François Truffaut, one of the directors who launched the French New Wave, occupies a special place in the history of the evolution of the male melodrama. By eclectically combining aspects of American cinema, Italian neorealism, and Bergmanesque psychological drama to express his own personal concerns, he developed a mode of filmmaking that, both in terms of its thematic preoccupations and stylistic techniques, has exerted a powerful influence on many filmmakers ever since. This new kind of film was first manifest in his coming-of-age drama The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959), followed by a series of films tracing the ongoing experience of Truffaut’s fictional avatar, Antoine Doinel (acted by Jean-Pierre Léaud): as a young adult in Antoine and Colette (Antoine et Colette, 1962); as a fiançé in Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968); as a married man in Bed and Board (Domicile conjugal, 1970); and finally as a divorcé in Love on the Run (L’Amour en fuite, 1979).

These films put into practice a manifesto that Truffaut had proclaimed boldly in 1957, while as yet still only an ardent cinephile and film critic:

In contrast to “the stereotyped representation of reality that had come to dominate French cinema” in what Truffaut referred to disparagingly as “le cinéma de papa” (Daddy’s cinema), he aimed for a kind of film that was extremely realistic, projecting a personal vision of things that were close to the filmmaker’s own experience. In this regard, he was candid in admitting the formative influence of Roberto Rossellini and Ingmar Bergman.