[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.4.0″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.4.0″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.4.0″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.6.6″ z_index_tablet=”500″ border_color_all=”#ffffff” use_border_color=”off”]Dear Cinephiles,<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I’d tell them the truth and they still wouldn’t believe me, so I prefer to lie.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut\u2019s \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d has been so much written about that I don\u2019t know what else I can add to the mix. It\u2019s one of the most important films in cinema, at the vanguard of the French New Wave, which many consider to be the beginning of contemporary film as we know it. What I\u2019ve always been struck by in my repeated viewings throughout my life is how fresh and vital it remains. It\u2019s a poignant and groundbreaking work of art and of particular interest to me is the role that movies themselves play for the main character. Seeing it for the umpteenth time a couple of nights ago it felt as if it was just made yesterday. Truffaut has such command.<\/p>\n
It is a coming of age story, but it could be the best example of it. One memorable scene in a film full of many has always been my favorite for its impact and artistry. I\u2019ve spoken before about metaphors in film, figurative comparisons in which the filmmaker conveys the crux of the themes in his movie in a visual scene. Here, our main protagonist, Antoine has skipped school with his best friend and they go to a carnival and take a spinning ride called a \u201crotor.\u201d The camera stays on him as the ride starts, and then we see his point of view as he sees the crowd above looking at him circling and picking up speed. The contraption gathers such velocity that Antoine starts to levitate off the ground, and he bursts into a smile \u2013 the first time we see this fourteen-year old so full of joy. He attempts with all of his might to turn himself upside down, going fully against the forces of gravity and he doesn\u2019t succeed. In that passage, we get the journey of this young adolescent who longs to break free from the constrictions and who wants to be himself. It\u2019s a beautiful allegorical moment. The ride ends and Antoine goes back to the real world. As he exits the ride, you can catch a glimpse of Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut himself making a Hitchcockian cameo.<\/p>\n
Truffaut\u2019s work is undeniably autobiographical. Antoine undergoes many of the situations that the director experienced growing up. We follow him living in Paris with his mother, Gilberte (Claire Maurier), and his stepfather, Julien (Albert R\u00e9my) \u2014 who gave him his name. \u201cSpeaking of kids, what\u2019ll we do with this one for the summer?\u201d asks dad in front of Antoine. They live in a very cramped apartment and both parents are distracted by work, and parenting Antoine is a nuisance. We get the feeling that Antoine\u2019s arrival was not planned and that his mother is slightly bothered by his presence. There\u2019s even a moment where she has to step over his bed when she comes home late at night from an adulterous affair she\u2019s been carrying on, and one that Antoine is aware of, for he caught her kissing in the streets.<\/p>\n
At school things are not better. The curmudgeon teacher has it against him, and Antoine seems to have the luck of always getting into trouble. He lies a lot, and finds himself wanting to skip classes. He finds refuge at the movies which he attends with his close friend, and he has a kindred feeling for the writer Balzac. He builds a shrine in his room (unfortunately it leads to a close call with a fire). Lies, petty thefts and misunderstandings with his family lead him to juvenile delinquency and eventually he\u2019s sent to the Paris Observation Center for Minors. There\u2019s a longing to break free from conformity, to make your mark, to be loved, to belong, to leap the awkwardness of childhood and embrace the future and adulthood. All the blows that he\u2019s receiving will ultimately liberate him and make the artist that Truffaut will become. The last ten minutes are spectacular and some of the most extraordinary moments in cinema history, as important as Dorothy opening that door unto Oz. Antoine escapes from the Center for Minors and the camera follows him on a tracking shot as he runs outdoors. We continue running with him as he starts to see the expanse around him. It all leads to the ocean, where he hadn\u2019t been before and the screen takes it all in as he does. He runs towards it and then Antoine turns to us, and moves towards the camera. We lock eyes with him and Truffaut zooms in on his face and does a freeze frame. It is a stunning way to end his film. Defiant. The whole world ahead of him. The artist is born.<\/p>\n
There are so many other scenes and moments that are so beautiful in \u201cThe 400 Blows.\u201d The opening sequence shows a camera circling different sections of Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. There are cuts and turns in the trajectory, but the top of the tower is always peeking, until the travels lead us close to it and we navigate it from below.<\/p>\n
Antoine Doinel : \u201cAfter this I can’t live with my parents anymore. I’ve got to disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Love,
\nRoger[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version=”4.4.0″][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.6.6″ hover_enabled=”0″ z_index_tablet=”500″ border_color_all=”#ffffff” use_border_color=”off” sticky_enabled=”0″]The 400 Blows
\nAvailable to stream on HBO Max, Kanopy and The Criterion Channel and to rent on YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, iTunes and Amazon Prime.
\nWritten by Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut and Marcel Moussy
\nDirected by Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut
\nStarring Jean-Pierre L\u00e9aud, Albert R\u00e9my, Claire Maurier
\n99 minutes<\/p>\n
Screenwriter and Director Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut on \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d
\n\u201cWhen I was shooting \u201cLes Mistons,\u201d \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d already existed in my mind in the form of a short film, which was titled \u201cAntoine Runs Away.\u201d It was because I was disappointed by \u201cLes Mistons,\u201d or at least by its brevity. You see, I had come to reject the sort of film made up of several skits or sketches. So I preferred to leave \u201cLes Mistons\u201d as a short and to take my chances with a full-length film by spinning out the story of \u201cAntoine Runs Away.\u201d Of the five or six stories I had already outlined, this was my favorite, and it became \u201cThe 400 Blows.\u201d \u201cAntoine Runs Away\u201d was a twenty-minute sketch about a boy who plays hooky and, having no note to hand in as an excuse, makes up the story that his mother has died. His lie having been discovered, he does not dare go home and spends the night outdoors. I decided to develop this story with the help of Marcel Moussy, at the time a television writer whose shows for a program called \u201cIf It Was You\u201d were very realistic and very successful. They always dealt with family or social problems. Moussy and I added to the beginning and the end of Antoine\u2019s story until it became a kind of chronicle of a boy\u2019s thirteenth year\u2014of the awkward early teenaged years.<\/p>\n
In fact, \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d became a rather pessimistic film. I can\u2019t really say what the theme is\u2014there is none, perhaps\u2014but one central idea was to depict early adolescence as a difficult time of passage and not to fall into the usual nostalgia about \u201cthe good old days,\u201d the salad days of youth. Because, for me in any event, childhood is a series of painful memories. Now, when I feel blue, I tell myself, \u201cI\u2019m an adult. I do as I please,\u201d and that cheers me up right away. But then, childhood seemed like such a hard phase of life; you\u2019re not allowed to make any mistakes. Making a mistake is a crime: you break a plate by mistake and it\u2019s a real offense. That was my approach in \u201cThe 400 Blows,\u201d using a relatively flexible script to leave room for improvisation, mostly provided by the actors. I was very happy in this respect with Jean-Pierre L\u00e9aud as Antoine, who was quite different from the original character I had imagined. And as we improvised more, the film became more pessimistic, then\u2014in brief spurts, as a contrary reaction\u2014so high-spirited that it almost became optimistic.\u201d…All I can say is that nothing in it is invented. What didn\u2019t happen to me personally happened to people I know, to boys my age and even to people that I had read about in the papers. Nothing in \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d is pure fiction, then, but neither is the film a wholly autobiographical work.<\/p>\n
…As for my method of writing, I started making \u201cscript sheets\u201d when I began work on \u201cThe 400 Blows.\u201d School: various gags at school. Home: some gags at home. Street: a few gags in the street. I think everyone works in this way, at least on some films. You certainly do it for comedies, and you can even do it for dramas. And this material, in my case, was often based on memories. I realized that you can really exercise your memory where the past is concerned. I had found a class photo, for example, one in the classic pose with all the pupils lined up. The first time I looked at that picture, I could remember the names of only two friends. But by looking at it for an hour each morning over a period of several days, I remembered all my classmates\u2019 names, their parents\u2019 jobs, and where everybody lived. It was around this time that I met Moussy and asked him if he\u2019d like to work with me on the script of \u201cThe 400 Blows.\u201d Since I myself had played hooky quite a bit, all of Antoine\u2019s problems with fake notes, forged signatures, bad report cards\u2014all of these I knew by heart, of course. The movies to which we truants went started at around ten in the morning; there were several theaters in Paris that opened at such an early hour. And their clientele was made up almost exclusively of schoolchildren! But you couldn\u2019t go with your schoolbag, because it would make you look suspicious. So we hid our bags behind the door of the theater. Two of these movie houses faced each other: the Cin\u00e9ac-Italiens and the New York. Each morning around nine-forty-five, there would be fifty or sixty children waiting outside to get in. And the first theater to open would get all the business because we were anxious to hide. We felt awfully exposed out there in the middle of all that\u2026\u201d (newyorker.com)<\/p>\n
The Making of \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d
\nIn the late 1950s a group of iconoclastic young French film critics who had been attacking the established French cinema began to make their own very personal films. Among them was Francois Truffaut, just 26 years old, who had first proposed what came to be known as the auteur theory – that the director is the author of a film. For his first feature, Truffaut dug deep into his own troubled childhood to paint an unforgettable portrait of an adolescent whose resilience is tested by unloving parents and clueless teachers. The French title of “The 400 Blows” (1959) comes from the idiom, “faire les quatre cents coups,” meaning “to raise hell.”…As Truffaut put it, “I wanted to express this feeling that adolescence is a bad moment to get through.” “The 400 Blows” was shot in less than two months, in real locations, for only $50,000. (tcm.com)<\/p>\n
About Composer Jean Constantin
\nJean Constantin was a French singer, songwriter, and composer best known for writing Edith Piaf’s 1958 song “Mon Man\u00e8ge \u00e0 Moi (Tu Me Fais Tourner la T\u00eate)” and for composing the soundtrack of Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut’s 1959 film Les Quatre Cents Coups. Born on February 9, 1923, in Paris, France, Constantin was primarily active during the 1950s and ’60s in both the music and film industries. Charles Aznavour’s “\u00c0 T’regarder” (1955) and Zizi Jeanmaire’s “Mon Truc en Plumes” (1956) were among the first instances of his songs becoming popularized. Edith Piaf’s 1958 performance of his song “Mon Man\u00e8ge \u00e0 Moi” (“Tu Me Fais Tourner la T\u00eate”) would become the most enduring instance of his craftsmanship as a songwriter. Perhaps even more enduring is the soundtrack he composed for Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut’s 1959 film “Les Quatre Cents Coups” (known in English as “The 400 Blows”), one of the defining films of the French New Wave movement. Among the best-known singers to perform his songs over the years are Yves Montand (“Barcarolette,” “Ellington Quarante et Love,” “L’Enfant \u00c9bloui,” “Le Simple Jardinier,” “Ma Gigolette,” “Mon Man\u00e8ge \u00e0 Moi,” “Napoli Jolie”) and Petula Clark (“Che Sbadato,” “En Juillet,” “Ne Joue Pas,” “Tango de l’Esquimau”). Despite his success as a songwriter and composer, Constantin had little success as a singer himself. Though his solo output is quite obscure, some highlights of it were compiled for release by BMG on the best-of collection “Les Plus Belles Chansons” (1994). Constantin died on January 30, 1997, in Noisy-le-Grand, Seine-Saint-Denis, France. (allmusic.com)<\/p>\n
About Writer and Director Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut
\nTruffaut was born into a working-class home. His own troubled childhood provided the inspiration for \u201cLes Quatre Cents Coups\u201d (1959; \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d), a semi-autobiographical study of a working-class delinquent. It is the first of the Antoine Doinel series, tracing its hero\u2019s evolution from an antisocial anguish to a happy and settled domesticity. When it won the best direction prize at the 1959 Cannes film festival, Truffaut was established as a leader of the French cinema\u2019s New Wave\u2014a term for the simultaneous presentation of first feature films by a number of French directors\u2014a tendency that profoundly influenced the rising generation of filmmakers around the world. The New Wave marked a reaction against the commercial production system: the well-constructed plot, the limitations of a merely craftsman-like approach, and the French tradition of quality with its heavy reliance on literary sources. Its aesthetic theory required every detail of a film\u2019s style to reflect its director\u2019s sensibility as intimately as a novelist\u2019s prose style retraces the workings in depth of his mind\u2014hence the term le camera-stylo (\u201ccamera-pen\u201d). The emphasis lay on visual nuance, for, in keeping with a general denigration of the preconceived and the literary, the script was often treated less as a ground plan for a dramatic structure than as merely a theme for improvisation. Improvised scenes were filmed, deploying the visual flexibility of newly developed television equipment (e.g., the handheld camera) and techniques (e.g., extensive post synchronization of dialogue). The minimization of costs encouraged producers to gamble on unknown talents, and the simplicity of means gave the director close control over every aspect of the creative process, hence Truffaut\u2019s term auteur, or film author.<\/p>\n
Outside his art, Truffaut was reticent about his private life, although it is known that he left school at age 14 and worked in a factory before being sent to a reformatory. His interest in the cinema, however, brought him to the attention of critic Andr\u00e9 Bazin, doyen of the monthly avant-garde film magazine Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma. After Truffaut enlisted in the military and then was imprisoned for attempting to desert, Bazin helped him secure a discharge and incorporated him into the magazine\u2019s staff. For eight years Truffaut asserted himself as the most truculent critic of the contemporary French cinema, which he considered stale and conventional, and advocated a cinema that would allow the director to write dialogue, invent stories, and, in general, produce a film as an artistic whole in his own style. Thus, he was influential in the cinema world before he actually made a film. Like his leading character in \u201cBaisers vol\u00e9s\u201d (1968; \u201cStolen Kisses\u201d), another film in the Doinel series, he was expelled from his military service. Again, like Doinel in \u201cDomicile conjugale\u201d (1970; \u201cBed & Board\u201d), he married and became a father. Truffaut\u2019s initial creative effort, the short piece \u201cLes Mistons\u201d (1958; \u201cThe Mischief Makers\u201d), depicted a gang of boys who thoughtlessly persecute two young lovers. It met with sufficient appreciation to facilitate his first feature-length film, \u201cLes Quatre Cents Coups.\u201d An evocation of the adolescent\u2019s pursuit of independence from a staid adult world of conformity and protocol, for which Truffaut evinced a romantic sympathy, the film proved to be one of the most popular New Wave films, especially in England and the United States, where he received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Two tenderly pessimistic studies in sexual tragedy followed\u2014 \u201cTirez sur le pianiste\u201d (1960; \u201cShoot the Piano Player\u201d), adapted from a 1956 American crime novel (\u201cDown There\u201d by David Goodis), a genre for which Truffaut displayed great admiration, and \u201cJules et Jim\u201d (1962). During this time he also made a second short, \u201cUne Histoire d\u2019eau\u201d (1961; \u201cA Story of Water\u201d), a slapstick comedy for which Jean-Luc Godard developed the conclusion. After this burst of creativity, he seemed to have a period of hesitation.<\/p>\n
All of his later works, however, were intensely personal and explored one of two themes: studies in forlorn childhoods\u2014e.g., the Doinel saga and \u201cL\u2019Enfant sauvage\u201d (1970; “The Wild Child”)…and sensitive melodramas sadly celebrating disastrous confrontations between shy heroes and boldly emancipated or possessive women\u2026A certain hero worship, also, is discernible in Truffaut\u2019s long published conversations with the veteran British American filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock, rev. ed. 1984), whose work he admired in complete defiance of his earlier theories. Of Truffaut\u2019s features, only \u201cFahrenheit 451\u201d (1966), a film version of Ray Bradbury\u2019s science-fiction novel, falls outside these categories, though it relates to the American style and the poetic-melodramatic form. Through his production company, Les Films du Carrosse, Truffaut co-produced, among other films, Godard\u2019s first feature and Jean Cocteau\u2019s last. His own later films included \u201cLa Nuit am\u00e9ricaine\u201d (1973; \u201cDay for Night\u201d), for which both his direction and screenplay received Oscar nominations; \u201cLe Dernier M\u00e9tro\u201d (1980; \u201cThe Last Metro\u201d); and \u201cVivement dimanche\u201d (1983; Confidentially Yours\u201d)\u2026Two autobiographical books, \u201cLes Films de ma vie\u201d (1975; \u201cThe Films of My Life\u201d) and \u201cTruffaut par Truffaut\u201d (1985; \u201cTruffaut by Truffaut\u201d), shed further light on Truffaut\u2019s philosophy and modus operandi. (britannica.com)[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Cinephiles, \u201cOh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I’d tell them the truth and they still wouldn’t believe me, so I prefer to lie.\u201d Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut\u2019s \u201cThe 400 Blows\u201d has been so much written about that I don\u2019t know what else I can add to the mix. It\u2019s one of the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1778,"featured_media":39231,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[214],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1778"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbiff.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}