François Truffaut: The Lost Secret

Conclusion: The Art of the Secret

283 Ten minus four = a hexagon. As I have said, this formula can serve as a paradigm for understanding Truffaut’s narrative procedure . Instead of explicit and abstract information, we find an indirect response formulated in a metaphoric, figurative language. Puzzling at first sight, it can be exposed through an imaginative and ingenious analysis. It requires the interlocutor to engage in mental gymnastics that disobey conventional channels of communication. I will now study the details of these gymnastics because they produce the emotion and constitute the foundation of the psychic well-being that is procured by fiction. We know that at the very first screening of moving images, organized by the Lumière brothers, the audience, seeing a train arrive at a station, was seized with panic. This was emotion in its raw state. Silent cinema played on this extraordinary power of the image and harnessed it in order to create very refined forms of expression. Fifty years later, emotion had become dulled. “The golden age is behind us,” said Truffaut in 1982 to journalists from Cahiers du cinéma, adding: “. . . in the work of directors who began making films in the silent era, there is an authoritative aspect that subsequently has been irremediably lost.”1 What he envied in these pioneers was their direct impact on the imagination of the spectator. Being the inventors of cinematic language, they were able to adopt “the most radical solution,”2 when faced with a problem, without fearing that they would appear naive. With them, the effect of surprise was assured from the outset. Truffaut knew that he no longer enjoyed the same privilege. The guilty party responsible for this was “French quality” cinema, with its commonplaces and clichés, as he observed in Conclusion The Art of the Secret 284 Anne Gillain his first critical article published in March 1953, titled “Les Extrêmes me touchent”: “Twenty years of contrived grand subjects, twenty years of Adorable Creatures, Return to Life, Don Camillo, and others like Moment of Truth have created a blasé audience whose sensibility and judgment have been alienated by the ugly and contemptible “fear of being duped” that Radiguet had already denounced.”3 In the post-classical era, in order to achieve the same effect as the great filmmakers of the past, it was necessary to use a new type of coding to give the film power over the imagination. In an age of wariness, Truffaut put in place a narrative system that was meant to elude the perceptual predispositions of the spectator. It depends upon the principle of “clandestine persuasion.” Instead of the direct style of early cinema, he used an indirect style, as in “the raw and the cooked.”4 The emotion generated by a fiction film is the product of a double operation: a suspension of ordinary reason in order to force the mind to produce unconscious associations. The psychic apparatus is set up to resist this process, which has the threatening potential to eventuate in chaos. In the context of ordinary exchanges, all data that is presented to the mind is automatically organized in accordance with schemes and logical structures. Awakened consciousness thus creates “a protective network to prevent any unorganized material from penetrating into the deeper layers of the mind.”5 This blocking process facilitates communication and an ability to adapt to reality. Its weakening during sleep explains the return of fantasmatic thought in the form of dreams. The formal components of works of art also have the effect of inhibiting the organizing functions of the conscious mind, and of opening up a new kind of receptivity in the perceptual system: “the formal elements of art are, in essence, intricate and ingenious techniques aimed to bypass , evade, or penetrate the logical, reality-oriented protective layer, to arouse the deeper levels of the mind.”6 The aspects of experience with which works of art are concerned–emotions, memories, desires–are, in effect, stored in these depths. They arise, then, as multi-layered structures intended to deliver a derivative from the conscious to the unconscious . Truffaut provoked this derivative, which early cinema had produced through the simple magic of the image, much more deliberately than his Conclusion: The Art of the Secret 285 elders had done. It is furthered in his films by a dynamic relationship between ellipsis and repetition. Ellipsis is the most powerful strategy whereby the mind is normally able to create logical...