François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation

by Robert Stam

One of François Truffaut's most poignantly memorable films, Jules and Jim, adapted a novel by the French writer and art collector Henri-Pierre Roch. The characters and events of the 1960s film were based on a real-life romantic triangle, begun in the summer of 1920, which involved Roch himself, the German-Jewish writer Franz Hessel, and his wife, the journalist Helen Grund.

Drawing on this film and others by Truffaut, Robert Stam provides the first in-depth examination of the multifaceted relationship between Truffaut and Roch. In the process, he provides a unique lens through which to understand how adaptation works-from history to novel, and ultimately to film-and how each form of expression is inflected by the period in which it is created. Truffaut's adaptation of Roch's work, Stam suggests, demonstrates how reworkings can be much more than simply copies of their originals; rather, they can become an immensely creative enterprise-a form of writing in itself.

The book also moves beyond Truffaut's film and the mnage--trois involving Roch, Hessel, and Grund to explore the intertwined lives and work of other famous artists and intellectuals, including Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, and Charlotte Wolff. Tracing the tangled webs that linked these individuals' lives, Stam opens the door to an erotic/writerly territory where the complex interplay of various artistic sensibilities-all mulling over the same nucleus of feelings and events-vividly comes alive.

Genres: Film

262 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2006

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dunno... can something be interesting without being compelling? Because that's the conflicted feeling I get when remembering this study—Stam is a distinguished writer and scholar, of course, and I appreciate the varied and multivalent approach in analyzing Jules et Jim, which many feel is Truffaut's masterpiece (I need to rewatch, but I've always been firmly in the camp that holds that the director never quite reached the same heights he managed with Les quatres cents coups). Stam places both Henri-Pierre Roché's source novel and the film adaptation into a variety of biographical and historical contexts, and also looks at the later adaptations Truffaut made of Roché's work. It's a learned and impressive piece of scholarship that is also readily accessible—no easy feat. But does it say something that I never exactly bothered to finish it?