François Truffaut

Woman is pure, delicate, fragile," muses one of the characters in François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player . "Women are marvelous, women are supreme." It's easy to imagine Truffaut himself making the same exclamations about cinema. His love affair with moving pictures was a profound and lasting one, and you can feel the intensity of it in his criticism, even in his acting. And most of all, in his films. Truffaut's passion for cinema, the desire that it stirred in him, animates every movie he ever made, every scene, every shot. He spent a very long time in the editing room with...