FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Francois Truffaut - Fahrenheit 451 

Ray Bradbury was said to have written his short story The Fire Man (which he was to extend to the novel Fahrenheit 451 in 1953) with a typewriter that worked with a coin slot. His main concern was not to criticize a totalitarian state, but to warn against the medium of the future: television. We are therefore in a repressive state of the future. The fire brigade no longer has the task of extinguishing fires, but of burning books. In a society in which everyone should be equal, writing or reading a novel means to rise above the others. Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) has been working for Fire Department 451 for five years and has just been offered promotion. While he is burning books, his wife Linda (Julie Christie) is at home watching state television and swallowing psychotropic drugs. Until this moment we could be in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the USA equally. One evening Linda swallowed too many tablets and collapses. But she can't remember anything the following day. In general she lives only in the here and now and doesn't even know how she got to know Guy. One day Guy is asked by his neighbour, the teacher Clarisse (Julie Christie), if he would read the books before the burning - a question that leaves him no peace anymore and Guy begins to read secretly at night... Truffaut leads us into a kind of commune in the forest, where the book people live and learn the great classics by heart. One would pass them on orally. However, the occupation seems pointless, since everyone in this commune only reads and learns by heart. Conversations about what is read do not take place. People in society live happily, but spiritlessly. They, too, hardly speak to each other. Bradbury once described how he saw a couple walking a dog in California. She wore a radio as small as a pack of cigarettes and listened to music with headphones. Neither her husband nor the dog paid her any attention. How must that have happened to a couple during a TV night? Truffaut's dystopia has a conservative aftertaste, just like Bradbury's pattern. The statement; "Television is to blame" may seem a bit brittle, but we should see this homage to Western culture in the spirit of its time: The year 1966.