NOTE ON The 400 Blows (French: Les Quatre Cents Coups)
BUDGET $50,000
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FILM One of first examples of a director using Autobiographical material. The most obviously predecessor being Ingmar Bergman.
THE TITLE Truffaut's original title for the film had been Antoine's Fugue The English title is a literal translation of the French but misses its meaning. French title refers to the idiom "faire les quatre cents coups", which means "to raise hell".
On the first prints in the United States, subtitler and dubber Noelle Gilmore gave the film the title Wild Oats, but the distributor did not like that and reverted it to The 400 Blows. Before seeing it, some people thought the film covered the topic of corporal punishment.
DYALISCOPE The 400 Blows was the very first French film to be photographed in dyaliscope widescreen, a 2.35:1 format similar to the Cinemascope process.
THEMES The semi-autobiographical film reflects events of Truffaut's and his friends' lives. In style, it expresses Truffaut's personal history of French film, with references to other works—most notably a scene borrowed wholesale from Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite.
Truffaut dedicated the film to the man who became his spiritual father, André Bazin, who died just as the film was about to be shot.
Besides being a character study, the film is an exposé of the injustices of the treatment of juvenile offenders in France at the time
TIMELINE
1954 – Writes a “Certain Tendency in French Cinema”
1958 – Starts Production
1959 – 400 Blows - Francious Traffaut -Debut film
One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, Albert Rémy, and Claire Maurier.
Filmed on location in Paris and Honfleur, it is the first in a series of five films in which Léaud plays the semi- autobiographical character.
AWARDS
Best Director Award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. the OCIC Award (Organisation Catholique Internationale du Cinéma et de l'Audiovisuel)
Nominated Palme d'Or in 1959
The Critics Award of the 1959 New York Film Critics' Circle
The Best European Film Award at 1960's Bodil Awards.
Nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 32nd Academy Awards – 1960.
It is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time; in their 2012 poll of all-time classics, Sight & Sound ranked the film 39th
THEMES: Film illustrates juvenile identity crisis
1) Onset of puberty
2) Emotional weening of child from parents
3) Desire for independence
4) Inferiority complex
SHRINE TO BALZAC Honoré Balzac, (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature.[3]
THE ANTOINE DOINEL CYCLE.
Jean-Pierre Léaud appears year prior to The 400 Blows
Appears as Jean Marais in Georges Lampin's La Tour prends garde! In 1958
Truffaut made four other films with Léaud depicting Antoine Doinel at later stages of his life.
1959 - The 400 Blows 1962 - Antoine and Colette (contribution to the 1962 anthology Love at Twenty) 1968 - Stolen Kisses 1970 - Bed and Board 1979 - Love on the Run
LOCATIONS
Avenue Frochot, Paris 9, Paris, France Eiffel Tower, Champ de Mars, Paris 7, Paris, France Honfleur, Calvados, France Montmartre, Paris 18, Paris, France Palais de Chaillot, Trocadéro, Paris 16, Paris, France Pigalle, Paris 9, Paris, France Rue Fontaine, Paris, France Sacré Cœur, Paris 18, Paris, France
NOTES
Psychologist Interview Just Traffaut, Camera operator, and Actor Interview.
Kurosawa called it "one of the most beautiful films that I have ever seen"
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
Truffaut heavily influenced of Andre Bazin. Lived with Bazin as a teenager.
The happiest time we see the whole family enjoy together as a unit is when they go out to see Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us – another French New Wave film yet to be released!
Where is the father?”—a phrase that resonates both within the film (Antoine has never known his real father) and in the director’s life.
FAMOUS SHOT IN CAGE Antoine, locked in a small holding cell for vagrancy and theft. Alone and bored, he pulls his turtleneck sweater partially over his face, peering dispassionately over the top of the fabric. A descriptive expression of Antoine's resignation yet also his defiance, this image came to be symbolic of the French New Wave. Truffaut himself would use the image again fleetingly in Antoine and Colette.
FAMOUS FINAL SHOT
Watershed moment between modern and post modern cinema (self reflective cinema)
The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera.
The shot freezes. There is an optical zoom into this freeze- frame that focuses upon Antoine's face. For several seconds, this famous image is held, then it fades away, and the film ends. It is a mysteriously abrupt conclusion to the film. Antoine's expression, in this final shot, is not one of unadulterated elation but one of thoughtful contemplation. What does it mean? Is this final shot meant to signify the crossroads at which Antoine now stands? Is he looking backwards or looking forward? Is he perhaps addressing the audience, as if to ask, "what happens now?"
"At the end, you are no longer looking at the film - the film is looking at you"
Weak and Ambiguous ending
An attempt to account specifically for the fact that the action is stopped in a freeze frame. For one commentator, this suggests paralysis or suicide (Kauffmann), for others, Antoine's entrapment (Insdorf, Greenspan), a police photo or death (Thiher) and dehumanization (Shatnoff). Neubert wrote for example that Antoine is transformed from a solid body moving through space into a figure of the arrestation of the film's driving strategies. The "stilled" Antoine becomes an image of termination; the optical zoom approaches, turning him into a static spectacle. There is nowhere for the viewer's glance to wander. The point of view structure has changed the spectator's look into a fixed stare, freezing the action codes and closing the narrative discourse by giving a final, impossible view of Antoine (99). the freeze-frame image is a strong and innovative closure device, signaling that nothing more will happen in this film and giving us a moment to adjust to the fact that we now have to let go of the fiction.
When asked about his intentions regarding the freeze-frame, he replied: "the final freeze was simply an accident. I told Léaud to look into the camera. He did, but quickly turned his eyes away. Since I wanted that brief look he gave me the moment before he turned, I had no choice but to hold on to it; hence the freeze."
Truffaut's original intention was thus for Léaud to continue looking into the camera in live action, presumably for the same 10 seconds the freeze-frame lasts. This ending would also undoubtedly have provided adequate closure. But the stasis embodied by the freeze-frame is even more striking. And considering how open-ended the story is, and even the final image of Antoine - susceptible as it is of radically divergent readings - it is probably just as well that Truffaut had to find an alternate and even stronger closural device.
The last shot has been justly celebrated for its ambiguity. This brief but haunting release from the harrowing experiences that fill the movie brings Truffaut’s surrogate self in direct contact with his audience—an intimacy he was to pursue throughout his career. Truffaut’s zoom in to freeze- frame (more arresting in 1959, before this technique became a stock-in-trade of television commercials) provides a mirror image of an earlier shot in the police station.
Homage to Hitchcock
Trivia - In The 400 Blows, Truffaut also pays tribute to Hitchcock's tradition of making cameo appearances in his own films. Watch carefully during the carnival ride sequence. The man to Antoine's left during the ride and smoking a cigarette afterwards is none other than Truffaut himself!
Trivia - Interestingly, The 400 Blows was originally filmed silently, with the entire soundtrack post-dubbed afterwards! Except for interview scene.
The film's audio is French mono 1.0