ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, François Truffaut expressed some degree of displeasure when critics labelled his work autobiographical. His ambivalence on this record is apparent as early as 1959 when his first film, Les 400 coups, was released to worldwide acclaim. His interviews at the time reveal two types of contradictory statement. He first adamantly claimed that nothing in the film was an exaggeration and that he had experienced as a child all the hardships endured by Antoine Doinel in the film. He also flatly denied that Les 400 coups was his biography (Truffaut 1959). For this there were of course reasons of a personal nature. The film was after all a violent indictment of his parents, particularly of his mother. Both were alive when the film came out and Truffaut had been trying to establish a normal relationship with them during his years as a film critic for Cahiers du cinéma. But, more importantly, this denial was prompted by reasons pertaining to aesthetics.
