Sound Colour Vibration (Music | Art | Film)

François Truffaut, critic turned director, is one of the most personal auteurs* of the French New Wave.  Before becoming known as an auteur, a term he coined in one of his writings “La Politique des Auteurs”*, Truffaut was one of the critical film analysts that formed the journal “Cahiers du Cinema”* (which is still in syndication today.)

These men praised directors like Hitchcock, Jean Renoir and Howard Hawkes as auteurs and denounced the more pliable commercial directors of Hollywood and French cinema.

The stories and characters in Truffaut’s films often feel as if they are ripped from pages of his own life.  Indeed, one can see and feel the real and human elements in his films and relate them to their own lives.

This personalization is driven home most heartedly in his Antoine Doinel series, which begins with his 1958 film, The 400 Blows (Les Quatres Cents Coups).

The six film Doinel series is made over the course of 20 years (1959-79) and intimately follows the haphazard and amorous protagonist Antoine Doinel, who is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud .

The 400 Blows is a masterful achievement in the history of cinema. More over it is one of the most moving and relatable stories of coming of age. It is rare for a film to empathize so well with childish tendencies, which are generally dismissed and punished as negligent. Truffaut paints a young boy that finds himself at odds with the world. The audience is led to believe that this boy will never become anything of himself, but as a viewer conscious of Truffaut’s script being semi-autobiographical it makes you ponder what this disobedient child will amount to.

400 Blows follows 12 year-old Doinel in his adventures as resourceful and rebellious child. We find Doinel at a time in which he is distanced from his relationships with his authorities (at home and at school.) Doinel’s parents seem more troubled by his presence than nurturing towards his growth. He is a lower middle class child who does not know his real father. While his mother has remarried a man who is kind enough to give Antoine his name and his attention, his mother can’t seem to cope with the fact that she has a son to care for. The mother, the caretaker comes off as immature as her son.

Paris is young Antoine’s playground and he knows his way about: where to play, where to get money, and where to run. As youths tend to do, he thinks he has a grasp on life and the world surrounding him. However, his dissidence slowly teaches him a greater lesson, that of ignorance in the face of a vast unknown world.

Like much of its new wave followers, 400 Blows takes the filming out of the studio, into the streets and, in many ways, straight from our very own lives. The script takes a backseat in most of his films, which allows the actors to improvise a more humanistic character. Often this blurs the distinction between the actor playing a character and the human behind the actor. This point is enforced more so by the fact that the actor is just a 13-year-old child.

A script, in the eyes of auteurs like Truffaut, is a loose narrative binding a story, not a concrete mold that is inflexible. There is a scene in which Doinel is being interviewed by a psychiatrist. This is a single shot with jump cuts* of Doinel exposing his youthful antics in utmost honesty to his faithful and attentive audience. Léaud was unaware of the questions he was being asked before filming and his answers were improved from his own life experiences. His hesitation, his answers, and his sincere vulnerability come from the heart. “Truffaut’s camera is able to capture the boy’s hesitations, his embarrassment, and his charming macho bravado.” (Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies 11th Edition, p. 311)

Truffaut uses his camera to symbolically tell the undercurrents of Doinel’s jaunt towards maturity. In a famous shot where Doinel is shown behind a cage Truffaut summarizes his message without words. The tight close up of Doinel shows that he is alone in this world with nowhere to go. He finds himself isolated by society and the scale of the world is obscured to him, perhaps by him.

The film has a lesser-known title called “The Sea, Antoine, The Sea.” There is a power to this title that is lost in the obscurity of the The 400 Blows. Antoine’s adventure culminates on a beach, his first time witnessing the sea. We leave him on a freeze frame staring into the camera. His innocence and vulnerability, his isolation and freedom all culminate here. These themes leave the young man holding a bewildered look; both anxious and excited about the life he is yet to live.

Truffaut is not a household name; it could be argued that Godard and his film “Breathless” are more commonplace. After witnessing such a masterpiece, it’s hard to understand how Truffaut has been swept under the rug of American film history. Recognize them or not, there are many elements in Truffaut’s films that have made possible the type of films we see and love in our commercial Cineplex’s.  This film is important because of the audience’s empathy with the characters. There is nothing polished about Doinel’s life. It is gritty and real, the funny moments are hard to laugh at because this could be your life, or the lives of your parents. This is something cinema tends to neglect and is lost in its continuing commercial exploits. – Erick R. Wilczynski

Glossary & Further Analysis:

Auteur – French word literally translating to “author.”  It is a term used to describe the Auteur Theory, which states that the director is the sole creator of the film’s style and auteur leaves a mark in each film with his style. It’s what makes you say that’s a Scorsese, a Wes Anderson, a Kubrick, etc.

“La Politique des Auteurs” – Loosely translated as “The Policy of the Auteurs” – Comes out of Truffaut’s essay “A certain tendency in French cinema.” In particular, Truffaut was angry with two commercial French screenplay writers, -Alexandre Astruc and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze -who manipulated works of literature to fit their own political agendas. The directors point of view is as follows: “The subject of these notes is limited to an examination of film solely in point of view of screenplays and scenarists. But I think I should state that directors are and should want to be responsible for the scenarios and the dialogue that they delineate. ‘Films of writers’, I wrote earlier, and indeed Aurenche and Bost will not contradict me. When they hand in their screenplay, the film is finished. The director, in their eyes, is the gentleman who puts frames around that screenplay. And alas that is the truth. [..]“

• Source of quote: http://www.indianauteur.com/?p=86

“Cahiers Du Cinema” – Translates to “What is Cinema” – Is a French journal founded in 1951.  It was helmed by co-founder and editor André Bazin. The authors of the journal were vehement critics and theorists of films and proponents of realism. “Bazin’s realist aesthetic was based on his belief that photography, TV, and cinema, unlike the traditional arts, produce images of reality automatically, with a minimum of human interference.” (Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies 11th Edition, p. 186)

Jump cuts are editing techniques that disregard space and time.  They are often jolting and cause a sense of distance from the absorbing world of the film. The term I used “single shot with jump cuts” means that the same shot was cut with no other shot to form a smooth transition. What happens here is an unexpected jump in the character’s placement and offsets the assumed timing of the movie’s reality.