Released in 1959, Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), is one of the greatest films of all time. Marilyn Fabe, UC Berkeley Lecturer in Film Studies, captures the subtle cinematographic details in her book Closely Watched Films (2004). It is 27-year-old Francois Truffaut's autobiographical first feature film. It launched the French New Wave from 1959-1963. Other New Wave directors included Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, all of whom wrote polemical articles in the film journal Cahiers du Cinema. Their cinematic innovations were influenced by their film theories and the nature of the film medium.
Since the inception of motion pictures, the author of the screenplay was felt to be the
'auteur" of the film, as the directors were merely attempting to create a film faithful to the screen writer's vision. New Wave directors embraced the theories of Alexandre Astruc that cinema was a language in which an artist can express his thoughts in a powerful form, like literature. New Wave theorists thought the director was the auteur, in control of images, actors, and screenplay revisions. Auteur theory was challenged by Marx and Freud, who were interested in understanding the process by which a culture's ideology, be it capitalist consumer values or patriarchal ideas about gender, were reproduced and maintained through mass media. Roland Barthes also invoked a challenge, announcing the death of the author and birth of the reader. Meaning is determined not by the intent of the author, but by the reader of the text.
In The 400 Blows, Truffaut demonstrates that film can be as emotionally and intellectually evocative and complex as literature. The story of the film was based on Truffaut's own childhood. The "400 blows" of the film's title comes from the French idiom "faire les quatre cents coups" which means "to raise hell." The title has a double meaning. It also alludes to the blows dealt by insensitive neglectful parents and the bullying school and state authorities. An unwanted child neglected by his parents, Truffaut took refuge in film. Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, has the same life history as Truffaut. Also born out of wedlock, his parents find him a burden. This is given poignant visual expression when Antoine takes out the garbage. In a sense, his mother wanted to throw him away in an abortion.
Truffaut ran away from home at age 11 after an excuse for playing hooky backfired. He claimed he was not in school because his father was taken away by the Germans. Antoine claims his mother died. Both Truffaut's and Antoine's adoptive fathers turn them over to the police. He ends up in the Center for Delinquent Minors where he makes a mad dash for the beach. Truffaut films Antoine in his moments of freedom in wide angle exaggerating the distance between foreground and background, making the world seem expansive. At the times when he is caught, Truffaut films him in tightly framed close shots. His images of Antoine through the grillwork of a holding cell are iconic. In one shot his face is framed by the grid pattern, resembling a noose around his neck.
At the ocean's edge, he is trapped. For his part, Truffaut was rescued by Andre Bazin, who became his substitute father. Since many of the New Wave directors wrote for Bazin's Cahiers du Cinema, the style of their films was influenced by his realist aesthetic. Antoine's escape from the soccer game and his run to the sea are an homage to Bazin. The 75-second tracking shot in which Antoine runs to the sea demonstrates Bazin's idea that some actions need to be represented in real time in order too be dramatically effective. We are able to experience the adrenaline-filled exhilaration of his run for freedom.
Finally, Truffaut shocked audiences in 1959 by use of a freeze frame technique to end the film. The sudden freezing of the frame foregrounds the film medium. Classic films always hid any awareness of the medium. Truffaut was willing to expose the artifice of the medium, in effect abandoning Bazinian realism, acting as a metaphor for Antoine's entrapment. Even the word of the title (FIN) functions not just as a word but as an image. The letters F-I-N resemble the bars that obscured our view of him in the prison scenes, signaling that Antoine's hope for escape are finished too.
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