This is a piece Truffaut wrote on The Ballad of Narayama separate from the one he did for Cahiers du Cinéma No. 88. The translation was included in Truffaut's The Films In My Life, though the book did not source the original text. (Presumably, it was written for Arts Magazine, but I could not locate the native text).
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The Legend of Nayarama
We know that quite a large part of Japanese film production is intended for export. This was…
THE LEGEND OF NARAYAMA (Cahiers' Venice 1958 coverage)
(Cahiers du Cinéma No. 88, October 1958)
The late Cardinet cinema had allowed us to see, for one week, without subtitles, but nevertheless brilliant, Like a Wildflower¹ by Kinoshita. The vision of this single film allowed Jacques Rivette to associate the name of this filmmaker with that of the greatest, the sublime Kenji Mizoguchi.
It is still an absurdity of festivals to reward, in of Japanese films, only the most commercial…
Les haricots du mal
(The Beans of Evil, Cahiers du Cinéma No. 56, Février 1956)
Qui ne peut teur se réfugie dans la création. La nostalgie des meurtres non commis obsède les meilleurs cinéastes; mais ils n'ont guère à nous offrir sur le monde du crime et du sexe que le point de vue, assez fastidieux à la longue, de l'honnête homme. La Chienne, La femme au portrait, L'ombre d'un doute, sont des films irables mais « bourgeois », où…
The Beans of Evil
(Les haricots du mal, Cahiers du Cinéma No. 56, February 1956)
Those who cannot kill take refuge in creation. The nostalgia for uncommitted murders obsesses the best filmmakers; but they have little to offer us on the world of crime and sex other than the viewpoint, quite tedious in the long run, of the honest man. La Chienne, The Woman in the Portrait, Shadow of a Doubt, are irable but "bourgeois" films, where Renoir, Lang, and…
