Francois Truffaut: The Lost Secret - Tapa dura

Gillain's preface is succinct, lucid and illuminating. * Spectator * In her brilliant book, Francois Truffaut: The Lost Secret . . . Gillain serves us with a delicious reexamination of someone's work that will make us want to sit down and take in all of Truffaut's wonderful filmography at once. * PopMatters * Truffaut fans will love this English translation of Gillain's work drawing on the psychology and cinematography of the acclaimed filmmaker. * Booklist * In addition to its trenchant anatomizing of Truffaut, this work is an excellent examination of the process of creation. . . . Highly recommended. * Choice *

For Francois Truffaut, the lost secret of cinematic art is in the ability to generate emotion and reveal repressed fantasies through cinematic representation. Available in English for the first time, Anne Gillain's Francois Truffaut: The Lost Secret is considered by many to be the best book on the interpretation of Truffaut's films. Taking a psycho-biographical approach, Gillain shows how Truffaut's creative impulse was anchored in his personal experience of a traumatic childhood that left him lonely and emotionally deprived. In a series of brilliant, nuanced readings of each of his films, she demonstrates how involuntary memories arising from Truffaut's childhood not only furnish a succession of motifs that are repeated from film to film, but also govern every aspect of his mise en scene and cinematic technique.