400 blows essays

Content

The 400 Blows
The 400 Blows: Describing the Problem That Should Never Be Ignored
The Truffaut Essays That Clear Up Misguided Notions of Auteurism
Francois Truffaut's Film Les Quatre Cents Coups Essay
The 400 Blows Themes

Born in Paris in , he spent his first years with a wet nurse and then his grandmother, as his parents had little to do with him. When his grandmother died, he returned home at the age of eight. An only child whose mother insisted that he make himself silent and invisible, he took refuge in reading and later in the cinema. Like Antoine, Truffaut found a substitute home in the movie theater: He would either sneak in through the exit doors and lavatory windows, or steal money to pay for a seat.

The 400 Blows

But in a field that involves a collaboration between many artists, from actors and writers to editors and designers, the notion of the auteur is not intuitive. In practice, they wrote enthusiastically about the work of directors around the world—and also extolled new movies of many Hollywood directors working within the studio system.

His instant prominence—or, rather, notoriety—got him hired to write criticism for the popular, right-wing-leaning weekly Arts Spectacles. He also was scheduled to write, for Cahiers , a theoretical exposition of the politique des auteurs. Instead, in his weekly writings at Arts , he supplied his thoughts on the subject gradually, in more than four hundred articles and reviews between and Crucially, Truffaut viewed authorship in terms of literal authority, of power, and he placed as much emphasis on the production of films as on their direction.

He discussed at length and with enthusiasm the work of Hollywood directors who were also their own producers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Robert Aldrich, and Joseph Mankiewicz. Truffaut sharply reproached established French filmmakers for complaining about pressure from producers or from official censors. He did so by outlining their option of self-production—and the specific practices of low-budget filmmaking that they could have employed whenever they chose.

Those methods were radical ones. Truffaut exhorted directors to take control of their own productions because he had a particular kind of movie in mind and contended that independent production would help to foster it. He concluded this article with a fervent, prophetic vision:.

The film of tomorrow thus seems to me to be even more personal than a novel, individual and autobiographical like a confession or an intimate diary. Young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will tell us what has happened to them. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love. He observed the rise of art houses—and the large numbers of young viewers frequenting them—as a forerunner of a rising new generation of filmmakers.

Thinking about directors with imaginative sympathy, critics put themselves, so to speak, on the side of filmmakers, and they thereby do the same for their readers, placing the art of movies within their reach, as an art to be practiced locally and personally, by any means necessary. Similarly, the concept of the auteur has been validated not by the search for touches of distinction in this or that Hollywood blockbuster but by the centrality of independent filmmaking to the continued flourishing of the art.

Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. The filmmaker, who died this week, was so far ahead of the world of cinema that she had to wait for it to catch up to her. By Richard Brod y. The tragic fire disfigured a treasured landmark, but some see the moment as an opportunity for renewal.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in He writes about movies in his blog, The Front Row. Read More. Postscrip t. The Front Ro w.

The Blows directed by Francois Truffaut is an iconic film of the late s that refined French cinema and helped spark a cinematic re. The Blows. Essay by Brian Eggert February 6, Director: François Truffaut; Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Remy, Guy Decombie.

In ways that have been well-rehearsed in Truffaut scholarship, an idealization of movie-going prevails within his oeuvre; yet teaching The Blows reminds me of how the space of the film classroom might also be engaged as a site of idealization. The Blows —a film about the transgression of structures, limits, rules, and norms—gives rise to an invigorated film classroom. It offers a method and site of teaching that outshines the strictures of rote learning and champions the pleasures of passionate and intellectual engagement with objects of love.

Occasionally, a movie is made in which the invisible director is the most important element.

The Truffaut Essays That Clear Up Misguided Notions of Auteurism

With his full-length debut, Truffaut practiced what he had so ardently preached in New Wave avowals. By and even more so in the subsequent year, the first films by New Wave directors, many of them critics-turned-filmmakers, had begun to appear. The New Wave would come to represent the dividing movement between classical and modern filmmaking. As a result, the name itself is a blanket term, to be used in an open sense. Most agree that the New Wave began in and came to an end, as much as such a thing can, in

Francois Truffaut's Film Les Quatre Cents Coups Essay

So I tell lies. Almost a decade after this scene was shot, France was in the grip of its greatest political and social upheaval since the Liberation and the end of World War II. In May of , rioting students took to the streets and demanded that everything in society had to change. They were, for the most part, disaffected sons of the bourgeoisie — the very children depicted so vividly in this film. Unlike, say, the orphans in a Dickens novel, the boys in this film are not malnourished or materially deprived. They are subject, instead, to a constant and soulless regimentation — designed to turn them into model citizens of a society they do not and have no wish to understand. He is, rather, the scapegoat — the child whose rebellion is caught out and punished, forcing him into ever more drastic acts of defiance and, finally, into all-out flight. Like Doinel, Truffaut was raised in a petit bourgeois milieu, with a distant mother and a father who was not his real father. A rebellious teen, he played truant from school and spent his days at the movies. He was locked up in a reformatory in and incarcerated in a military prison in , after deserting from the army.

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.

One of the defining films of the French New Wave , [3] it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. Written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy , the film is about Antoine Doinel , a misunderstood adolescent in Paris who struggles with his parents and teachers due to his rebellious behavior.

The 400 Blows Themes

Pssst… we can write an original essay just for you. Francois Truffaut, director of the film The Blows , concerns himself with the delinquent child abandoned by the education system and even the family. The hero ultimately sinks to a life of crime and recidivism however, Truffaut traces for us the stages of his fall and brings to the fore, the underlying reasons for this social deviant. The prevailing approach to The Blows is an ideology in which the underlying principle is Hollywood hegemony. This movie gives a searing critique against the home, educational and penal institutions. These units are geared toward the development and growth of the individual but in particular circumstances, these systems can be very self-defeating since a child is neglected and resorts to crime. The ideological principle that is represented only in its absence is Hollywood hegemony. Hollywood hegemony advocates a more glossed, superficially perfect portrait of society: a comfortable middle class American family with a good child and responsible parents. Antoine attends a boy school where he is the black sheep of the class. In the class, he helps circulate magazines displaying pictures of nude and lewd women. He cheats in class, earns low grades, defaces the walls of the classroom, skips school, fabricates and forges parental letters for his teacher and wanders about the city with his best friend during school time. Because Antoine is disruptive during class, he poses a threat to the martinet teacher, Mr. Sourpuss who in turn constantly kicks him out of class. For almost every grievance in class, all fingers point to Antoine and he is the object of constant censure.

These words are carved into the exterior of the school Antoine attends. It is also the national motto of France. We see these three words rather briefly after Antoine has been placed in the corner by the French teacher for being caught with an image of a pinup girl. The slogan has an ironic bent in The Blows , as we can clearly see that Antoine is systemically deprived of liberty and equality by his teachers and in his home life with his parents. The deprivation of these three rights—rhetorically central to the school and to France itself—casts an even more ironically tragic light on Antoine's experience. Throughout the film we see Antoine struggle with his parents, teachers and other adults who don't seem to give him attention or care. The first time we see Mrs. Doinel listening to Antoine is when he returns home after sleeping in the paper factory.