Whatever the reason, people went to a Truffaut film not in the way that audiences today turn out for whatever new indie director -- good or bad -- happens to be hot at the moment, but with a mix of eagerness and expectation and, there's no way of getting around it, love. "Truffaut's films are easy to love," says director Olivier Assayas in the documentary "François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits," "because they seem to love the audience." It was this popular image of Truffaut -- the filmmaker as compassionate man -- that Steven Spielberg had in his head when he cast Truffaut in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the sort of man people look at and think, "He'll understand." When Truffaut gently smiles at an addled old Mexican man who has witnessed a fleet of brightly lit UFOs, the man's confusion seems to clear away, and he confides his vision: "The sun came out last night, and it sang to me."

There are entire areas of Truffaut's work that that view doesn't encompass. No one who wrote with the vitriol Truffaut did during his days as a film critic ("rise up against French cinema"; "smash the seats when faced with these revolting films"), who expressed the bitterness over his own upbringing that still feels so raw in "The 400 Blows" or who understood -- and even sympathized with -- the depths of reckless passion that was the subject of one of his greatest films, "The Story of Adèle H." (1975), could have been entirely benevolent. But at their most lyrical -- and Truffaut was one of the three or four most lyrical filmmakers the movies have given us -- Truffaut's films made you feel as if the sun were singing to you. You sense that in the first shot of his first film, the 1957 short "Les Mistons," as the camera, placed in front of Bernadette Lafont, follows her bicycling down a summer street. If the palpability of the sun on Lafont's skin, the breeze rippling her dress, the fractured light falling through the overhanging leaves didn't all feel so completely natural, you might suspect that Truffaut had found a way to convince nature herself to put on a show for him. At moments like this, lyricism seems to be Truffaut's natural language, as it does in a (somewhat calculated) trifle like "Stolen Kisses" (1968) when the camera glides over the Paris rooftops while Charles Trenet sings on the soundtrack, or even in moments in a film as bad as "Confidentially Yours" (1983), when he simply films Fanny Ardant walking down the street in a trench coat.

For Truffaut and his compatriots in the nouvelle vague, the ambition to capture a poeticized vision of life as it is lived was not so much a break with tradition as a way to resume the tradition, interrupted by war, of French films of the '30s. Seeing only stultification and decay in the glossy "quality" films that dominated the French industry in the '50s, Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette (first as critics at Cahiers du Cinema and then as directors) celebrated the en plein air style of Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo and René Clair. (In "The 400 Blows," young Antoine even cleans his dirty hands on a window curtain, just as Michel Simon used one to wipe his muddy shoes in Renoir's "Boudu Saved From Drowning.") Truffaut might have been summing up the cri de coeur of the nouvelle vague when, introducing a festival of Renoir films in 1967, he said, "His work unfolded as if he devoted his most brilliant moments to fleeing from the masterpiece, to escape any notion of the definite and the fixed, so as to create a semi-improvisation, a deliberately unfinished 'open' work that each viewer can complete for himself, comment on as it suits him, approach from any side."

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