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Background information
"Among the great French film directors, François Truffaut is certainly one of those who have written most about the cinema: first as an influential critic and polemicist in the 1950s and later, after he himself switched behind the camera, as an essayist who never hesitated when it came to writing prefaces for books by fellow authors or writing about his favorite directors.
François Truffaut cultivated this activity as a 'cinema writer' with great pleasure, always parallel to his career as a filmmaker. At the beginning of the 1980s, he planned to publish a new collection of texts that would be a sequel to his 1975 book 'The Films of My Life'.
Content
The text and picture book 'Die Lust am Sehen', which has been out of print for a long time, was again intended to gather together a large number of articles covering all stages of his career: from his critical texts for Arts and Cahiers du Cinéma (including the important essay 'A certain tendency in French cinema', which established his fame in 1954) to more recent articles on his experiences as a filmmaker and concise essays on the directors he admired (Renoir, Hitchcock, Welles, Chaplin, Rossellini, Woody Allen), writers (Gide, Giraudoux, Woolrich, Roché) and actresses with whom he had the pleasure of working (Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Julie Christie, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Fanny Ardant).
Jean Narboni and Serge Toubiana, editors of the 'Cahiers du Cinéma', and Robert Fischer, the editor of the German edition, followed closely the concept left by François Truffaut when selecting the articles. The texts collected in this book reflect the intense writing of a true 'cinema moralist' whose talent and influence have a legendary reputation. (Publisher's text, © Verlag der Autoren, 1999)