SOURCE: "François Truffaut," in Religion in Film, edited by John R. May and Michael Bird, University of Tennessee Press, 1982, pp. 210-18.

In the following essay, Testa considers religion and spirituality in Truffaut's work, contrasting his cosmology with the beliefs of his mentor André Bazin.

Among film makers whose work has received treatment by critics considering the religious dimension of cinema, a particularly complex figure is François Truffaut. The leading student of André Bazin, Truffaut reflects in his films his own belief that human consciousness and experience must be bound to language and culture. For Bazin, human consciousness is directly grounded in Being, and for him the special role of film is to express this grounding in a manner free of "those piled-up conceptions, that spiritual dust and grime," which our culture has imposed upon our grasp of reality. In contrast to his mentor, Truffaut believes rather...