400 Blows

Francois Truffaut's 1959 feature film 400 Blows is one of those films that resonates with you long after it is over. The film takes an unconventional approach for its time, both narratively and stylistically. Truffaut uses the camera to write a story near and dear to him. The various autobiographical elements confer with the spectator ideas about what it takes to make a film something prodigious. The film is a testament to many of the concepts that are contained in the cinema itself; and Truffaut explores this reciprocity and reflexivity, not just in narrative content, but also in terms of cinematic content.

Truffaut reincarnates his adolescence through the experiences of Antoine, played by young actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. First of all, this alone is quite a unique reference to the cinema's close relation to memory, history, and identity. It is the cinema which remarks on and re-enacts recollection, remembrance. The cinema is in its very nature like that of a memory. It is composed of various elements (various times, spaces, rhythms, etc) which are condensed/conflated and assembled to create an experience. The film much like the memory is not one long continuous (uninterrupted) stream of experience, it is composed of multifarious elements, which both enter into and exit out of remembrance (and conscious experience). Yet, all the while, as spectators we are able to encounter the cinema as we would a memory. The memory, so close and yet so distant, is something of a challenge to consult with. Nevertheless, Truffaut sets up a film where we can both enter the characters and at the same time see them from a distance, much in the same way that we experience memories.

What is remarkable about the character Antoine is his reluctance to speak. His internal experience rarely reveals itself directly to the viewer. This inability to latch on to a verbalized expression forces the external to compose the character. All things external--the composition of the scene, the gestures of Antoine, the music, the rhythm of the camera--spell out the experience and memory of adolescence. The one time when Antoine verbalizes himself is when he talks to the woman at the reformatory. This moment is peculiar because of the way in which the sequence is revealed and Antoine's awareness is divulged. We never see the woman speaking, she is an acousmatic voice, filling the screen with her invisible presence. She is a rupture, she is a surrogate, and she is omnipotent as far as we are concerned. He reveals himself to that which we cannot see. She is both a presence and an absence. But why, why would Truffaut compose the sequence in this manner? As Michel Chion notes in Voice in the Cinema, it is the acousmetre that "brings disequilibrium and tension," as it is something of a mystery. The only other woman that Antoine interacts with is his mother, who in both her words and actions betrays her responsibility and love for him. This other woman, however, has no attachment to him, she is a mere assessor. As an assessor, she takes no authority over him, instead she allows Antoine to freely express himself. In order to learn more about Antoine's awareness we must work with the acoustmetre, as Chion says of the acousmetre, it is she that "invites the spectator to go see, and (s)he can be an invitation to the loss of the self, to desire and fascination," which in our case it is to discover not herself, but Antoine. That is the difference. For Anointe's mother is always commanding and manipulating him for her own needs, she leaves no room for expression. Adolescents do not necessarily grasp all of what is around them, but there are many things which a young person senses and grasps without it seeming so. Such is the case between Antoine and his mother. Truffaut explores this, for instance, when the mother comes in late one night and we see her legs enter into the screen as she quietly walks through Antoine's room, across his bed. And then following that there is the offscreen (acousmatic) bickering between the parents, which he witnesses aurally, when Antoine should be asleep. He uses a scene like this to communicate to us indirectly the experience of adolescence.

Another important aspect of the film is the way in which he conveys the experience of adolescene through cinematic techniques. The entire film is composed around a relationship between adult characters (models) and confining spaces (sets). These two figures are linked together to convey a feeling of oppression. His parents, the teachers, the police, are all confining him to tight quarters. They are also restricting him to mechanical and conforming movements, explored both through cinematic techniques and acting. His somber mood in and around their presence also adds to this oppressiveness. Against all of this however, Antoine is secretly desiring autonomy. We see this in his actions, i.e., in his constant desire to escape these people and environments. In particular, there are two scenes that rupture the entire pace and space of the film. One occasion is on the day Antoine and Rene skip school, and venture out into the streets of Paris. The first time we actually see Antoine happy is when he is spinning around on the "rotor" amusement park ride. Cinematically there is a rupture, when the elements on screen free up from the rigid confines of a set, of a room. The ensemble of props, the models, and Antoine all become a swirling blur. The rhythm of elements is no longer the same as it was throughout the film up to that point. Although walls are still surrounding him, Antoine manages to escape his situation through both movement and affect. He no longer has to express himself, or do anything for that matter, instead he gives himself to the movements and feelings experienced by the "rotor" ride. You can really see and feel the freeness of this moment, especially when Antoine manages to move himself upside-down, thus rendering his world in a completely new and autonomous light. The other moment where a sort of rupture occurs is at the very end. He escapes the reformatory, he runs and runs, until he finally meets the water. There all the walls (those ever confining walls) drop down. There he is truly free. Unlike the "rotor," where through cinematic elements he becomes rhythmically free, there at the beach he is spatially free. No longer do walls, or bars, or persons get in the way of his freedom. And I think this is his most genuine expression. He never really verbalizes himself, because his true expression, his true desire is this autonomy which cannot be rendered in words or scathing complaints, it is rendered in action, an action which meets a point of complete openness. An openness that one might say resembles those things which words, and consciousness cannot even begin to explain. In sum, it really seems to me to be about truly living: living as expressiveness, living as creative potential, and thus, potentially freeing, liberating.


Michel Chion, Voice in the Cinema (pp.24)