The 400 Blows

Title: The 400 Blows
Director: Francois Truffaut
TRT: 99 minutes
Year-1959
Awards: Winner of Best Director, OCIC Award at Cannes Film Festival

Truffaut’s The 400 Blows was very influential for the French New Wave movement. It rejected the traditional cinematic structure. Like with Eisenstein’s films such as The Battleship Potemkin, it went against the typical hollywood style. The movie featured jump cuts. The visual style was also different as Truffaut used different and odd angles for shot instead of the typical long, medium, and close, shot. Truffaut instead focused on long tracking shots such as Antoine running at the end of the film.

The first article I chose is entitled “The Aesthetics of Absorption: Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’. The article is talks about the directing style of Truffaut and about the different shots such as panning in the film that he uses. The article also talks about the French New Wave and compares and contrasts Truffaut to another director, Jean-Luc Godard. One of the scenes the article talks about is the jogging scene. In this scene, the gym teacher takes the class running through the streets and one by one the kids disappear. Truffaut places the camera high above the street to allow the viewer to see this unfold whereby a person walking on the streets would not be able to see (jenkins). Also, in the screening, Truffaut draws attention to the camera and Truffaut’s doesnt try to hide it over its narration.

The second article I chose is from Literature Film Quarterly entitled “The Existential Play in Truffaut’s Early Films. The article talks in details about Truffaut’s three early films which are The 400 Blows, Shot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim. The article focuses on different themes and shots from each movie. The last shot of the film is a freeze frame of Antoine. The article relates it to the mug shot the police made of Antoine (thiher). Like the other article, this one also talks about Truffaut’s camera movements. These camera movement help the audience to foreshadow what Antoine does in the film. An interesting thing this article talks about how the music in the film doesn’t necessarily fit what is happening in the film (Thiher).

The 400 Blows was a good film in my opinion. I like the way he used the tracking and panning shots. I also like how the story was more existential of short in its way of thinking and wasn’t like the typical clear-cut Hollywood films. The sporatic opening shots of Paris which he did used jump cuts and tracking shots showed how the film was going to unfold with Antoine getting into mischief and how things will change in his life drastically. I also found it very interesting with Truffaut’s choice of music in his scenes because the music did not go at all sometimes because of the character’s emotions or tone of the scene. Lastly, I did like how Truffaut decided to end the film with the freeze frame of Antoine instead of giving us a typical Hollywood ending.



Citations:

Jenkins, Chadwicke. "The Aesthetics of Absorption: Turffaut's 'The 400 Blows'." n. pag. Web. 10 Oct 2010.
http://popmatters.com/pm/tools/print/70934

Thiher, Allen. "The Existential Play in Truffaut's Early Films." Literature Film Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Summer 77 1977) :183.
Communication & Mass Media Complete. EBSCO. web 10 Oct. 2010.