François Truffaut: The Lost Secret

6. In Search of the Father: Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Day for Night (1973)

161 Fahrenheit 451 and Day for Night both present an image of a small human community, the function and organization of which are clearly delimited. The team of firemen and the film crew both have theirhead(captain/director),theirbase(firestation/hotel),theirequipment (cranes and trucks), their work-instruments (flame-thrower/camera ), and their goal (to achieve their respective missions). The first burns books; the second is shooting a film. In these two works, lyrical shots– “magical,” as Truffaut called them–rather than depicting human exchanges , dwell on moments of speechless ecstasy when fire is consuming pages or when film is coiling at the foot of the editing table. In these microcosms, in which human activity more than ever takes on the appearance of play, destruction and construction confirm the status of two cultural objects: the book and the film. “Confirm” is a term that is too weak to describe the veritable cult devoted to these two objects. Both reign supreme in human affairs; in Fahrenheit 451, as in Day for Night, we find that the economy of desire is entirely subordinate to their power. These films are peculiarly complementary because they raise the question of cultural experience, and of its roots in an affective experience that is dominated by parental figures. But these works–and their power resides in this–lead one into a larger reflection on the transmission of knowledge, on communication, and on death. In studying them, we come to appreciate the filmmaker’s gift in being able to invest autobiographical specificities with a universal relevance, in which everyone can find elements of his or her own experience. In Search of the Father Fahrenheit 451 (1966) Day for Night (1973) 162 François Truffaut: The Lost Secret Fahrenheit 451 (1966) Despite the crackling of the flame-throwers that endlessly occupy the screen, Fahrenheit 451–the title indicates the temperature at which papers ignites–seems at first sight to be a cold film. Feelings remain hidden , and speech is rare. Filmed in England, which left Truffaut feeling hugely isolated because he could not speak English, and shot, significantly , at the time when his “Hitchbook” was being published, Fahrenheit 451 seems to exemplify the law of the master: “Whatever is said instead of being shown is lost on the viewer.”1 In this, the first of the films he made in color, Truffaut accords great prominence to the image: “The scenes with dialogue are to be kept short, and I am making a rule for myself not to shorten the ‘privileged moments,’ that is, scenes that are purely visual: the comings and goings of the firemen, emergency departures, fires, and various odd happenings.”2 The silentinterventions of the pyromaniac firemen, for which Bernard Hermann’s martial music supplies a revealing commentary, constitute particularly successful moments of visual art. In Fahrenheit 451, two great forces confront one another: fire and the book.Aforcethatisnatural,primary,andelementalisopposedtoaforce that is cultural, secondary, and sublimated. The members of the human population comply with this double polarity, aligning themselves with the power of one or the other of these forces. In the course of the narrative ,thejourneyofMontag(OskarWerner),theheroofthefilm,consists of fleeing from one camp to the other. A fireman blasts out flames in the first images of the film; by the end of the story he becomes a living book who utters the words of a dead author in the depths of a snow-covered forest. In the science-fiction world of Fahrenheit 451, the options are indeed limited to these two types of engagement, and the forest camp at theendis,inmanyrespects,asconstrainedandaustereasthefirestation at the beginning. The firemen are robots, and the book-men resemble automatons. In this disturbing film, the only freedom consists of choosing one’s respective mode of alienation. Real life is absent; all that exists is its reflection in words. The empire of fire is depicted as being as resolutely masculine as it is childish. Strapped into their black uniforms (inspired by the tunics of In Search of the father 163 the Russian army),3 stationed rigidly on their gleaming truck, the firemen in Fahrenheit 451 embody the dream of every young boy: to see the things he is playing with suddenly enlarged to a human scale. From the opening images of the film, the spectator plunges directly into the world of childhood: “If I were to do the film all over again, I would instruct the set designer...