![]() ![]() The French New Wave arguably never gifted a superior present to its favorite American genre, the film noir. ![]() ![]() Obviously, Truffaut’s future career tells us that he found more comfort in the less formally quizzical character studies he made his name on, but, if Shoot was a mere vacation, it would prove one of the most exploratory and cinema-charged vacations in all of the medium. Trading in his quasi-neo-realist heart for a fit of feverish play, Truffaut used Shoot as both a chance to stretch out and a means to test himself, to both mimic the style of a friend and to, perhaps, decide if that style could know a home in his own mind as well. Fittingly, and without surprise, it is as buoyantly vivaciousness and infected with cinematic self-love as even Godard’s Band of Outsiders and yet as chilly and formally provocative as Godard’s Breathless (in a rare feat of simultaneous humility and egomania from Godard, that film’s name tells all).Īnd Shoot is a noir, no less, the most New Wave-y of genres, but one coming from the famously genre-averse Truffaut. In 1960, before the French New Wave was nothing more than a passing whisper in the international film crowd, Shoot the Piano Player managed to prelude and predict all the proclivities, both passing and permanent, of the trend. He went Godard, in other words, and like his relationship with that most temperamental of filmmakers, Shoot the Piano Player is cinema with both hot flashes and cold skin. After transcribing his childhood into one of the finest character studies in all of cinema, Francois Truffaut took a cue from his sometimes friend, often enemy for his second feature. ![]()
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