The 400 Blows (1959)
Directed by François Truffaut
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
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3 films that influenced The 400 Blows
What critics say influenced The 400 Blows
Not since the 1952 arrival of René Clement's "Forbidden Games," with which this extraordinary little picture of M. Truffaut most interestingly compares, have we had from France a cinema that so brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent in the directorial field.
LET it be noted without contention that the crest of the flow of recent films from the "new wave" of young French directors hit these shores yesterday with the arrival at the Fine Arts Theatre of "The 400 Blows" ("Les Quatre Cents Coups") of Françcois Truffaut.Not since the 1952 arrival of René Clement's "Forbidden Games," with which this extraordinary little picture of M. Truffaut most interestingly compares, have we had from France a cinema that so brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent in the directorial field.Amazingly, this vigorous effort is the first feature film of M. Truffaut, who had previously been (of all things!) the movie critic for a French magazine.
Renoir's early experiment with direct film sound recording using non-professionals, outside locales, local dialect, music and customs, etc ., as in Toni (1934) - that is often regarded as a vital precursive link to Italian Neo-Realism which influenced the Cahiers French New Wave group - is also uncanningly reminiscent of Astruc's definition of a "camero stylo " cinema (and not overlooking today's digital video developments) as Renoir's following words attest: "My aim was to give the impression that I was carrying a camera and microphone in my pocket and recording whatever came my way, regardless of its comparative importance.
It is a lyrical poetic realism that is central to two influential films for The 400 Blows - Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) and Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) - and significantly informs Truffaut's hypnotically moving debut feature.
Nowadays, that treatment seems more than a little quaint (much like the savage reception accorded the delightful and achingly beautiful The Rules of the Game , six years later), largely because of the outsized influence this poetic little 41 minute snip of a film has had on subsequent film history (among others, François Truffaut lifted shots intact for his The 400 Blows ), rendering its then-shocking treatment of rebellious little kids into appealing cliché, and all but guaranteeing that a modern viewer is going to be taken by its marvelous visual poetry than by its outdated revolutionary content.
Many filmmakers have been inspired by Vigo, including Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut (whose The 400 Blows was a tribute to this film), Lindsay Anderson (whose If... was a remake), and even Neil Jordan, who must have seen Zero for Conduct in order to make The Butcher Boy .