Fahrenheit 451: Truffaut Burns the Books

The film opens on a series of rooftop aerials while a voice reads the credits aloud. No text appears. Not a word of writing on the screen — no title, no cast list, no “directed by”. You are told who made this film, because in the world of this film nobody could have read it.

It is the best idea anyone has ever had for a title sequence, it lasts ninety seconds, and it tells you immediately that François Truffaut has understood the assignment at a level his critics in 1966 declined to credit. Fahrenheit 451 is a strange, stilted, frequently awkward picture. It is also the only film about the destruction of books that grasps the thing Bradbury was actually mourning, which is not literature. It is interiority.

A director who could not speak the language

Truffaut made this in England, at Pinewood, in a language he could barely hold a conversation in. He kept a production diary — published in Cahiers du Cinéma, and one of the most useful documents any director has left about a troubled shoot — and it records a man working through interpreters, fighting with his leading actor, and slowly realising that the awkwardness was becoming the film.

The fight with Oskar Werner is the famous part. Truffaut had adored Werner in Jules et Jim; by the end of this shoot they were barely speaking, and Werner’s Montag is stiff, thick-accented, faintly resentful, marooned. Every account of the production treats this as damage.

Watch the film cold and the damage is indistinguishable from a performance choice. Montag is a man with no inner life who is growing one, badly and late, in a society that has never given him the equipment. Werner’s blankness reads exactly as arrested development. A supple, fluent leading man would have played the awakening as an awakening. Werner plays it as a man discovering he has been furniture, and I am not convinced Truffaut could have got that on purpose.

The whole film has that quality. The English dialogue is odd — over-formal, a beat wrong, translated-sounding — and it produces a society that speaks in received phrases because that is all anyone has left. The accident and the theme are the same shape.

Roeg’s colour, Herrmann’s noise

Nicolas Roeg shot it, four years before he began directing, and it is the most beautiful-looking dystopia of the decade. The trick is that the future is pretty: primary reds, clean suburban interiors, sunlight, tidy hedges. The fire engine is a gleaming toy. Nothing is grim. Roeg and Truffaut worked out that a totalitarian society which has abolished reading in the name of everyone’s happiness would look like a catalogue, and they photographed it accordingly. The horror has to come from the content of the frame, because the frame itself is offering you a very nice life.

Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, and Truffaut wanted him specifically for what he had done for Hitchcock. Herrmann’s decision here was strings and harps — warm, romantic, surging, the music of a love story — laid over the burning of books. The mismatch is the argument. The film’s most upsetting sequences are scored as though something tender is happening, because to the firemen something tender is happening: they are protecting people from distress. Herrmann had been the sound of dread. Here he is the sound of consolation, which turns out to be worse.

The monorail is the other found object. Montag commutes on a suspended single-rail train, gliding above a landscape of hedges and detached houses, and it is not a set or a miniature — it is a real experimental transport system, a test track built in France, borrowed by the production and photographed as the everyday infrastructure of the future. It gives the film something no designed set could: a machine that genuinely existed and genuinely went nowhere, a piece of somebody else’s tomorrow already sitting unused in a field. Truffaut’s future is assembled out of the present’s discarded prototypes, which is both cheaper and truer than building one.

Then there is the fireman’s pole. Truffaut shot the men going up it — reversing the footage so they rise, smoothly and impossibly, in a single unbroken movement. It is a music-hall gag in the middle of a serious film, and it does real work: this world’s technology is childish, its pleasures are childish, and its violence is performed by grown men playing at being boys.

Julie Christie, twice

Christie plays both Linda, Montag’s wife, and Clarisse, the young woman who asks him whether he ever reads the books he burns. Truffaut cast one actress in both parts deliberately, and it is the film’s boldest structural gesture.

The obvious reading is that Montag is choosing between two versions of the same woman. The better reading is that there is only one woman, and the difference is entirely a question of whether anything is happening behind the face. Christie plays Linda with a bright, medicated vacancy — a woman whose relationships are with a wall-sized screen and a handful of pills — and Clarisse with a watchfulness that is barely a different performance in technical terms. Same hair colour would have ruined it; Truffaut gives them different hair and almost nothing else. What separates them is attention.

The wall-screen family that Linda talks to, participates with, and considers her relatives is the film’s sharpest prophecy, and it needed no updating whatsoever. Bradbury wrote it in 1953. Truffaut shot it in 1966 as a woman in a nice room being addressed by name by a broadcast and answering it.

What the film is actually about

The books are treated as bodies. Truffaut shoots the burnings as executions — pages curling like skin, spines opening, the camera holding far longer than comfort allows on volumes that anyone in the audience will recognise. The most quoted image is a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma going up, which is Truffaut burning his own house down, and it is not a joke.

The society’s justification is the part that has aged forward most sharply. Books are burned because books make people unhappy, unequal, argumentative. Some are cleverer than others. Some are offended. The Captain, played with immense weary charm by Cyril Cusack, explains this in the film’s best scene, and he is reasonable throughout. He has read everything. He knows exactly what he is destroying. His position is that people asked for this, and he is right.

That is the difference between this and its neighbours. Metropolis and Things to Come hand you a tyrant. Brazil hands you a bureaucracy that has forgotten why it exists. Truffaut hands you a customer-service state that abolished the mind on request, and the closest descendant in tone is Gattaca, which likewise understands that the sinister future will be clean, polite, and broadly popular.

The case against

It is slow in the wrong places, and the middle sags badly. Truffaut’s interest in plot was always minimal and here it is close to absent — long stretches where Montag walks, looks, and decides nothing while the film waits for him. The fire-station material is repetitive. The action sequences are limp; Truffaut had no instinct for pursuit and the film’s chases are its dullest passages.

And the language problem is a genuine cost as well as an accidental gift. Whole exchanges land flat because nobody involved could hear that they were flat. Bradbury’s prose was incantatory, and Truffaut’s version is prose with the music removed — which suits the theme and starves the scenes.

Contemporary reviews were rough, and they were not wrong about the surface. The film only assembles itself in retrospect.

The verdict

Fahrenheit 451 is a flawed film that is smarter than most unflawed ones, and it survives on the strength of a handful of ideas so good they carry the dead weight: the spoken credits, one actress in two roles, Herrmann scoring an atrocity as a romance, a world where the enemy of thought is comfort. Truffaut never made another film in English and never made another science-fiction film. He did not need to. He got the one thing the genre usually misses, which is that a book-burning state does not have to conquer anybody. It only has to offer a better evening.

Watch it for Cusack’s Captain, for Roeg’s reds, and for the last twenty minutes, which are unlike anything else in 1960s cinema.

Spoilers below

Montag’s turn is triggered by an old woman who refuses to leave her library. The firemen arrive, she stands among her books, and she strikes the match herself. Truffaut holds on Montag’s face while she burns, and it is the moment the film’s thesis lands physically: she has decided her interior life and her body are the same object, which is precisely the equivalence the state exists to prevent anyone reaching.

He begins stealing books, reading at night, and Truffaut shoots the reading with enormous patience — Montag’s finger under the line, mouthing the words, a grown man learning to read again in his own front room. Linda’s response is to inform on him, and the film treats her betrayal without malice: she is frightened, he has made the house unhappy, and unhappiness is the one unforgivable thing. The Captain, who has known for some time, forces Montag to burn his own home, and then Montag turns the flamethrower on him.

The ending is the reason the film endures. Montag escapes to the book people, who live rough by a lake outside the city, and who have each memorised a book entire — becoming the thing they carry, addressing one another as titles, reciting themselves. Truffaut shoots them walking in the snow, muttering their texts, an old man teaching his book to a boy so it survives him. It is absurd and it is unbearably moving, and it lands the argument the whole picture has been building: a book is not paper. It is somebody paying attention hard enough to hold it. The state burned the objects and never touched the thing that mattered, because it never understood what the thing was.