Film as literature, or the Truffaldian Malaise

This chapter looks at L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) as a privileged instance of the self-effacing, obliquely disruptive, reflexive aesthetics that characterizes Truffaut’s cinema, by means of an intermedial approach. Although an original story, written by Truffaut in collaboration with Suzanne Schiffman and Michel Fermaud, the film’s subject is the writing of a book containing the protagonist’s story. More importantly, its mode of address presents this story as literature, through a complex network of flashbacks and voiceover narrations that comment on and make sense of the fragmentary present-tense action scenes. As well as a film, this method resulted in an actual novel, or cinéroman, this time authored exclusively by the director under the same title of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, thus giving material form to the literary aim of the cinematic enterprise: a book.