'The 400 blows' immediately introduces its hero in a breathless credit sequence: I mean the Eiffel Tower, glimpsed from different angles as the camera drives through the streets of Paris, emerging from behind buildings, through trees, opening onto avenues. It is a magnet - wherever you go you move towards it - and a totem.
This sequence is transposed later, when Antoine goes to the funfair, and rides on one of those moving cylinders, like a zoetrope. The comparison is deliberate - Truffaut is situating his film in film history, declaring his intention to start again, to get back to first principles, to a time when moving pictures was a medium of possibility, before it was bogged down by genre and the studio system. this zoetrope has a transformative power - it takes a character from neo-realism and abstracts him, turning him into a figure in a Grand Guignol, crawling in eternal circles. But, from his point of view, it completely transforms the outside world, from a thing of oppressive solidity content to stare in powerful distance, to a formless, unstable mass.
This sequence crystallises the power of Truffaut's film, its freedom and its concern with entrapment. It charts the decline into imprisonment of its main character with a style of buoyant liberation. So while Antoine is trapped in this barrel, he is also offered a new way of looking beyond those merely content to look on from the outside.
'The 400 Blows' is the first masterpiece of the nouvelle vague, that iconoclastic movement that briefly saved cinema from stagnation as an art-form, just as it declared that it was an art-form (hmm, a connection?). It's a cliche now that Truffaut was the least innovative of the New Wavers, and yet it's still surprising that a film built so classically (moving from Paris to the countryside; balancing the opening school scene, with its barred doors, with the closing borstal scene etc.) still achieves that tingling spontaneity so rare in the cinema (e.g. Jean-Pierre Leaud as an actor laughing with the crew as Albert Remy breaks an egg). The first viewing of '400' is such a rush you'd be forgiven for thinking that it, like 'A Bout de souffle', was made up on the spot, and it is only on subsequent viewings that you marvel at Truffaut's formal control, the rhythm of his camera movements and editing, the consideration of his compositions.
That image of spinning round a fixed pole is the one that haunts me. Just as the decline of Michel Poiccard in the Truffaut-scripted 'A Bout de souffle' is figured as a car running out of steam, so Antoine is forever running in circles, brought back to a fixed point, having gotten nowhere. To move is to live - that is why the final freeze-frame is so frightening: Antoine has usurped the Eiffel Tower, has become the centre of the spinning top - he dominates the closing frame, just as the opening ones were empty (of humans). But at what cost? - has he simply wound down into inertia?: the subsequent Doinel films would suggest so. (that closing beach scene, in which Antoine seems to be running against moving, phosphorescent sand, also alludes to another great work about a young artist and his city, Joyce's 'Ulysses' and its chapter 'Proteus')
Although the film rarely shoots directly from his point of view, the style is an exuberant expression of Antoine's sensibility. Antoine is ambisexual, still seeking his identity, just before seeking sexuality - early on he sits at his mother's dressing table, his face splintered by the triptych mirrors; later he steals supplies from the ladies' toilet. This embodying of subjectivity in objective style is what saves the closing third from de Sica-like sentimentality and manipulation: we are rarely outside Antoine's head, people are wonderful or horrible as he experiences them. Only twice is his sensibility intruded on - when he is caught bringing back the typewriter, the captor creeping his point of view; and the interview with the faceless psychologist at the borstal, filmed as if behind a double-sided mirror, the feral animal penned at last.
'The 400 blows' is revered as a moving, melancholy picture of misdirected adolescence. It is sometimes forgotten that most of the film is pure comedy, delighting in gags, digressions, bits of business. For much of the running time, you envy Antoine - what joy it must be to be young and in Paris, swashbuckling in the schoolyard, truanting in the city, smoking cigars: his family situation is no worse that most, at least he has friends, a roof over his head, and can read Balzac. Antoine is a bit of a clown: all clowns eventually settle down, make the right choices at crucial moments in their lives. Antoine somehow misses those rarely visible choices and finds himself locked up, descending the various levels of institutional hell. His often amiable and/or witty parents are no more evil than he is a saint, although an educational system that asks kids to simply copy down 'great' poems (a Sisyphean task in one ink-blotted case) is clearly wrong. Georges Delerue's score - romantic, exuberant, tragic, bittersweet - ranks with the three greats ('Vertigo', 'Taxi Driver', 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg').
This sequence is transposed later, when Antoine goes to the funfair, and rides on one of those moving cylinders, like a zoetrope. The comparison is deliberate - Truffaut is situating his film in film history, declaring his intention to start again, to get back to first principles, to a time when moving pictures was a medium of possibility, before it was bogged down by genre and the studio system. this zoetrope has a transformative power - it takes a character from neo-realism and abstracts him, turning him into a figure in a Grand Guignol, crawling in eternal circles. But, from his point of view, it completely transforms the outside world, from a thing of oppressive solidity content to stare in powerful distance, to a formless, unstable mass.
This sequence crystallises the power of Truffaut's film, its freedom and its concern with entrapment. It charts the decline into imprisonment of its main character with a style of buoyant liberation. So while Antoine is trapped in this barrel, he is also offered a new way of looking beyond those merely content to look on from the outside.
'The 400 Blows' is the first masterpiece of the nouvelle vague, that iconoclastic movement that briefly saved cinema from stagnation as an art-form, just as it declared that it was an art-form (hmm, a connection?). It's a cliche now that Truffaut was the least innovative of the New Wavers, and yet it's still surprising that a film built so classically (moving from Paris to the countryside; balancing the opening school scene, with its barred doors, with the closing borstal scene etc.) still achieves that tingling spontaneity so rare in the cinema (e.g. Jean-Pierre Leaud as an actor laughing with the crew as Albert Remy breaks an egg). The first viewing of '400' is such a rush you'd be forgiven for thinking that it, like 'A Bout de souffle', was made up on the spot, and it is only on subsequent viewings that you marvel at Truffaut's formal control, the rhythm of his camera movements and editing, the consideration of his compositions.
That image of spinning round a fixed pole is the one that haunts me. Just as the decline of Michel Poiccard in the Truffaut-scripted 'A Bout de souffle' is figured as a car running out of steam, so Antoine is forever running in circles, brought back to a fixed point, having gotten nowhere. To move is to live - that is why the final freeze-frame is so frightening: Antoine has usurped the Eiffel Tower, has become the centre of the spinning top - he dominates the closing frame, just as the opening ones were empty (of humans). But at what cost? - has he simply wound down into inertia?: the subsequent Doinel films would suggest so. (that closing beach scene, in which Antoine seems to be running against moving, phosphorescent sand, also alludes to another great work about a young artist and his city, Joyce's 'Ulysses' and its chapter 'Proteus')
Although the film rarely shoots directly from his point of view, the style is an exuberant expression of Antoine's sensibility. Antoine is ambisexual, still seeking his identity, just before seeking sexuality - early on he sits at his mother's dressing table, his face splintered by the triptych mirrors; later he steals supplies from the ladies' toilet. This embodying of subjectivity in objective style is what saves the closing third from de Sica-like sentimentality and manipulation: we are rarely outside Antoine's head, people are wonderful or horrible as he experiences them. Only twice is his sensibility intruded on - when he is caught bringing back the typewriter, the captor creeping his point of view; and the interview with the faceless psychologist at the borstal, filmed as if behind a double-sided mirror, the feral animal penned at last.
'The 400 blows' is revered as a moving, melancholy picture of misdirected adolescence. It is sometimes forgotten that most of the film is pure comedy, delighting in gags, digressions, bits of business. For much of the running time, you envy Antoine - what joy it must be to be young and in Paris, swashbuckling in the schoolyard, truanting in the city, smoking cigars: his family situation is no worse that most, at least he has friends, a roof over his head, and can read Balzac. Antoine is a bit of a clown: all clowns eventually settle down, make the right choices at crucial moments in their lives. Antoine somehow misses those rarely visible choices and finds himself locked up, descending the various levels of institutional hell. His often amiable and/or witty parents are no more evil than he is a saint, although an educational system that asks kids to simply copy down 'great' poems (a Sisyphean task in one ink-blotted case) is clearly wrong. Georges Delerue's score - romantic, exuberant, tragic, bittersweet - ranks with the three greats ('Vertigo', 'Taxi Driver', 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg').