Truffaut: Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Francois Truffaut’s first and only English film was an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel, which details a future society in which reading is illegal, and books are routinely sought out and burned by “firemen” appointed to maintain law and order. However, you never really feel as if Truffaut is directing in a second language, just because, with the exception of the banned books themselves, there’s no writing or text anywhere in the film. Not only are the opening credits spoken, rather than displayed on the screen, but the dialogue is minimal as possible – it’s Truffaut’s least talky film – with great stretches of it playing more or less as silent cinema, or silent set pieces. While Bradbury may have tapped into something peculiarly powerful by presenting us with a novel about a world in which novels are illegal, Truffaut seems to suggest that one of the advantages of telling this story as a film is that he can evoke the excommunication of language as well as literature from this dystopian future, generating an incredible suspicion and paranoia from talk and verbal communication more generally. At the same time, however, the very eloquence and elegance with which he does so tends to cut against Bradbury’s vision somewhat, or at least deflate the splendid isolation of its dystopian universe. Where Bradbury was envisaging a future in which literature was illegal, it often feels as if Truffaut is merely describing a present in which written language is irrelevant, the beginnings of a totally visual culture, a wasteland of widescreen televisions and reality programs, which is perhaps more dystopian than Bradbury’s vision, depending on how you look at it. Similarly, where Bradbury’s novel proceeds more or less narratively, Truffaut’s version is driven more by visual cognates than by language, especially Julie Christie’s dual roles as wife and confidante to Montag (Oskar Werner), the fireman whose gradual change of heart sets things in motion, in something like an early forerunner of the stiff-upper-lip fascism of The Lives Of Others. Abstracting his visual scheme, and anchoring it in a few key colours, Truffaut removes language only to make his objects and tableaux feel peculiarly and uncannily legible, perhaps explaining why this also feels like his tribute to Hitchcock, especially when Bernard Herrmann’s score starts to swell. And at the most suspenseful – and Hitchcockian – musical moments, you start to look at every space much like Montag is trained to do, as a series of places where books, words and meaning might be concealed, in what must be one of the strangest and most sinister primers on film language ever committed to film.