Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary, by Bob Balaban With the Pentagon’s recent release of three unclassified videos of UFO’s taken by navy pilots, it’s understandable you might be watching the skies. And if you’ve yet to see Steven Spielberg’s classic of extraterrestrial contact, Close Encounters of the Third […]
The 400 Blows, by Francois Truffaut This year marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a film that changed cinema—and on its debut, brought immediate recognition to the then-unknown director. In May, 1959, The 400 Blows won the Grand Prize for Direction at the […]
The Films in My Life, by Francois Truffaut The revered French filmmaker, who would have been eighty-six this year, is the subject of numerous books that cover his life and work, and we are lucky that Truffaut was also a prolific critic who wrote scores of essays. One of the […]
As the summer film season approaches, here are three books—a memoir, a novel, and a book-length interview—that offer a look behind the camera. Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary, by Bob Balaban Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary was published in 2002, and it’s a fascinating look behind […]
The Films in My Life, by Francois Truffaut The revered French filmmaker, who died in 1984 is the subject of numerous books that cover his life and work, and we are lucky that Truffaut was also a prolific critic who wrote scores of essays. One of the founders of the […]
Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary, by Bob Balaban In the summer of 1976, during the first weeks of the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Francois Truffaut, who played the extraterrestrial specialist Claude Lacombe, was at work on a book about actors—tentatively titled Hurry Up and […]
Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary, by Bob Balaban In the summer of 1976, during the first weeks of the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Francois Truffaut, who played the extraterrestrial specialist Claude Lacombe, was at work on a book about actors—tentatively titled Hurry Up and […]
The Films in My Life, by Francois Truffaut This past week, Francois Truffaut would have turned 84. The revered French filmmaker, who died in 1984 is the subject of numerous books, dearth of books that cover the director’s life and work, but few directors step into the role of critic. […]
A Definitive study of Alfred Hitchcock, by Francois Truffaut, trans. by Helen Scott (1966) & Hitchcock/Truffaut, a documentary film by Kent Jones (2015) Before he began directing, Francois Truffaut was a film critic, and before that, a voracious viewer of films. A director and a founder’s of the French cinema’s […]
A Definitive study of Alfred Hitchcock, by Francois Truffaut (trans. by Helen Scott). Before he began directing, Francois Truffaut was a film critic, and before that, a voracious viewer of films. The director’s habit of movie-going reportedly began at the age of eleven, and coincided with his habit of skipping […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.