SOURCE: "Antoine Doinel in the Zoetrope," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 4, 1990, pp. 230-35.

In the following essay, Towner argues that Truffaut is a revisionist and that his later films reintroduce characters, scenes, and images from his earlier films.

It should surprise no one that Francois Truffaut would base one of his later films (The Green Room, 1978) on the writings of Henry James. There are a number of aspects about their works that bear comparison, and even if the filmmaker as a youth might have been ignorant of the American novelist's work, Truffaut's later discovery of James must have been a revelation. After all, like James, Truffaut was among the first practitioners of a new national art form to have a clear historical sense on which to draw. (In fact, T.S. Eliot's criticism of James, that he had not so much a sense of the past as...