History of Cinema, Theory of Cinema, Truffaut, Poetics of Reverie
Abstract
Literature is a fundamental aspect of François Truffaut’s cinema. In his movies it is possible to find these two great passions – literature and cinema – which are always strictly connected together. The bibliography on the relationship between Truffaut and literature allows to study in depth what may be defined «Le roman de François Truffaut», to quote the title of a special issue of the French review «Cahiers du cinéma», published in December 1984. Such «roman» is characterized by movies, as well as by letters and critical writings, which concern the work of the author. This paper is mainly concerned with Truffaut’s artistic project in terms of screen versions of a literary work that produced movies like «livres filmés» – as some film critics call them – through the use of that creative force which literary culture defines with the term of rêverie; besides, in this essay the philosophical conception of rêverie developed by Gaston Bachelard in his book La poétique de la reverie (1960) is applied to the “literary cinema” of Truffaut.
