A Story “We” Tell: The Cinematic Transformation of Literature in François Truffaut’s Les Mistons (1957)

Abstract

François Truffaut’s career began with a reflection on an intersection of cinema and literature. As a critic, he published an essay, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” in which he criticized the adaptations of the time, and three years later, for his first film, Les Mistons, he attempted an adaptation of Maurice Pons’s novel. A year later, in his essay “Literary Adaptation for Cinema,” he took up Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Diable au Corps, based on the novel by Raymond Radiguet, and once again approached the issue of adaptation. These two essays and the film tells us that Truffaut’s interest was in adapting a first-person memory.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the cinematic transformation of literary work in Les Mistons by focusing on its “invisible, unidentifiable first-person-plural narrator.” The first section clarifies that Truffaut's claim of “adaptation of value” by referring to the two essays. The second section discusses the first-person narrator who recollects in the novel and film, and confirms the position of the narrator in Les Mistons. Finally, I will argue that the film enables the “we” narration of the novel by placing an unidentifiable narrator.