ABSTRACT
One of the key figures of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), Truffaut is almost certainly the postwar French film director whose work is most widely known in English-speaking countries. He had an unhappy and neglected Parisian childhood against which he reacted by continually playing truant from school to go to the cinema; unlike most of his New Wave contemporaries, he received virtually no formal education. The ciné-clubs of the Liberation were his ‘university’, and it was there that he met the critic André Bazin, who rescued him from the French equivalent of borstal and became an educator and father figure to him much as Truffaut himself was later to become to Jean-Pierre Léaud.
