation, and a slightly embarrassed recognition of who he himself once was. When Alphonse asks the director whether he should kill himself because of unhappy love, Ferrand answers with weary resignation: “You’re a very good actor. Nobody has their personal life in order. That only happens in films. Life has traffic jams, stoppages. Films move like trains in the night. People like you and me are happy only when we’re working.” It is one of the most moving scenes in the film. It sounds like a farewell letter from Truffaut to Léaud—but also to his own younger self: to the boy who believed in the magic of love and cinema with a naïveté so sincere it almost hurt.

Alphonse’s romantic adventures are comic—and it is precisely in that comedy that their tragic dimension appears. He throws around declarations like “I love you more than my own life,” flies into jealous rages, asks the witnesses at a wedding whether everything is all right, and finally runs away from the set because “life is more important than the film.” It is pure farce—but a sad farce. Truffaut does not mock Alphonse. He loves him precisely for that naïveté, for his faith in grand passions, for his inability to separate fiction from reality. This is the part of Truffaut that never grew up, that still searches for magic, that still ruins its own life through emotion—only now, seen from Ferrand’s distance, it takes on a grotesque, comic shape.

And here we arrive at the core of the matter: life drags film back down to earth, but film transforms life into something else—something grotesque and therefore perhaps more bearable. The real dramas of the crew—Séverine’s alcoholism, Julie’s fragility, Alexandre’s death, Alphonse’s breakdowns—are absorbed into the mechanism of cinema and lose some of their weight. They become lighter, amusing, even cathartic. Alphonse’s affair becomes material for a marital scene. The death of an actor changes the ending of a melodrama. The chaos of the set becomes, instead of tragedy, a comedy of human weakness. The grotesque here is not mockery; it is a form of defence. Cinema functions as a filter: it takes the tragedy of life and gives it a comic form, making it bearable—and sometimes even beautiful.

Truffaut’s dispersion does not end with Ferrand and Alphonse. One can detect his shadow in Séverine—the actress who drinks in order to forget ageing and obscurity; in Julie—the fragile star pretending to maintain control; even in the cats and stand-ins who refuse to cooperate. Truffaut does not confine himself to a single character. He scatters himself across the entire set—in the actors, the crew, the props, and the very act of filmmaking. This is not a self-portrait reflected in a single mirror, but a self-portrait shattered into a thousand fragments.

Within this dispersion, the film ceases to be a simple betrayal of ideals or a simple tribute. It becomes something more complex: a tender gaze upon one’s own illusions, one’s own naïveté, one’s own maturity—maturity that sometimes hurts. Truffaut no longer defends the “pure portrait” against “quality cinema”; he shows instead that the two intertwine, that the grotesque of fiction may be the most honest way of speaking about the truth of life.

And once we understand this, only one thing remains: craft. Respect for it. Love for cinema despite everything.

Truffaut’s Escape

It is precisely through this dispersion—into Ferrand, Alphonse, Séverine, the cats, the stand-ins, the entire chaos of the set—that Truffaut ultimately escapes. He refuses to be locked into a single self-portrait, a single mask, a single manifesto. He is no longer the radical of the 1950s who wished to cleanse cinema of illusion. But neither is he merely a tired craftsman capitulating before “quality cinema.” He is everywhere and nowhere at once.

What remains after watching La Nuit américaine is not an answer to the question of betrayal or triumph of ideals—it is respect for craft. Respect for that stubborn, everyday labour: the assistant director noting every change in the script, the lighting technician adjusting lamps for hours, the stuntman falling from a horse instead of the actor, the cat that finally jumps onto the windowsill. Cinema is born not from pure vision but from that collective lie we all agree to treat as truth. And in that lie—paradoxically—lies the most sincere love for the medium.

Truffaut offers no final reckoning. He does not say, “I was right in 1954,” nor “I was mistaken.” He simply makes another film—and in that gesture lies his freedom as an author. He has freed himself from dogma, from being frozen in the role of rebel or of devotee. He allows himself tenderness toward what he once condemned. He allows himself grotesque humour toward what he once treated with deadly seriousness. He allows himself to love cinema despite everything—despite its absurdities, compromises, lies, and ephemerality.

At the end of the film the crew disperses. Alphonse leaves with a new girlfriend, Julie returns to her husband, Séverine packs her suitcases full of memories, the technicians coil their cables. Ferrand remains alone in the empty hotel and watches the train depart into the night.

“Films are like trains in the night,” he says quietly, as if to himself, as if to us.

The line is not a grand finale. It is a sigh of relief and resignation at the same time. For another train is already waiting at the platform. Another film must be made. Once again the crew must be gathered, the script rewritten, the cat chased, the illusion maintained that everything is under control.

Truffaut does not end his essay on cinema. He simply boards the next train. And we—the spectators—remain on the platform with the feeling that we have just witnessed something very true about a man who loved cinema enough to stop idealising it.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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