Antoine and Colette - Development

Development

Truffaut had just finished Jules and Jim in 1962 when he was approached by film producer Pierre Roustang for his omnibus film project Love At Twenty. Truffaut was influential in helping to select Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Renzo Rossellini and Andrzej Wajda as the other directors who would eventually participate in the project. In his book Truffaut On Truffaut, Truffaut later said, "For my part, the French episode gave me the occasion to realize a project I hadn't dared to launch on my own, a short sequel to my first film, The 400 Blows, in which we would meet up with the young Antoine Doinel three years later having his first sentimental adventure, one that would illustrate the moral: you risk losing everything by wanting too much."

Antoine and Colette is a largely autobiographical work, based on seventeen-year-old Truffaut's infatuation with an unconventional beauty named Lilliane Latvin. Truffaut met Latvin at the Cinémathèque Française and quit his job as a welder and moved to Paris just to be near her. Like Antoine, he took an apartment across the street from hers so that he could monitor her activities. However, she was ultimately not interested in him nor in any of his friends (she had also attracted attention from Jean Gruault and Jean-Luc Godard).

Read more about this topic:  Antoine And Colette

Famous quotes containing the word development:

    “The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
    —Gail Sheehy (20th century)

    “... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
    —Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)

    “The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
    —Jean Baker Miller (20th century)