(Les quatre cents coups, France, 1959, 99 min., 35mm, French with English subtitles)
The film that heralded in the ground-breaking French New Wave movement, The 400 Blows is a deeply personal and poetic depiction of childhood. Truffaut made the leap from film critic to filmmaker in this semi-autobiographical depiction of a young boy named Antoine Doinel who can’t seem to conform or obey his parents, teachers, or society. The film’s title is a transliteration of a French phrase, more akin to the English phrase, “to raise hell”; and while Doinel’s rebelliousness is seen as “raising hell” in the eyes of all the adults that surround him, Truffaut’s sensitive, even shy, camera reveals to the audience the ways in which children’s playful and explorative behaviors become pathologized as psychological indicators of a “dangerous” personality. While Truffaut’s contemporaries such as Godard may have become known for their experimentation and formal trickery, Truffaut’s debut is a reminder that the world’s most famous film movement was begun by making cinema more personal, not less. The 400 Blows is not a rejection of film history so much as a warm appreciation of all its potentialities and is perhaps one of the first films to have been made by a sincere cinephile.