400 blows essay

The other day, at the end of the school year, I found myself wedged between other parents in a standing-room-only auditorium, watching my first-grade son receive an award for outstanding conduct. Seeing it for the first time is for young people like a rite of passage; those who discover it later in life find themselves profoundly moved by its themes of lost innocence and dashed hopes. Truffaut was born in Paris in , the illegitimate son of a Jewish father. He led a troubled young life, and in joined the French army, but his attempted desertion led to an arrest.

The 400 Blows (1959) review

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. Francois Truffaut's "The Blows" is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom.

The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. He has just run away from a house of detention, and is on the beach, caught between land and water, between past and future. It is the first time he has seen the sea. Antoine Doinel was played by Jean-Pierre Leaud , who has a kind of solemn detachment, as if his heart had suffered obscure wounds long before the film began.

This was the first in a long collaboration between actor and director; they returned to the character in the short film "Antoine and Collette" and three more features: "Stolen Kisses" , " Bed and Board " and "Love on the Run" The later films have their own merits, and "Stolen Kisses" is one of Truffaut's best, but "The Blows," with all its simplicity and feeling, is in a class by itself. It was Truffaut's first feature, and one of the founding films of the French New Wave.

We sense that it was drawn directly out of Truffaut's heart. It is dedicated to Andre Bazin, the influential French film critic who took the fatherless Truffaut under his arm at a time when the young man seemed to stand between life as a filmmaker and life in trouble.

Little is done in the film for pure effect. Everything adds to the impact of the final shot. We meet Antoine when he is in his early teens, and living with his mother and stepfather in a crowded walkup where they always seem to be squeezing out of each other's way.

The mother Claire Maurier is a blond who likes tight sweaters and is distracted by poverty, by her bothersome son, and by an affair with a man from work. The stepfather Albert Remy is a nice enough sort, easy-going, and treats the boy in a friendly fashion although he is not deeply attached to him. Both parents are away from home a lot, and neither has the patience to pay close attention to the boy: They judge him by appearances, and by the reports of others who misunderstand him.

At school, Antoine has been typecast by his teacher Guy Decombie as a troublemaker. His luck is not good. When a pinup calendar is being passed from hand to hand, his is the hand the teacher finds it in. Sent to stand in the corner, he makes faces for his classmates and writes a lament on the wall.

The teacher orders him to decline his offending sentence, as punishment. His homework is interrupted. Rather than return to school without it, he skips. His excuse is that he was sick. After his next absence, he says his mother has died. When she turns up at his school, alive and furious, he is marked as a liar. And yet we see him in the alcove that serves as his bedroom, deeply wrapped in the work of Balzac, whose chronicles of daily life helped to create France's idea of itself.

He loves Balzac. He loves him so well, indeed, that when he's assigned to write an essay on an important event in his life, he describes "the death of my grandfather'' in a close paraphrase of Balzac, whose words have lodged in his memory.

This is seen not as homage but as plagiarism, and leads to more trouble and eventually to a downward spiral: He and a friend steal a typewriter, he gets caught trying to return it and is sent to the juvenile detention home.

The film's most poignant moments show him set adrift by his parents and left to the mercy of social services. His parents discuss him sadly with authorities as a lost cause "If he came home, he would only run away again''. And so he is booked in a police station, placed in a holding cell and put in a police wagon with prostitutes and thieves, to be driven through the dark streets of Paris, his face peering out through the bars like a young Dickensian hero.

He has a similar expression at other times in the film, which is shot in black and white in Paris in a chill season; Antoine always has the collar of his jacket turned up against the wind. Truffaut's film is not a dirge or entirely a tragedy.

There are moments of fun and joy the title is an idiom meaning "raising hell''. One priceless sequence, shot looking down from above the street, shows a physical education teacher leading the boys on a jog through Paris; two by two they peel off, until the teacher is at the head of a line of only two or three boys.

The happiest moment in the film comes after one of Antoine's foolish mistakes. He lights a candle to Balzac, which sets the little cardboard shrine on fire. His parents put out the flames, but then for once their exasperation turns to forgiveness, and the whole family goes to the movies and laughs on the way home.

There is a lot of moviegoing in "The Blows," with Antoine's solemn face turned up to the screen. We know that young Truffaut himself escaped to the movies whenever he could, and there is a shot here that he quotes later in his career.

As Antoine and a friend emerge from a cinema, Antoine steals one of the lobby photos of a star. In " Day for Night " , which stars Truffaut himself as a film director, there is a flashback memory to the character, as a boy, stealing down a dark street to snatch a still of " Citizen Kane " from in front of a theater. The cinema saved Francois Truffaut's life, he said again and again.

It took a delinquent student and gave him something to love, and with the encouragement of Bazin he became a critic and then made this film by his 27th birthday. If the New Wave marks the dividing point between classic and modern cinema and many think it does , then Truffaut is likely the most beloved of modern directors -- the one whose films resonated with the deepest, richest love of moviemaking.

He liked to resurrect old effects the iris shots in " The Wild Child ," narration in many of his films and pay tribute " The Bride Wore Black " and "Mississippi Mermaid" owe much to his hero, Hitchcock. Truffaut died too young, of a brain tumor, at 52, but he left behind 21 films, not counting shorts and screenplays. His " Small Change " returns to the sharply remembered world of the classroom, to students younger than Doinel, and recalls the almost unbearable tension as the clock on the wall creeps toward the final bell.

Even while directing a film a year, he found time to write about other films and directors, and did a classic book-length, film-by-film interview with Hitchcock. One of his most curious, haunting films is "The Green Room" , based on the Henry James story "The Altar of the Dead," about a man and a woman who share a passion for remembering their dead loved ones. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who thinks "The Green Room" may be Truffaut's best film, told me he thinks of it as the director's homage to the auteur theory.

That theory, created by Bazin and his disciples Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Malle , declared that the director was the true author of a film -- not the studio, the screenwriter, the star, the genre.

If the figures in the green room stand for the great directors of the past, perhaps there is a shrine there now to Truffaut. One likes to think of the ghost of Antoine Doinel lighting a candle before it.

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Reviews The Blows. Roger Ebert August 08, Now playing. Circus of Books. The Vast of Night. Selah and the Spades. I Know This Much is True. Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind. Film Credits. Latest blog posts.

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.

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 film had 4.

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.

These words are carved into the exterior of the school Antoine attends. It is also the national motto of France.

The 400 Blows Themes

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 But this was not an awareness exclusive to the film industry; a series of economic, societal, and technological factors aligned to spawn a new creative consciousness that found its most profound result in the cinematic art form.

The 400 Blows

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. Francois Truffaut's "The Blows" is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. He has just run away from a house of detention, and is on the beach, caught between land and water, between past and future.

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.

Antoine Doinel Jean-Pierre Leaud is a year-old boy who keeps getting into trouble at school. His parents do their best to keep him in line but lack understanding. After being found out and punished for skipping classes, he runs away from home and spends a night on the streets.

The 400 Blows: Describing the Problem That Should Never Be Ignored

The film looks superb and Antoine's heartbreakingly open face is like Truffaut's monochrome Paris: beautiful, tough, innocent and yet worldly. There are too many great moments to list in full: the "Wheel of Death" scene at the fair, like the contraption itself, abolishes gravity and becomes weightlessly joyous. The faces of the children are unforgettable. The overhead shot of the kids in single-file behind the gung-ho PE teacher jogging through the Paris streets, gradually sneaking away to bunk off, is inspired, and so is Antoine's plagiarism of Balzac - a demonstration of literary good taste lost on his dullard schoolmaster. The end sequence, culminating in his arrival at a vast lonely shore, is mysterious. Antoine runs away from his correctional facility, and his escape seems to morph into something else; without an immediate pursuer, it becomes an intuition, or premonition, of the lonely long-distance run he has endured and will continue to endure. Topics Francois Truffaut. Crime films World cinema reviews. Reuse this content. Most popular.

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.