François TruffautCorrespondance avec des écrivains: 1948-1984

Correspondence with writers 1948-1984. In an old photograph, he is this wise and melancholic child, already bent over his book… « Tout au long de notre vie, écrit François Truffaut, nous devenons des personnes différentes et successives, et c’est ce qui rend tellement étranges les livres de souvenirs. Une personne ultime s’efforce d’unifier tous ces personnages antérieurs. » From his first letter as a young film lover to Jean Cocteau in 1948 until his premature death in 1984, it is his common taste for literature and cinema that runs through this unpublished correspondence. In it, Truffaut reinvents himself as a family with his favourite writers (Genet, Cocteau, Audiberti, Louise de Vilmorin), solicits renowned publishing figures (Jean Cayrol, Marcel Duhamel, Robert Sabatier) and the authors he wants to adapt for the screen (Maurice Pons, David Goodis, Ray Bradbury, Henri Pierre Roché, René-Jean Clot…). It is the backstage of the creation, the passions of the shootings that we discover here, but also the questioning and the shadowy areas of a man in a hurry, to whom time will cruelly run out… Et c’est à son ami Jean Mambrino, le père jésuite rencontré en 1954 dans le sillage d’André Bazin, que Truffaut adresse ce dernier petit mot, quelques mois à peine avant sa mort : « Bonne année 1984, mon cher Jean. I am getting back on track, I read your poems, they help me and your signs of friendship touch me very much, affectionately yours, François.