Eclairage(s)

Abstract :

International audience

Released in 1960, Shoot the Piano Player was adapted from a thriller by David Goodis and considered one of the emblems of the Nouvelle Vague films along with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. By choosing a very different material from his first full-length film, Les 400 Coups, not only did François Truffaut revisit the film noir and illustrate his auteur theory-defended in his 1954 article "A Certain Tendency of French Cinema"-but most of all he offered a lesson of cinema in which diversity, innovation, narrative freedom, and film self-reflexivity echo each other. Unlike Jean Collet who in his book Le Cinéma de Truffaut wrote that Goodis's novel was cinematographic while Truffaut's film was literary in that the latter could be read with breaks and lulls and commented in depth like a novel, this article demonstrates how cinematographic this film is through its references to films noirs, westerns, silent films, and several Anglo-Saxon filmmakers, but also through its audacious direction choices and outlook on cinema.

Published : 2026-06