Cinema – Literature – Sculpture and What’s Between Them, François Truffaut's Films as an Intertextual Cultual Space

Abstract: Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1961) and Two English Girls (Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent, 1971) are two films directed by François Truffaut, both adapted from autobiographical novels by Henri Pierre Roché. In both films the principal characters' occupations are related either to writing or to art, hence providing Truffaut with a fertile ground to include literary oeuvres as well as works of plastic art, thus generating a rich intertextual dialogue, which creates a multi-layer interpretation and expropriate the film from the narrow definition of "adaptation". Furthermore, both films evoke an inter-disciplinary discussion regarding the virtues and limits of each art, as well as its uniqueness, while examining the complex relationship between cinema and the more veteran arts, which preceded it. In this article we examine the complex intertextual dialogues and their vital contribution to interpretation, at different thematic and auto-poetic levels, in both films. The main intertexts discussed are: Balzac's short story Sarrasine (1830), three statues, each of which is a reference to a literary work: Venus Victrix by Pierre August Renoir; Balzac and The Kiss by August Rodin, and the classical myth of Pygmalion.

This article was submitted in Hebrew, please switch to the Hebrew section of the issue.