Tonight, Rialto Channel presents a fascinating introduction to Truffaut and his New Wave brother-in-arms Jean-Luc Godard in a documentary called Two in The Wave. 

Francois Truffaut, one of the celebrated founders of French New Wave Cinema is the featured director in this month’s Directors Showcase screening each Sunday at 8.30pm.

Tonight, Rialto Channel presents a fascinating introduction to Truffaut and his New Wave brother-in-arms Jean-Luc Godard in a documentary called Two in The Wave.

The documentary chronicles their friendship and subsequent falling out; well researched by director Emmanuel Laurent, the attention to detail is impressive. The script is written and narrated by Antoine de Baecque, a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma (where both Truffaut and Godard worked as critics) and a biographer of Truffaut.

The film starts at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, where Truffaut won Best Picture for his debut film The 400 Blows. Highly critical of the festival in his role as a critic in previous years, Truffaut was the only critic not invited to the festival the year before.  The irony of his success at this festival was not lost on him or his New Wave compatriots. Encouraged by Truffaut’s success, Godard went on to shoot his own debut feature (written for him by Truffaut), the controversial Breathless.

The documentary then goes back in time, comparing the artists’ upbringings and the origins of their devotion to cinema, following their relationships through to its bitter break up years later. As their careers mature Godard’s work becomes more anti-cinema and political while Truffaut continues exploring humanist cinema, for which Godard labels him “bourgeois”. The student and workers strikes in 1968 marks the beginning of the end of their friendship as the two argue over whether politics has a place in cinema, and after Truffaut releases his apolitical film-about-filmmaking La Nuit américaine (in which he also stared), they never speak again.

The story of these two quite different men is bound together with archive footage that includes interviews, news stories, and carefully selected film scenes. It’s an intense documentary, and although it’s not a definitive telling on the Nouvelle Vague story (too many other artists are excluded), it’s a wonderfully well presented introduction to two of its most iconic stars.

Two in The Wave screens tonight at 8.30pm.

Enjoy.